Theologians on Scripture 9780567182401, 9780567670083, 9780567464965

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Theologians on Scripture

Theologians on Scripture Angus Paddison

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 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Angus Paddison, 2016 Angus Paddison has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Amanda Rohde/Getty 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5671-8240-1 PB: 978-0-5676-8172-0 ePDF: 978-0-5674-6496-5 A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vii ix x

Introduction  Angus Paddison

1

1 The gospel as an image of the kingdom: An Eucharistic reading of the Bible in the Orthodox tradition  Andreas Andreopoulos

7

2 Finding a critical space: Scripture and experience in practical theology  Zoë Bennett

23

3 Evolution, language and the Biblical text: Towards a theological synthesis  Oliver Davies

37

4 Scripture used implicitly within public bioethics  Robin Gill

53

5 Learning to live within a tradition  Timothy Gorringe

67

6 Sola Scriptura, the community of the church and a pluralist age: A Methodist theologian seeking to read Scripture in and for the world  Tom Greggs

79

7 Christian doctrine and the discipline of reading Scripture  Mike Higton

93

8 Scripture in liturgy and theology  Stephen R. Holmes

105

9 Gathering gifts under gunfire: A feminist use of Scripture  Lisa Isherwood

119

10 The virtue of attentiveness  Murray Rae

133

11 Explorations in front of the text: A black liberationist readerresponse approach to reading the Bible  Anthony G. Reddie

147

vi Contents

12 Read – pray – trust. One theologian’s encounters with Scripture  Christoph Schwöbel

161

13 How I read the Bible  Graham Ward

181

14 The fullness of Scripture in the Christian life  Angus Paddison

193

Bibliography Index of Authors Index of Biblical References

213 231 235

Contributors Andreas Andreopoulos is Reader in Orthodox Christianity and Programme Leader of the MTh Orthodox Studies programme, University of Winchester. Zoë Bennett is the Director of Postgraduate Studies in Pastoral Theology through a joint appointment, Cambridge Theological Federation and Anglia Ruskin University. Oliver Davies is Professor of Christian Doctrine, Kings College, London. Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology, University of Kent. Timothy Gorringe is Emeritus Professor of Theological Studies, University of Exeter. Tom Greggs is Marischal Professor of Divinity, University of Aberdeen. Mike Higton is Professor of Theology and Ministry, Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University. Stephen R. Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology, University of St Andrews. Lisa Isherwood is Professor of Feminist Liberation Theologies and Director of the Institute for Theological Partnerships, University of Winchester. Angus Paddison is Reader in Theology, University of Winchester. Murray Rae is a Professor on the Theology Programme, University of Otago and Series Editor, Journal of Theological Interpretation Supplement Series.

viii Contributors

Anthony G. Reddie is Extraordinary Professor, Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology, University of South Africa. He is also a Learning and Development Officer for the Methodist Church. Christoph Schwöbel is Professor of Systematic Theology (Foundational Theology and Philosophy of Religion), University of Tübingen and Director of the Institute for Hermeneutics and the Dialog of Cultures. Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity, Christ Church College, University of Oxford.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Chloe Ryan from the University of Winchester for her sterling editorial assistance in the latter stages of the book’s composition. I would also like to express my gratitude – for their patience – to the contributors and to Miriam Cantwell of T&T Clark Bloomsbury.

Abbreviations CNRS

Centre national de la recherche scientifique

JTS

Journal of Theological Studies

TU

Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur

SC

Sources Chrétiennes

WA

Weimarer Ausgabe

Proc. R. Soc. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London CPT

Centre for Pentecostal Theology

Introduction Angus Paddison

The purpose of this edited collection is to invite academic theologians to think about the range of questions raised by their involvement with Scripture in the context of their lives (understood broadly), this text being understood as a book of faith. As such, the chapters in this volume are grounded in the conviction that the practice of theology is inseparable from the practical labour of scriptural reading and engagement. Theology is not, as Graham Ward states in his contribution to this volume, a self-sufficient exercise. While there is both a quite proper role for biblical scholarship and much to learn from the multiple ways biblical scholars read the text, for as long as biblical scholarship prescinds from any commitment that the Bible is a text whose true nature is grasped by reference to the activity of God, theologians of whatever stripe are entitled to remind the guild of biblical scholarship that it does not own what it is to be ‘biblical’.1 Regardless of how we define the task of theology – as ‘systematic’, ‘constructive’, ‘public’, ‘political’, ‘practical’, or ‘liberationist’ – all theology is, in some way, obliged to attend to the text of Scripture. The reasons for such attention are elementary: Scripture is pre-eminently a book gathered together by the church (apart from whom it would make little sense as a single text)2 and continually read and re-read, as the settled medium through which Christians may come to know Jesus, who he is and what he has achieved.3 At the genesis of the church the Hebrew scriptures were the means by which the first Christians came to understand both who Jesus was See Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds), Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). Although the polarizing tone of the title is unhelpful (in that polemical theology can lure us into binary thinking), the raising of the ‘Whose Bible is it anyway?’ kind of question is permanently timely. 2 See the bibliology of Robert W. Jenson for this elementary observation, forcefully made. 3 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘God: Action and Revelation’, Studies in Philosophical Theology, Vol. 3 (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing, 1992), 17. 1

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(Lk. 24) and the nature of his saving significance. Every subsequent Christian generation has been obliged to establish the significance of the Jesus event in (some kind of) conversation with Scripture.4 Expressed in abbreviated form: as theology is dependent on the faith of Christian people (for again, without such faith the practice of theology would be a nonsense), so it must necessarily relate to Scripture. The now well-established movement known as ‘theological interpretation of Scripture’ has made considerable strides in reminding both theologians and biblical scholars that the reading of the biblical texts, for the majority of Christian history, has been a non-negotiably theological affair.5 Both Thomas’ Summa Theologiae and John Calvin’s Institutes were intended as guides to the reading of Scripture (the intended readership of the Institutes not being academic theologians on the conference circuit, but ministers of the Word), their work always signposting to the primary source of theological work.6 Theology, Stephen Fowl boldly proclaims, ‘has always been a mode of scriptural exegesis’.7 This is not to say that theology is purely an exegetical enterprise, as if all that theology needs to go about its business is the Bible, nothing more and nothing less. Both the Summa and the Institutes make this plain in the manner of their composition and in the range of their interlocutors. In our own time we might wish to say that theology, as ‘exegesis, exegesis, exegesis’ in Karl Barth’s famous admonition, is a multi-voiced, trans-historical enterprise that, precisely because it is hermeneutical, appreciates the distinction between interpretations that are always contingent and fallible, and the text itself. Scripture, as divinely-authored text, calls for alertness to a series of conver­ sations across both theological disciplines and non-theological disciplines if its depth is to be plumbed. The diversity of the text itself militates against any view that interpretation of it can be anything other than multi-voiced. See Andrew T. Lincoln and Angus Paddison (eds), Christology and Scripture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: T&T Clark, 2007). 5 By ‘theological’ is meant the will to understand the text, what it communicates, and how it communicates in relation to the saving purposes of God in history. For an account of theological interpretation see Angus Paddison, ‘Who and What is Theological Interpretation For?’, in J. Gordon McConville and Lloyd K. Pietersen (eds), Conception, Reception, and the Spirit: Essays in Honor of Andrew T. Lincoln (Eugene: Cascade, 2015), 210–23. 6 Andrew Moore, ‘Experience and the Doctrine of God’, in Anthony Clarke and Andrew Moore (eds), Within the Love of God: Essays on the Doctrine of God in Honour of Paul S. Fiddes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61–76 (63). 7 Stephen Fowl, ‘Historical Criticism, Theological Interpretation, and the Ends of the Christian Life’, in McConville and Pietersen (eds), Conception, Reception, and the Spirit, 173–86 (174). 4

Introduction

3

The story of modern theology’s drift from Scripture, and the loss of a sense that the meaning of Scripture is to be found through a multi-voiced conversation, is a familiar one requiring only modest rehearsal: academic theology has fragmented into sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines; there has been a notable trend for systematic theology to become an internal conversation with and about other systematic theologians (just as in a parallel manner biblical scholarship has a tendency to morph into debates about the materials that constituted the Bible rather than the subject matter of the Bible itself);8 disciplinary protectionism has fostered a sense that attention to and understanding of the biblical text was the exclusive preserve of biblical scholars.9 Corresponding to this combination, although operating in a somewhat different manner, is a modern form of biblicism which presumes that sola Scriptura means something that it never meant for the Reformers, namely reading of the Bible in isolation from the church’s patient history of reflection on the narrative pressure of the text. As Stephen Pickard narrates in his account of the influence of John Locke on modern theology, there are parts of the church that have acted to sever the umbilical connection between biblical and doctrinal attention. Post-biblical articulations and clarifications concerning God as triune or the identity of the Son have been imagined to be accretions to be peeled away from the biblical text. The effect was that the particularity of the text was cut off from a wider tradition which had always attempted to make sense of the whole.10 The direction of modern theology and of much of the church is marked by the dispersal of a universal vision, a sense of the whole in which Scripture may be properly understood.11 In Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25. Cited in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘‘Exegesis I Know, and Theology I Know, But Who Are You?’ Acts 19 and the Theological Interpretation of Scripture’, in R. David Nelson, Darren Sarisky and Justin Stratis (eds), Theological Theology: Essays in Honour of John Webster (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 289–306 (294). See also Paul Helm, ‘ “Grace Builds Upon Nature”: Philosophy and the Future of Theology’, in Trevor Cairney and David Starling (eds), Theology and the Future: Evangelical Assertions and Explorations (London: T&T Clark Bloomsbury, 2015), 137–49 (38), who in his discussion of Basil Mitchell comments thus on the insularity of much theology: ‘it is theologians’ words about theological words’. 9 See the lucid account of theology’s fragmentation and how we might imagine dogmatics as a subject that ‘hangs together’ in B. A. Gerrish, Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 13–20. 10 Stephen Pickard, In-Between God (Hindmarsh: ATF Theology, 2011), 54–66. See Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. xiii–xiv for talk of ‘the whole’, cited in Nicholas M. Healy, ‘What is Systematic Theology?’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (2009): 24–39 (24). 11 Pickard, In-Between God, 52–3. 8

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this fragmented context theological interpretation of Scripture has sought to re-connect the conversation between the faith of the church and the text that is constitutive of its identity. This collection is therefore related to the integrative endeavour of theological interpretation as a modern movement, but seeks to sound a distinct note. The intention of Theologians on Scripture is to convene theologians who professionally would be badged with a range of epithets (systematic, practical, liberationist, and contextual), representing different ecclesial traditions (Orthodox, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist and Lutheran) purposely beyond the confines of those who might be regarded to be on the frontline of theological interpretation of Scripture. By selecting theologians who might normally be placed at frontlines other than theological interpretation the hope is that theological interpretation may be coaxed to look in new directions. This selection of theologians with their sometimes divergent start and end points is a deliberate reminder on my part as editor that ‘what constitutes theology is a contested matter’.12 One might add to this, that what constitutes theology, and how one is ‘theological’ will remain a perennially contested matter until the end of times.13 Equally, there are many ‘scriptures’.14 (Thus what it is to be a theological interpreter of Scripture must necessarily be understood capaciously and generously, precisely because no one theological school or style owns the ‘rights’ to being a theological reader of the text.) Too many edited works in theology remain isolated from direct contact with positions which may allow for the contested nature of theology to be highlighted between its covers. One sign of this is for edited collections to advance a school of theology divorced from questions about how different moods of theology (contextual, systematic, practical) might relate to one another, need one another, and contribute universally to a Christian understanding of the worlds in which we live. When theological work sequesters itself in this way it is easy to forget Pickard, In-Between God, 86. It is notable that in Nelson, Sarisky and Stratis (eds), Theological Theology, the question of the contested nature of what counts as being ‘theological’ remains largely unaddressed. A definition of ‘theological’ derivative from the work of John Webster is assumed. John Webster certainly has much to teach us about what it is to be ‘theological’, but an approach informed by Webster will not exhaust the range of responsibilities that are incumbent upon one who dares to be ‘theological’. 14 This is one of the key emphases of David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (London: SCM, 1975). As well as reminding us that Scripture is contested theologically, so Kelsey also reinforces that there is more than one way to move from the biblical text to theological proposal. 12 13

Introduction

5

that theology is an inescapably conversational enterprise about how it is to be done faithfully. We can state it even more strongly than this: the unity of the church, and a sense of the whole, will only be found through bringing into conversation and mutual understanding different perspectives on the place of the Bible in the Christian life. In this context, as Andreas Andreopoulos and Christoph Schwöbel both attest in their contributions to this volume, the Bible is uniquely positioned to contribute to ecumenical discussions, representing as it does a common (albeit with some variations) point of reference across the Christian church. In the conclusion to this collection I reflect intentionally on what the different theological perspectives on Scripture in this volume might be telling us about how theology, and theological interpretation in particular, is to be practised. With the assumption that all theologians are required to – and should be expected to be able to – render an account of how they adhere to Scripture in their work the contributors to this volume were asked to engage with the following set of questions, each of them intended to unearth some of the decisions that have already been made before the theologian even opens the Bible: 1. In your theological work what has been the implicit or explicit theology of Scripture that you have worked with? 2. How has the reading of Scripture shaped and contributed to your theological vision? 3. With whom do you read Scripture? 4. For whom do you read Scripture? 5. In your theological work how have you utilized the contribution of biblical studies and how have you negotiated the challenges and potential of ‘historical critical’ readings of the text? In order to take up the challenge set before them the contributors have had to engage sympathetically with the notion that intellectual and personal auto­biography are bound up with one another. Speaking autobiographically for some theologians is not an instinctive exercise, but the intention of the invitation was to draw attention to the importance of formation and the theologian’s individual narrative in their experience of the biblical text. In this sense, Theologians on Scripture shares some of the working assumptions

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of those modes of contextual theology that assume there are two types of theology. There are those that are self-consciously aware of the shaping influence of context on their theology. And there are those that are shaped by their context, but unaware of or reluctant to accord this context too much influence. This book has invited its contributors to place themselves closer to the first, rather than the second camp. How theologians relate to biblical scholarship, what theologians may think of this text called ‘Scripture’, how this text is woven into their wider theological outlook – these are all questions imbricated in the lives of the theologians gathered here. Indeed, what is apparent from many of the contributions is the inseparable link between the author’s pastoral and intellectual context. In this sense the collection ahead of you is intending to make a universal point through particular lives and experiences. Stanley Hauerwas, reflecting on his autobiography Hannah’s Child, relates that what may seem embarrassingly particular can have the potential to contribute to a variety of conversations theology needs to be hosting: [T]he “I” that is trying to tell the story of how I learned to think theologically will be recognized by others as not unrelated to how they too have come to think theologically. If that is the case then the story I have to tell is not just my story but a story that helps us locate where we have been, as well as what our future may be.15

In summary, theological work is always at risk of arriving at proposals that can seem to render invisible the connections that must necessarily exist between theological work and biblical attention.16 This collection of chapters is a modest bid to render some of these connections a little more visible. One final note: the chapters have been organized alphabetically rather than into theological ‘schools’ or approaches. In this way, before reaching the final chapter in which I seek to reflect on the cumulative effect of the different voices, the reader is invited to make their own connections across and between the contributions.

Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 20. See, for example, the critical observation of David Ford that Scripture is accorded a rather slender role in the Radical Orthodoxy project: David F. Ford, ‘Radical Orthodoxy and the Future of British Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001): 385–404.

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The gospel as an image of the kingdom: An Eucharistic reading of the Bible in the Orthodox tradition Andreas Andreopoulos

Introduction It is sometimes said that the Bible in the Orthodox Church is not so much read and studied, as it is venerated. And indeed, as is often the case with stereotypes, a first glance at the Orthodox tradition shows a relative lack of a sustained and deep engagement with the biblical material, at least at the research level. It is hard to find any substantial contribution to modern biblical scholarship from Orthodox researchers. Nevertheless, before we pass such a harsh judgement, it will be necessary to take a closer look at the way the gospel is read, received and used in the Orthodox tradition. For this however, we need to consider the wider use and the context of the reception of the Bible in the Orthodox world, both at the pastoral and at the scholarly level. Perhaps it is useful to say here that I have been struggling with Scripture at both of these two levels of reference, pastoral work and scholarly research and teaching, as a priest and also as a university lecturer. The two directions are certainly distinct. They employ different methodologies, they have different aims, and they are addressed to different groups of people – the community of the faithful and the academic community. Nevertheless, I never felt that these two directions were pulling me towards contrary or incompatible directions, although it may certainly be the case for other pastors or scholars. The priest in me started with the presupposition that the gospel is a means of divine revelation that intends to lead the community of the people who are

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gathered in the name of the Lord, but this same impetus made it necessary for me to study and unlock the message of the Word, as much as possible. By the same token, the scholar in me made use of the several ways ancient, medieval and modern research has employed to study the content and the context of Scripture, but this also meant that the Bible could not be understood properly if it was simply seen as a text, separated from the community that wrote it and the context of faith that gave sense to it. Likewise, as a writer, whether I was trying to concentrate on hard research in Patristic thought or in an explanation of a Christological doctrine aimed at a wider audience, I felt that the Bible had to be recognized as a foundation of Christian thought and to be used accordingly. One reason for this is that in the modern context of several Christian groups with their own traditions, doctrines and theological sensitivities, the Bible is perhaps the only common level of reference. An attempt towards an honest and sustained theological dialogue among them needs to start from the common basis they all share. If this dialogue shows that they do not all read the same material in the same way, perhaps the reasons for this divergence can be addressed, thus encouraging a truly ecumenical dialogue – one that that would try to face and investigate differences rather than to gloss over them. Furthermore, the continuous deference to the Bible is not useful only as part of the ecumenical dialogue, but also for the way each community understands its own teachings and ways. To say this within a specifically Orthodox context (although it is also the case with every Christian denomination) many of the doctrines and the practices that are essential to Orthodox theology, such as the sign of the cross, the significance of Mary, the completely human and completely divine natures of Jesus Christ, the prayer of the heart or the significance of corporate worship, do not always have obvious biblical roots. Sometimes the reason for this is that they are based on practices that are as ancient as the Gospel itself, they belonged to the wider context that spawned the sacred books, and it was not necessary to include them as part of the narrative of the life, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. With others, while it is possible to find a biblical connection, they did not develop as practices or doctrines until several centuries later. In such cases, Scripture can serve as a mirror of truth. Perhaps it is too narrow-minded to limit our understanding of Christianity to a reading of the biblical text as a text only, without



The gospel as an image of the kingdom

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its historical, cultural and spiritual context, but then it becomes necessary to understand and demonstrate why such extra-biblical practices and teachings are serving the message of the gospel and lead us – the faithful and the scholar alike – towards a deeper understanding of the gospel as salvation, rather than distracting us from it.

Liturgical use First, let us take a look at the way Scripture is used in the liturgical services of the Orthodox Church. The services repeat and amplify the content of the Gospels. The reading of the entire New Testament (except for the book of Revelation) is completed within one year, starting with John 1.1-18 at the Easter service. The Gospel book itself is an object of veneration, and the Little Entrance of the Divine Liturgy (which corresponds roughly to the entrance of the clergy in Western services) is the ceremonious entrance of the Gospel book, carried by priests and deacons into the altar. Much of the text of the Divine Liturgy, as well as of other services, is derived from biblical sources, especially the Psalter, although the services reflect a painstaking effort to articulate biblical expressions in every turn. Psalms are read in various places of the services, especially in the service of Vespers and Matins, where the whole Psalter is normally read during the course of one week. The service of Matins includes the reading of Psalms 19, 20, 3, 37, 62, 87, 102, 142 and 50, in addition to a gospel reading.1 The service of Sunday Matins normally has a resurrectional tone, and its lectionary is based on a rotation of eleven post-resurrection readings from the gospels. Some of the hymns that are sung later in the service, follow the gospel reading of the day, and elaborate on its content. In addition, after the reading of the gospel passage, the gospel book is brought out to the middle of the nave, and it is venerated by all the faithful. The Orthodox liturgical life is generally characterized by a continuous chanting worship, with most prayers chanted or intoned rather than spoken. It also includes collections of hymns that develop the meaning of the feast of For the text and the rubrics of the services, there are several publications in English, such as the collection of liturgical texts in the Liturgikon of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America.

1

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the day (such as the Canon, which generally consists of thirty-two stanzas). The content of these hymns is almost always strongly theological, and rarely emotional. Although apocryphal gospels and lives of saints are used as sources, most of these cycles are based on the gospel narratives and on the Patristic reflections on them. One good example of this is the Akathist hymn dedicated to Mary, which draws material from biblical and deuterocanonical sources, in order to highlight all the stages of the life of Mary, such as the annunciation and the nativity of Christ, and her wider contribution to the Christological drama.2 Nevertheless, it is no accident that the people who contributed to the develop­ment of liturgy and hymnography were also fundamental in the formulation of doctrine and teaching, such as Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom (the two of them are traditionally credited with the liturgies still in use by the Orthodox Church) and John of Damascus (who is known for his system­ atization of Christian thought at his time, but also for introducing the system of the eight tones, and was the author of numerous hymns).

Language A difficulty at the pastoral level is that for several Orthodox traditions the language of worship differs from the language most people understand and speak in everyday life, although perhaps not quite in the way that Latin differs from modern vernacular languages. Among traditional Orthodox countries, this is not a problem in Romania or in Arab countries, where there is virtually no distance between the liturgical and the vernacular language, but it is a problem in Slavic countries, since Church Slavonic is widely understood only within a church context, and differs significantly from vernacular spoken languages such as Russian or Serbian. It has recently become a problem in Greece, because of a breakdown in the education system. Ancient Greek is not included in a rigorous way in secondary education anymore, and therefore it is becoming increasingly difficult for young Greeks to understand ecclesiastical Greek, which despite its venerable age, is not very different from C. A. Trypanis (ed.), Fourteen Early Byzantine Cantica (Vienna: In Kommision bei Hermann Böhlaus Nachf, 1968), and G. Papagiannis, Akathist Hymn (Thessaloniki: Vanias, 2006).

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modern Greek. The distance between ecclesiastical Greek and modern Greek is approximately the same as the distance between Elizabethan English and modern English, and only a generation ago the language of the Bible was fairly well and widely understood, at least among secondary school graduates with no particular theological education. It is a pity therefore, that the gap of understanding is widening, for the first time in many centuries. As a priest in an English-speaking community which includes people who grew up in Eastern Europe, young people have often approached me to say that they understood the subtleties of the Gospel reading more clearly when they heard it in English – a foreign language to them, yet much more system­atically taught. This is unfortunate in many ways, especially since the Orthodox Church had no qualms about encouraging the use of vernacular languages for church use in the past, and even went as far as to invent an alphabet and start the written version of the Slavic language of the Balkans, so that the populations who received Christianity from them could use it to read the gospel and the liturgical texts. Therefore, we have to admit that there is a problem of biblical comprehension in certain parts of the Orthodox world. Having said this, although one can make a case for the occasional updating of liturgical language in several cultures, something that involves successive editions of the biblical text, this would not be the best possible way forward in the case of the Greek Church. The first reason is that, as it was already mentioned, very little effort is required to bridge the gap between spoken and liturgical language. The second reason is that it is important that the language in which the New Testament was written, which has also given us the oldest extant transcription of the Old Testament, continues to be used today as a language of worship, in at least one part of the world. In some ways this is a responsibility that comes with the gift of the Greek language. This is not simply a romantic reflection on an idealized, and perhaps reconstructed antiquity that is preserved in a quasi-museum context, but precisely its opposite. Despite the challenges and the dramatic changes within modern Greek education in the last decades, the continuous use of biblical Greek for twenty centuries has preserved a certain subtle understanding among its more devoted speakers (something that may be observed more emphatically in monastic communities) that cannot be acquired by learning it as a foreign language. The verb ὀρθοτομῶ from 2 Timothy 2.15

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for instance, which is difficult to translate because it evokes a specific image without a precise counterpart in a word structure (and has been rendered in various ways in English, from ‘rightly divide’ in the KJB, to ‘rightly handle’ in the RSV or ‘rightly explain’ in the NRSV and in several similar variants), has a presence in the Greek language before and after the New Testament (cf. Prov. 3.6, but also many occurrences in the writings of the Fathers, and even an extensive reflection on its meaning in the fifteenth century memoirs of Sylvester Syropoulos3 who follows Chrysostom’s commentary on 2 Timothy and extends it to the ecclesiastical arguments of his day), can be understood inherently, when placed next to words with similar root and structure, such as καινοτομῶ (to innovate), διχοτομῶ (to cut in half) or ᾽ρυμοτομῶ (to design roads): the specific image of cutting forward that the word evokes, has relatives and a context in real life. The problem of translation becomes even more dramatic when we come across words with multiple meanings at different levels, such as λόγος, ὲπιούσιος, δόξα, or πονηροῦ, whose intended ambiguity or rarity invites us to consider all of their meanings at the same time, rather than to choose the one correct meaning among them, to the exclusion of the other levels. The sense one has from the experience of the language as a living language, certainly helps. Of course, it is not necessary to argue the importance of Greek in biblical studies. Nevertheless, there is another level in the subtle command of a language, which goes beyond scholarly familiarity. It is not enough to simply have a command of the apparatus within a classical – or liturgical – body of work. The ways of a language reflect also the landscape, the climate, the harshness of the light, and the ways that the speakers of this language have engaged with their environment, with the earth and the sea. A nation that has traditionally consisted of farmers and sailors receives a text such as the Song of Songs in a different way than a nation of accountants or warriors. This is not just about the cultural or symbolic significance of the words and the metaphors of the Bible. It is about the subtext, the subtleties that resonate from image to image, from metaphor to metaphor and from text to text, that urges the faithful to read John through Solomon, or Matthew through Isaiah, Vitalien Laurent (ed.), Les Mémoires du grand ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438–1439) (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), 1971), 562.

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in some reference to the images that generated the words and the metaphors used by Scripture. While it may be possible to trace some of these paths linguistically, very often it is the more unexpected, and more subtle features of a language that point us towards some of the more difficult aspects of understanding. When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman about the living water, he uses the word ἁλλόμενον (Jn 4.14). This is a rare word, which also appears in the variant διαλλόμενος in the Song of Songs (2.8). Although it is possible to translate both words as ‘leaping’, the linguistic connection between the two passages guides us to discern the desire of the beloved (who leaps over the hills to meet his bride), in what Jesus Christ offers to the Samaritan woman using the image of the living, leaping, loving water. This is one of the several examples where the gospel should be read in the echo of specific images from the Old Testament, specifically the Septuagint. It is, therefore, important to be able to experience Greek in its living continuity throughout the centuries – the entire range of Greek, from Homeric to modern Greek. When we try to understand a passage or a biblical image, it is often useful to let the words resonate within their own family, among their ancestors, their descendants and the various images that they expressed over the centuries, both inside and outside church culture. This heritage extends, at least to some extent, to the entire Orthodox world. While the Slavonic and the Georgian language have nothing in common with Greek, the exegetical tradition in the entire East has been based on the Fathers who worked primarily within the Greek language. It is, after all, easy to point to cultural and linguistic differences as historical causes of eccles­ iastical schisms.

Biblical studies in the Orthodox world If this is the case, why is biblical studies not particularly developed in the Greek or in the wider Orthodox world? Although it is possible to say that Orthodox theology has a considerable footprint in Western theological thought, in areas such as Patristics, Liturgy, Systematic theology or Ecclesiology, it is not easy to say that Orthodox theologians have much of a presence within modern international Biblical research, despite the recent contributions of scholars such as

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John Breck,4 Veselin Kesich,5 Theodore Stylianopoulos,6 John Karavidopoulos or Petros Vasileiadis.7 This image might look even darker if we were to examine the previous generations of Orthodox theologians in the twentieth or late nineteenth century, when even among the greatest names of Orthodox theological thought (Florovsky, Lossky, Staniloae, Zizioulas, Yannaras), very few people from that generation had much of an interest in biblical studies, and it was just about possible for them to keep up with the critical historical methods that were developed in the West. In addition, even the ones among them who showed an interest in the biblical material, such as Panagiotis Trembelas in the past8 or John Behr in the present,9 did not separate their approach from the Patristic or the liturgical legacy, and in this way it is hard to consider them ‘purebred’ Biblical scholars such as Jeremias and Bultmann. The question at this point is whether this situation reflects a lack of interest in the textual roots of Christianity, or whether it suggests that the approach of traditional Orthodox theology cannot be separated from its Patristic or liturgical context, and thus it is not completely compatible with modern Western biblical scholarship, which is a distinct area of theological interest and research. I believe the answer is a combination of the two. Considering sacred texts, liturgical traditions and practices, and their exegetical tradition, the way to monitor the way they are formulated, is to remember that their point is the pursuit of the spiritual life. We can see therefore, how well their academic and their pastoral approach helps us understand the way they serve their purpose. In the Orthodox Church the Bible is considered a necessary entrance to the way towards salvation, but John Breck, Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001) and The Shape of Biblical Language: Chiasmus in the Scriptures and Beyond (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008). 5 Veselin Kesich, The Gospel Image of Christ (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2nd edn, 1997). 6 Theodore Stylianopoulos, The Making of the New Testament: Church, Gospel, and Canon (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2014); Encouraged by the Scriptures: Essays on Scripture, Interpretation, and Life (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011); Sacred Text and Interpretation: Perspectives in Orthodox Biblical Studies (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007); The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1997). 7 Karavidopoulos and Vasileiadis have a long list of various contributions to biblical studies and research in Greece, which is difficult to be duplicated here. 8 Trembelas was a quite influential scholar in Greece in the middle of the twentieth century, who, despite the controversy that followed regarding some of his views on Patristics, offered the most widely read modern commentary of the New Testament in Greek. 9 Cf John Behr, The Mystery of Christ (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006). 4



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this does not mean that it is the sole foundation of the spiritual life. Even if we start with the argument that it contains everything that is necessary for our salvation, it is not considered a text that can be read without some preparation. In the few examples of exegesis that we find in the New Testament, we see that it is a text that needs to be ‘unlocked’ (Lk. 24.27), for which ‘someone needs to guide us’ (Acts 8.31). The Bible is read in the context of the wider life of the church, which brings within it the reference level that is necessary to unlock the text. The practice and the experience of the church are necessary to unlock and guide us through the text. Therefore, the Bible is read through the prism of the experience of the church rather than the other way round. This gives a relative pre-eminence to the church over the Bible. In some ways of course, it is possible to point to the mutual interdependence of the church and the Bible, arguing that while it is not possible to speak of a Christian church without a scriptural foundation, it is also not possible to consider that the Bible appeared fully formed, with no reference to the community that wrote it. This is not a question of authority as it is often expressed in the opposition of magisterium vs. Scripture. If the first direction points to the determination of the way towards salvation through a vertical hierarchical structure and if the second points to a textual fundamentalism that ignores the ancient as well as the continuous context of the words, Orthodox theology cannot be identified with either one, nor with any intermediate position. Instead, we would start with the understanding of salvation as union with the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, and how this is expressed in the Church as the body of Christ in the Pauline sense. What has traditionally defined the Church as such is the presence of the body of Christ in it, in a historical or in a sacramental way – although another case could be made for the space that is defined by the operation of the Holy Spirit. The Bible, as a text that both describes (and thus follows) and formulates (and thus precedes) the Eucharistic community, cannot be understood outside its immediate context. The hermeneutic approach that we find in the tradition of the Orthodox Church is based on this premise. This is understood in a several ways. The earliest extant testimonies about the narratives that became the core of the written gospels suggest that they were read in the gatherings of the Eucharistic community, within

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the context of the teaching, and the communion in bread and wine.10 This is hardly surprising, since it was not possible until much later to publish a high number of copies of the gospel for wide dissemination and study, but it means much for the way the text was received, and ultimately, for the way it was put together: the narratives of the life, the ministry, the passion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, were solidified within the context of communal ritual worship, and this affects the way we read them. To be more precise, the gospel was not written so much in order to be read and studied, is it was in order to be heard, and to be received after a certain spiritual preparation, by baptized members of the body of the church, and with a specific purpose, in their preparation towards the sacrament of the Eucharist. This has a direct bearing on our hermeneutics: when we come across various references to bread or wine, from the identification of Jesus as the Bread of Life (Jn 6.35) to the epiousios bread of the Lord’s Prayer (which echoes the word epiousa – the day of tomorrow – in Proverbs and Acts), it is necessary to consider the context that formulated these narratives, not only in reference to the historical life of Jesus Christ himself (an area with no dearth of research and interest), but also in the life of the early church. In other words, to miss the liturgical setting which gave rise to the gospels as we know them today, and to miss the connection between the bread of the gospel and the Eucharistic bread that was distributed and consumed right after the reading, implies a methodological error tantamount to reading the text of Romeo and Juliet and ignoring that it is not a novel but a play, which was meant to be acted in a theatre, in front of an audience. Following this line, we can consider the gospel a text that was primarily written for liturgical use, whose purpose and meaning is unlocked within the rites of the church, to those who participate in them. We find this hermeneutical view already in Luke 24, when Jesus appears to the two disciples on their way to Emmaus. This narrative follows closely the liturgical structure that Justin Martyr describes (reading and reflection on the Scriptures, followed by the blessing and the distribution of the Eucharistic bread and wine), but the event hangs on Luke 24.30-32, when it is the breaking of the bread that brings about the recognition of Jesus, and also leads the disciples to wonder why they Justin Martyr 1 Apol. 67.

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did not recognize him although their hearts were burning when he opened the Scriptures to them. The narrative implies that it is not possible to understand the meaning of the gospel without and outside the sacrament. In this case the sacrament was connected with the physical and historical presence of Jesus Christ, although after Pentecost the Body of Christ, both in the Pauline and in the sacramental sense, both in terms of the gathering of the people and their transformation into members of the Body of Christ, and in the sense of the change of the bread and the wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, is constituted by the Holy Spirit.

A liturgical approach With this in mind, and considering how the gospel as we know it today received its form within the liturgical setting of the early church, we can discern images of clear liturgical significance in it. Much of what we see in the Book of Revelation for instance, makes sense in the context of liturgy. Revelation 4, to take an obvious example, is a precise description of the beginning of a divine liturgy: a door opening in heaven (Rev. 4.1) is a way to describe an entrance (the entrance of the clergy); the image of the one who sat at the throne, with the appearance of jasper and ruby (Rev 4.3) evokes the image of the high priest from Exodus 28.17-20, who corresponds to the president of the divine liturgy, later to be known as the bishop. The bishop sits at the throne, surrounded by twenty-four presbyters (Rev 4.4), dressed in white vestments, just as the bishop and his priests in the early church were seated at the synthronon behind the altar (a semi-circular structure that can still be seen in ancient churches). As in the liturgy, what follows after the clergy is seated, is the singing of the Thrice-holy hymn (Rev. 4.8), although the liturgical version takes its text from the Old Testament reference this image evokes, in Isaiah 6.3. And finally, just like in the liturgy, what follows after the singing of the Trisagion is the reading of the texts. The entire meaning of Revelation changes when we look at it through this perspective, and if we can trace its liturgical imagery. Rather than a text that foreshadows events that may take place in a millenarist future, its liturgical reading encourages an exegetical direction that is not historically specific (grounded in a strict

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historical reference or anticipating an indeterminate future), but, consistently with prophecy and its rich imagery as understood in the Old Testament,11 it points to a revelation (hence the title of the book) of the meaning of the spiritual life in Christ, as it is viewed in the language of symbols, and therefore in deeply archetypical and psychological terms, connecting the ritual life of the church and the inner journey of the Christian in his way towards union with Christ – something which is understood more completely in liturgical ways rather than in terms of a linear analysis. It is impossible to know to what extent early liturgical practices shaped the writing of the gospel as opposed to the other way round. Since it took several decades for the Jesus narratives that later became universally accepted as the gospels to be written down, and since it took even longer until they were accepted by the church as the texts that reflect the experience of the early church, even more authoritative as Scripture than the Old Testament, and since the texts underwent several developments until they reached the stable form in which we know them today, it is reasonable to assume that formative shaping ran both ways. Even if we rejected the formative influence of the liturgical tradition on the texts however, we would still need to consider the liturgical culture of worship as the main hermeneutical lens through which the early church approached the texts. This is not just an observation that has to do with information that is available to the researcher. It is also a question about the attitude towards the text, and the preparation that is necessary in order to approach it. The difference between the liturgical and the historical approach to the Biblical text is that the first allows for a greater degree of participation in it, and in this way it encourages the ones who receive it to undergo a spiritual transformation. By contrast, approaching the text as if it is a historical chronicle of events (in past or in future time) and, especially in the case of the gospels, a collection of testimonies and descriptions of the ministry of Jesus Christ, places a far greater distance between the text and the reader. Seen as a historical text, the Bible may allow us to extract teachings of moral value, that may influence our behaviour, but it is difficult to see how they may facilitate the inner transformation. Columba Flegg, An Introduction to Reading the Apocalypse (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), and also the various books of Scott Hahn for a Roman Catholic, yet very similar approach on this issue.

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The understanding of the gospel is an act that involves a profound, or rather an active reception, beyond the level of getting to the information or the historical event behind it. Understanding the message of the gospel correctly requires divine illumination (that is, the participation of the Holy Spirit), and takes place in a way that addresses the entire human being, the mind and the heart, as we can see in the prayer that precedes the reading of the gospel in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom: ‘Shine within our hearts, loving Master, the pure light of your divine knowledge and open the eyes of our mind so that we may comprehend the message of your Gospel.’ The Book of Revelation points precisely to this difficulty, as it draws attention to the fact that ‘no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it’ (Rev. 5.3), except Christ himself. This phrase and this difficulty are developed into a full chapter (the entire fifth chapter of the Book of Revelation), which reflects the impossibility of reading or understanding Scripture without entering into a salvific relationship with Jesus Christ. As it is also reflected in Luke 24, it is Christ who leads to the opening of Scripture, rather than the other way round. We can conclude from this that Scripture on its own, if it is considered separately from its liturgical and ecclesiological context, is not sufficient to lead to salvation. The sacramental and ecclesiological presence of Christ needs to precede the reception of the text. Otherwise, it is likely to read the text in a misleading way. The early church was fully aware of this difficulty. Irenaeus of Lyons recognized that it was perfectly possible for two people to start from the same text, and to arrive to two different interpretations. To that effect he came up with his celebrated metaphor of the puzzle that may depict a king or a fox, according to the way the pieces are put together.12 Like the puzzle games we can still find at the local toy store, before we try to put the pieces together, we need an image of where we want to go with this, what is the hypothesis, or what is the image on the cover of the puzzle. Moreover, in order to evaluate the interpretation, we consider it, once again according to Irenaeus, against the ‘canon of truth’ we receive at baptism.13 The significance of baptism here points to the role and authority of the Eucharistic community and the body of

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, i, 8, 1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, i, 9, 4.

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the church, and therefore this is essentially the first theological consideration of the question of sola Scriptura in history, and its outright rejection. We can see however, that the question is not posed in the context of an authoritative structure of power. The reference to baptism, the rite of entry to the church for everyone, points to a sense and claim of the truth which is shared by all its members equally. In Orthodox ecclesiology it is very clear that the bishop expresses the authority, or rather the unity, of his Eucharistic community. The responsibility of the bishop (or the priest in a parish) is to ensure that the different views and opinions that exist within the Eucharistic community are committed to a continuous dialogue. This dialogue, conducted in the Holy Spirit of God, enables the continuous discovery and rediscovery of the life of the church, and makes it possible for the members of the Eucharistic body of Christ to maintain their own personhood, while they become ‘as one’. The biblical text is the main component of this continuous discovery. However, it is also necessary to keep in mind that this dialogue is not limited by time and space, and therefore it includes the Eucharistic community as it started at the historical and biblical table of the lord, as it passed through the experience and the witness of every o/Orthodox community in the world, and as it still continues, as a dialogue that includes all the members of the church individually, the entire Orthodox Eucharistic community of the present all over the world, the entire Eucharistic community of the past since the birth of the church, and the Holy Spirit. This suggests that the interpretation of the Bible is not a closed event with a reading that is handed down from the top, but that the text is owned by the entire community, of the present generation and of all the previous generations, and that any kind of dialogue as to its meaning necessarily includes the Fathers, the theologians and the saints of the past, as much as it does modern theologians. Therefore, we can see the biblical event as a continuous, living process, which helps define the very body of the church, and which is ultimately substantiated beyond time. This leads us to consider another aspect that reveals much about Scripture in the Orthodox Church: eschatology.



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The Holy Spirit and the eschatological approach Despite the direct Christological references we saw regarding the opening of the Scriptures, the revelation of Christ in all possible ways – historically, sacramentally, through Scripture – is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is important to bring in the third person of the Holy Trinity here. The Creed also reminds us that the Holy Spirit spoke ‘through the prophets,’ connecting directly Scripture and the Holy Spirit. However, the operation of the Holy Spirit cannot be reduced to either an abstract motivation or to an exhortation of moral nature, and certainly not to a disembodied quest for information. The Holy Spirit awakens the spiritual senses, it reveals the relationship between what is created and what is uncreated, and it leads to the truth by means of a spiritual process of transformation. For this reason, reading Scripture in the Holy Spirit is not a passive process, but one that involves an internal, transformative spiritual movement. The presence and the operation of the Holy Spirit is often described as an illumination, which is also how the prayer before the reading of the gospel in the Divine Liturgy refers to it. This illumination is understood in the context of the vision of the uncreated light that was developed into a full theological teaching in the fourteenth century, as a union with God through his energies, which is experienced as a bright light – for lack of a better way to describe it. But either in reference to hesychastic theology, or in reference to the illumination of the transfiguration, the operation of the Holy Spirit and the revelation of God as light is seen by the Fathers as a foreshadowing of the kingdom of heaven. To bring this back to the context of biblical study, we can talk of an apocalyptic illumination that allows us to interpret Scripture through the perspective of God, not bound by the limitations of time and space, and therefore looking back on the biblical events as though they are remembered from the end of time, after the fulfilment of all history. Maximos the Confessor described this in his theological analysis of the transfiguration in his Ambigua, by identifying the white garments of Jesus Christ with the pages of the gospel, which become fully understood only in the light of God – the light of the transfiguration as a foretaste of the light of the second coming of Christ and the kingdom of God.14 The liturgical Cf the analysis of the Transfiguration in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), 70.

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approach that we discussed above makes sense only when it leads to the time-beyond-time and the place-beyond-place of God. The way to consider this, drawing all the other exegetical strands together, is by thinking of the gospel as the beginning of a path that leads to the kingdom of God. The request to make the kingdom present, as it is reflected in the third phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, is an invitation to the operation and the power of the Holy Spirit.15 It is this internal transformation that allows us to follow the ascent from the theology that can be expressed with words (cataphatic) to that which no words are sufficient to describe (apophatic) – a fundamental topos in Orthodox theology. The Bible and the entire cataphatic (written or oral) tradition of the church can serve as the beginning of the quest for the person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of divine revelation, but it does not stop there. The next step, which is expressed by apophaticism, implies a journey beyond words, something that can be seen in the ‘inexpressible things’ that St Paul heard when he found himself beyond the confines of the created world (2 Cor. 12.4). The hermeneutics of the Orthodox Church treats Scripture as an open sign, an entrance and a way, whose interpretation cannot be separated from doxology, and whose final meaning can only be understood in the context of the eschaton made present in history. Within the framework of the liturgical, doxological engagement with the biblical events, these events are less about historical memories, and more about the continuous life of the congregation in Christ: Jesus Christ, and the entire body of the Church, are continuously born, continuously crucified and continuously resurrected.16 The sacramental bread that is offered, fractured and then transformed into the body of the resurrected Christ, reflects the whole congregation who participates in the sacramental presence of Christ in precisely the same way. The process may be liturgical and doxological, the end may be in the eschaton, but the foundation is certainly biblical. Therefore, the entire Bible can be seen as one of the first steps into a continuous heuristic17 that leads the travellers beyond the literal meanings, transforming them into members of the body of Christ.

This may be seen in the analysis of the Lord’s Prayer and the Mystagogy of Maximos the Confessor. Andreas Andreopoulos, Gazing on God (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013), 81. Andreopoulos, Gazing on God, 137–54.

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Finding a critical space: Scripture and experience in practical theology Zoë Bennett

My historical journey I learnt theology before I learnt Scripture. Eight years old, I sat up in bed in the early morning at my grandmother’s house reading a dusty old book of Christmas carols: ‘Born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth’. ‘Look now! For glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing; o rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing!’ A potent mix of theology and mythology, catching the imagination and immediately connecting my world with a story of something ‘more’, hinting at deep meanings and glorious possibilities. The sense of yearning, this call from and to something utterly wonderful, was evoked again later: ‘But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day; the saints triumphant rise in bright array; the King of glory passes on His way’. Lucy and Susan’s ride on the resurrected Aslan’s back in Narnia; floating on the warm sweet sea in Perelandra; Tolkien’s ‘starlight on the Western Seas’. Always a ‘radiant immanence’, not an other-worldy transcendence – though it would be a long time until I read George Steiner.1 All this was part of my imaginative world before I had read a word of Scripture, except a substantial amount of Deuteronomy in school Scripture lessons, and the words on the noticeboard of the little pre-fabricated Elim Chapel I passed on my bike on the way to school, ‘For God so loved the world, George Steiner, ‘The House of Being’, a review of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, in Times Literary Supplement 4097 (9 October 1981): 1143–4 (1144).

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that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’ (Jn 3.16). I constructed a child’s world of theological understanding: that there is something which is greater and more glorious than our wildest dreams; in this world there is tribulation and struggle – the glory comes with, from, or through pain; there is a story around Jesus which in some magical and mysterious way brings us to that glory; all this has very much to do with our own lives, feelings and imagination, my own included; heaven and earth are brought together; God is beyond our grasp but within our love, and we within God’s love. The carols and hymns, Lewis and Tolkien – imaginations fired by the biblical narrative and imagery. This theology was deeply informed by Scripture, but, crucially, not bounded by Scripture. Then a new tributary entered my river of understanding. Aged sixteen I joined an evangelical youth group in my parish church. Years followed: of youth camps, CICCU Saturday night ‘Bible readings’,2 and daily Quiet Times with ‘Search the Scriptures’ (I still have the filled notebooks). Whether it was ‘good for my soul’ or not, it was, without doubt, extremely good for my knowledge of Scripture. Studying some years later for an MPhil in Cambridge I had a burning question in my mind and heart: ‘what kind of animal is this “Bible”?’ Inerrant or infallible (the argument in my evangelical world) or neither? In any way connected with theology or not? (I was naïvely shocked when I found no one else brought a Bible to the faculty Christology seminar). I chose the route through the MPhil entitled ‘Christian theology in the modern world’, despite the attractions of the ‘New Testament’ route to an evangelical classicist soaked in Scripture and the Greek language, because I wanted to grasp a wider context for biblical interpretation – to understand the Bible’s use and its relationship to theology, faith, and practice. Here I learnt four things which are fundamental to my ongoing relationship as a theologian with Scripture. First, I encountered in Karl Barth a theologian who was not afraid to bring theology and Scripture together, but also, importantly for me, had more than a streak of the romantic in him, evoking in me memories of the angels’ wings, Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.

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the King of Glory, the starlight on the western seas. ‘During the work it was often as though I were being looked at by something from afar, from Asia Minor or Corinth, something very ancient, early oriental, indefinably sunny, wild, original.’3 ‘Ethics cannot exist without millenarianism, however small the dose.’4 ‘[W]as I (am I!) a bit of a romantic myself?’5 Although, I was, and still am, powerfully drawn to this sense of ‘the strange new world within the Bible’ and its potential for radical critique of human ideologies, problems with a Barthian approach have remained with me, and indeed grown more problematic in my passing years as a practical theologian. Second, in writing an essay which required a close reading of the book of Revelation, I took off from the secondary material and found myself journeying in the primary stuff of the text, analysing its imagery: images of intimacy, of power, blood, threat and fear, images of nakedness and riches, images of intimacy, the human and divine violence subverted and deconstructed by the central image of the slain lamb. My imagination was seized by this text, not as a detailed description of future events, nor as a propositional prescription for living, but as a tremendous and ambiguous invitation to see and to act differently – a magnificent call to the imagination. Later collaboration with Christopher Rowland, who set that essay as my supervisor, has been fundamental for me in opening up new possibilities of engaging with Scripture imaginatively, via its ‘minute particulars’ and the resonance of its words in our contemporary context.6 Third, already introduced by Chris Rowland to liberation theology, I began a long journey into feminist theology, and through that, a wider appreciation of the ideological critique of Scripture. This was at first felt in relation to my experience, rather than seen and grasped in relation to Scripture. I read Karl Barth, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914–1925 (trans. J. D. Smart; London: Epworth Press, 1964), 43. 4 Quoted in this form from Barth’s lectures of 1922 by Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1976), 139. See also Karl Barth, ‘The Problem of Ethics Today’, in The Word of God and the Word of Man (trans. D. Horton; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935), 136–82 (158). 5 Karl Barth, ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher’, in The Theology of Schleiermacher (ed. Dietrich Ritschl; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 261–79 (262). 6 Zoë Bennett and David Gowler (eds), Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) – see especially the Introduction; Christopher Rowland and Zoë Bennett, ‘“Action is the Life of All”: New Testament Theology and Practical Theology,’ in Christopher Rowland and Christopher Tuckett (eds), The Nature of New Testament Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 186–206. 3

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Beverley Wildung Harrison’s ‘The power of anger in the work of love’ (on a course offered by Stephen Sykes on Theology and Power – a somewhat strange start to becoming a feminist) and knew, for the first time, that someone was naming my experience in gendered relationships.7 It was then a short step, initially via Mary Hayter’s The New Eve in Christ, to seeing that Scripture itself contained within it a struggle.8 I had crossed the Rubicon. The ideological critique, the hermeneutic of suspicion, offered by feminist and other biblical criticism, has become fundamental to my understanding. The dialectical tension between this new understanding and my ancient love of, and rootedness in, the Bible is central to all my use of Scripture as a theo­logian.9 On the one hand the Bible has captured my imagination more than ever before; on the other hand I have learnt that it can both be critiqued and also in itself offer the materials for a critique of religion. Last but not least, the research I did at that time on the work of the New Testament scholar Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) enabled me to envisage a complex relationship between historical-critical biblical scholarship, Christian theology and social realities. It revealed to me the close, and often unacknow­ ledged, connection between a person’s theological stance and their social and political commitments – in Weiss’s case conservative liberal. Work on Weiss further demonstrated to me the impossibility of making direct connections between the fruits of historical-critical biblical study and normative Christian theology without a wider historical and even philosophical framework of understanding.10

Beverley Wildung Harrison, ‘The Power of Anger in the Work of Love’, in Ann Loades (ed.), Feminist Theology: A Reader (London: SPCK, 1990), 194–214. 8 Mary Hayter, New Eve in Christ: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in the Debate about Women in the Church (London: SPCK, 1987). Mary was at that time the curate of the church I attended. 9 See Zoë Bennett, Using the Bible in Practical Theology: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013). Also Mark Cartledge, ‘The Use of Scripture in Practical Theology’, Practical Theology 6 (2013): 271–83 (276–7): ‘[Bennett] acknowledges that for women the Bible has been a source of subordination as well as liberation. Therefore, it continues to be a site of struggle for interpreters who wish to remain in critical solidarity with the Christian faith.’ 10 Weiss is normally understood as a scholar who, with Albert Schweizer, declared a radical disjuncture between the eschatological Jesus revealed in the Gospels and contemporary Christian theology and faith. Theologically, he is seen as an uncritical adherent of Albrecht Ritschl. This too simple story is given the lie by a short treatize he wrote on ‘the idea of the kingdom of God’ in which he develops a theological view of history. See Johannes Weiss, Die Idee des Reiches Gottes in der Theologie (Giessen: J. Ricker, 1901); Zoë Humphries, ‘History and the Coming Kingdom – Johannes Weiss’ Critique of Albrecht Ritschl Revisited,’ Unpublished MPhil. dissertation, University of Cambridge (1990). 7



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My present context I work in a constant movement and tension between institutions, secular and sacred (Anglia Ruskin University and the Cambridge Theological Federation), between ecclesial tensions (in a Federation which includes Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Orthodox and United Reformed Church members), between disciplines (as a practical theologian), and in managing a disparate and far-flung student constituency (as Director of an MA in Pastoral Theology and a Professional Doctorate in Practical Theology). I have come to describe this way of being as ‘living in the cracks’ – not as an image of hiding away, but as an image of being constantly on the move, finding and exploiting spaces, discovering ‘home’ in the journey itself. The ‘cracks’ open up critical spaces, not thereby guaranteeing a ‘true’ viewpoint but at least ensuring a variety of perspectives. This context necessarily involves a dialectical engagement on a daily basis – an engagement which has been at the heart of my practice and has conditioned my intellectual development and work as a practical theologian. Pedagogy is my practice – specifically the pedagogy of enabling theologically reflective practice and research. My pedagogical practice is shaped by the structures of the Master’s programme and the Professional Doctorate programme; but these programmes in turn are shaped by an understanding of the complex interaction between theory/theology and practice, text and context. A key site for the dialectical engagement required is the fundamental issue of biblical hermeneutics, the relationship between ancient text (specifically the Bible for most students) and modern context. In teaching and supervising reflective practitioners and researching professionals, as part of an ecumenical team, the tensions and/or resonances between text and contemporary experience constantly emerge. Scratch below the surface, and there is no consensus among staff or students about the relationship between, and respective epistemological and practical worth of, the Bible (or other expressions of Christian authoritative tradition) on the one hand, and experience, practice, and insights from secular disciplines such as sociology and psychology on the other.

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Practical theology: The dialectic of tradition and experience The discipline of practical theology is haunted by the Scylla and Charybdis of the ‘tyranny of the text’ and the ‘tyranny of experience’. By ‘the text’ here I mean the Bible text itself, but also the tradition, the creeds, the confessions, the magisterial pronouncements and the liturgies which have shaped the myriad forms of Christian belief and practice. To what is accorded authority, how binding that authority is, and how much the role of interpretation is recognized, varies. This is not only about authority in the crude ‘imperative’ sense of the word; it is also about the shaping of identity. Alongside, or against, or in dialogue with, that ‘authoritative text’ is contemporary contextual experience, individual and corporate. The foundational layer of this is the ‘codified’ experience which constitutes the texts themselves.11 Then, communities have reshaped interpretation of these texts in history through their experiences – from the various ‘reformations’ to the abolition of slavery. The experience of an individual is also engaged in relation to the authority of the text and its interpreters – as a colleague of mine said in relation to the debate about same-sex partnerships, ‘what do you do when what you experience as grace someone else names as sin?’ The task of practical theology is often described via the use of models for critical reflection.12 A fundamental model is the pastoral cycle – from experience, to analysis of that experience, to reflection in the light of the Christian tradition (and key here is Scripture), to renewed and revised practice. This model has one root in the educational tradition of experiential learning,13 another in the professional tradition of the development of the reflective, therefore effective, practitioner,14 a third in the movement to return Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Towards a Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 1983), 12. 12 See for example, Edward Farley, ‘Interpreting Situations: An Inquiry into the Nature of Practical Theology’, in James Woodward and Stephen Pattison (eds), The Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 118–27; Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Francis Ward, Theological Reflections: Methods (London: SCM, 2005); Jane Leach, ‘Pastoral Theology as Attention’, Contact: Practical Theology and Pastoral Care 153 (2007): 19–32; David Lyall, ‘Pastoral Action and Theological Reflection’, in David Willows and John Swinton (eds), Spiritual Dimensions of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: J. Kingsley, 2000), 53–8. 13 David Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1984). 14 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003; originally published: London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983). 11



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research and the development of theory and practice to the practitioners,15 and finally a root in liberation theology, which uses the Marxian concept of praxis to encourage reflection on practices in order to interrogate those practices, to inform action, and, crucially, to facilitate change and transformation of society.16 What is often not noticed is that these roots signal quite diverse intentions and commitments – some are more conservative/instrumental, seeking effectiveness within the status quo; others are more critical/ transformational, seeking change of the status quo. The basic model of critical correlation may be described as a ‘critical conversation’ between self, context and Christian tradition/Scripture.17 This immediately begs the question of whether one of these conversation partners has a privileged place at the table. The question is normally posed by those who would wish to give some aspect of the Christian tradition, often Scripture, a privileged place. Even to ask this question is slightly to miss the point of the pastoral cycle model where the task of non-theological disciplines is to analyse the ‘given’ reality in such a way as to yield a clearer and deeper picture of that reality, which is then offered as the subject matter of theological reflection. However, to state the matter thus is also slightly to miss the point – that this is not a purely linear process, and that both experience and interpretation go right through theological reflection like lettering in a stick of rock. In David Kelsey’s Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology he identifies the sense in which B. B. Warfield, with a commitment to plenary verbal inspiration of scripture and thus propositional revelation in Scripture, leans on experience as the fundamental warrant for this position: Warfield’s claims for the inspiration of Scripture ‘involve an appeal to the common experience of men trying to live the Christian life…No other view on the part of the church could make sense of her numinous experience when she uses it in … various ways’ – such as for teaching, consolation, guidance, and the communication down the generations of vital faith.18 Furthermore, no standpoint or method of analysis is in Helen Kara, Research and Evaluation for Busy Practitioners: A Time Saving Guide (Chicago, IL: Policy Press, 2012). 16 Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis (trans. Robert Barr; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987); Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 17 Robert Grant and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (Philadephia: Fortress, 1984), 170; Stephen Pattison, ‘Some Straw for Bricks’, in Pattison and Woodward (eds), Blackwell Reader in Practical and Pastoral Theology, 135–45. 18 David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (London: SCM, 1975), 17–18. 15

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itself neutral. Experience and interpretation are already at work in the tools offered by such disciplines as sociology and psychology. The generation of knowledge is never ex nihilo. Lartey recognizes this when he includes in his version of the pastoral cycle the challenge of theology to analysis.19 There are two places in which I commonly engage with others on this question. One is the classroom, and its context in an ecumenical teaching institution. The second is in the practical theology academy – through the British and Irish Association of Practical Theology, particularly its special interest group on the Bible in practical theology. My recent book on Using the Bible in Practical Theology has a context in discussion in that group and has led to some specific nodes of debate.20 Two recent instances – a review and response conversation with Richard Briggs, at the University of Durham,21 and engagement with graduate students after a lecture at the University of St. Andrews, both highlighted this question of the starting point of theology, and revealed a chasm which is narrow but very deep between my position and a contemporary Barthian position. The root question concerns the locus of divine revelation. Briggs contends that starting with the Bible is inclusive also of human experience whereas starting with human experience is less able to make room for inclusion of Scripture: Thus my own reasons for preferring Barth’s approach are not that I think theology should be ‘top-down’ to the exclusion of the interpretative significance of context. Rather, if one starts with revelation, then rightly construed (indeed à la Barth) this loops round to take up context in theologically informed terms. But if one starts with the human framing of the context, or reception of the revelation, then it is a lot harder to see how one makes the move to a revealing God (or a divine voice in and through the text, in the case of biblical interpretation).

In my reply I said: Richard uses two expressions: ‘a human framing of the context’, and ‘a theological account of a revealing God’. And herein lies the issue for me: why should we Emmanuel Y. Lartey, ‘Practical Theology as a Theological Form’, in Willows and Swinton (eds), Spiritual Dimensions of Pastoral Care, 72–80. 20 Bennett, Using the Bible. 21 See Theology and Ministry: An Online Journal, vol. 3, 2014. Available online https://www.dur.ac.uk/ theologyandministry/volumes/ 19



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expect to meet the self-revelation of God any more through human theological accounts than through human accounts of experience and context? They are both human accounts. Is not the Bible itself a human account, taken to itself by human communities, in which we find human theological accounts and human accounts of experience and context?

That which is experienced and named as divine revelation is experienced and named by human beings, hence is itself a prime site for the possibility of ideological distortion, all the more so precisely as it is named as divine and so operates as a legitimation from God for human practices. My work as a practical theologian locates the critical space on offer to us in the messy history and experience of human beings. It is not that I doubt whether revelation – apocalypse, unveiling, the surprise of being ‘read’ – takes place; but I do believe it to be the case that there is no short cut – no appeal to any authority, including Scripture – which is privileged to bypass the complexities of human life and ideology. In my St. Andrews encounter the same argument was rehearsed, with the added poignancy for me of having stood the evening before on a plaque in the pavement where in 1528 a young man in his early twenties had been burned alive for his Protestant beliefs, horrifyingly embodying the seriousness and ambiguity of both human practices and engagement with the Bible. The impossibility of detaching the reading of Scripture from the context in which it is read was palpable; as was also the ultimate seriousness of such reading. From this dialogue at St. Andrew’s my wrestling with a sense of ambiguity in relation to Barth’s work was given a new twist. For years, I along with many others, especially practical theologians, have quoted Barth as saying ‘the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other’; a move which for me had allowed some rapprochement with my ‘enemy’ who was also my ‘friend’. At that lecture I was challenged to name the source of this oft-quoted but rarely-referenced remark. What Barth actually said, as I discovered in supplying a delayed answer to my questioner, was ‘take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible’. In an article in Time magazine on 31 May 1963 entitled ‘Barth in Retirement’ he recalls saying this forty years previously.22 As I commented wryly to the delighted Barthian ‘Barth in Retirement’, Time magazine LXXXI No. 22 (31 May 1963).

22

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theologian who had presided at my lecture, when I sent him this information by email a week later: ‘This is of course much more “Barthian” and modifies the way I will use the quotation – a salutary lesson!’

John Ruskin: A companion along the road When the university I work for took John Ruskin’s name into its own, I became curious to know whether Ruskin had anything to offer theology. My colleagues in art, English literature, politics and education all had a piece of this Victorian polymath – art critic and social critic (1819–1900). My search lead me to an extraordinary treasure trove, as I explored Ruskin’s life and work, and specifically the annotations he made in ink, on the foot of each page of a medieval biblical manuscript, a gospel lectionary, which he used for his daily reading.23 Ruskin was brought up in his mother’s evangelical faith, learning the Bible by reciting two chapters a day to her from a tender age. They went right through the Bible, returning to Genesis when they finished the final chapter of the book of Revelation. In his adult years Ruskin broke away from evangelical faith, embracing what he called the ‘religion of humanity’, but he returned to a more open and ecumenical Christian faith in his later years. The notes he made in 1875 on the passages of Scripture in his Gospel lectionary indicate a man intensely reflective about his own understanding of the Bible, and in particular about his own reading history and the development of his understanding of the biblical text: ‘After a life’s thinking I have not the least idea what this passage means or what a skandalon is’.24 Furthermore he was never, in his private or published work, afraid to face and live with doubt: my very first principle in Bible reading is neither to want to bring out anything – nor to be afraid of finding out anything; and only to make sure that whatever I read, I either do – or don’t understand… if, [the words] … appear inexplicable, mark the text as a short one – clearly – with the chalk – “That’s a locked Egerton 3046, Evangelistarium, British Library; Zoë Bennett, ‘Ruskin, the Bible and the Death of Rose La Touche: A “Torn Manuscript of the Human Soul”’, in Michael Lieb, Emma Mason and Jonathan Roberts (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Reception History of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 576–89. 24 Egerton 3046, 95r. 23



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door” – Well, it would be odd if all doors were open at once – go on to another, and we shall perhaps find that one open when we come back.25

He read the Bible and made notes on it daily, even in his period of doubt. What emerges from these private notes, corroborated by a reading of his published social critique, is a strong sense of justice, deeply informed by a reading of Scripture. This vision, expounded in a text which draws its title from a parable of Jesus, Unto this Last, is centred on the building of a political economy based on organic social relationships, with the flourishing of human life at its heart: ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.’26 The hermeneutic that Ruskin employed was to juxtapose biblical text and contemporary life, in a move which is somewhat like Stanley Spencer’s paintings, where the biblical story is superimposed on scenes from the village of Cookham. Ruskin explicitly states that he is not using the Bible as a proof-text: ‘It is not … because I am endeavouring to lay down a foundation of religious concrete, on which to build piers of policy, that you so often find me quoting Bible texts in defence of this or that principle or assertion.’27 His move is more to evoke resonances and catch the imagination, to engage the passions and to persuade. For example, commenting on Matthew’s Gospel (27.6) he writes, ‘The chief priests say of the money Judas returns that it is not lawful to put blood money into the treasury – ‘Our priests don’t even warn our Chancellor of the Exchequer of such unlawfulnesss’.28 I have come to call this move a ‘hermeneutic of immediacy’, or of analogy. It is neither proof-texting nor systematizing; instead it opens the ‘doors of perception’29 and acts as a ‘thorn in the side of the present’.30 I have found in Ruskin a resonance with my own story and an example of relating ancient text to contemporary context. In getting to the way Ruskin managed the dialectic of Scripture and experience in his context, I have had to find a critical space between myself and Ruskin in his Victorian context. So Van Akin Burd (ed.), The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 156. 26 Works 17.105. 27 Works 17.348. 28 Egerton 3046, 65r. 29 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Plate 11. 30 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications for a Christian Eschatology (trans. James W. Leitch; London: SCM, 2002), 21. 25

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the examination of a historical figure in his use of Scripture in itself becomes a way of gaining a critical space between ourselves and the biblical text, thus avoiding the tyranny of the text and the tyranny of experience and acknow­ ledging that all use of Scripture is culture-bound.

Reflections The editor’s invitation to ‘reflect on the role that the reading and interpretation of scripture plays in my theological work’ has been a fruitful and welcome one. The search for a ‘correct’ and systematic way of interpreting Scripture is not the way of a practical theologian. Instead the place to start is where we are, already reading and interpreting Scripture with a whole history of prior encounters, feelings, commitments and intellectual development – whether it be standing at our mother’s knee reciting chapters of the Bible or sitting in bed at our grandmother’s house reading carols, or indeed wrestling with national identity and public policy in the light of others’ contemporary and historical use and abuse of the scriptures.31 Personal and communal history forms and colours how we read and interpret the Bible, and to reflect critically on this enables us to gain some purchase on our own understanding and some space to move in dialogue with others. To unearth this history is an archaeological task. When asked if there would ever be a ‘wrong’ interpretation of Scripture I am tempted to say, ‘yes, an unexamined one, which is not self-reflexive’, one which ignores the interpreter’s context and history, and has no critical distance from it. There is also a ‘geographical’ task. As well as looking back to historical shaping the practical theologian also looks around to the current terrain in which their use of Scripture is forged. Within that terrain we search for a way of mapping the biblical text onto the text of contemporary life in such a way that the lived text is also mapped on to Scripture. In Ruskin I have found a way to do that mapping, not a model to follow slavishly but an invitation to see connections imaginatively.32

See for example the South African (1985) and Palestinian (2009) Kairos documents. Rowland and Bennett, ‘Action is the Life of All’.

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So the structure of this essay reflects in microcosm my practical theological methodology – to examine the influence of my past and the influence of my context on my use of Scripture. My two central hermeneutical commitments are the need for self-examination, and the hermeneutic of ‘immediacy’. Both are about seeing connections imaginatively, not about making connections according to a prescribed model. I note that I have left little place for a systematic theology. In this I have something in common with Ruskin who was ‘weak on mass’.33 This provisionality and refusal to systematize is characteristic of practical theology, and is connected with an inductive methodology emerging in the untidy realities of the ‘living human document’.34 ‘In times of stress, you do not read the Bible, the Bible reads you’. These words jumped off the page when I read them in an interview given by Giles Fraser to The Guardian the day he resigned his job at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011.35 Critics have pointed out that this appears to offer a contradiction to my declared starting point in human experience. Why did these words stop me in my tracks? Does the ‘call from the far country’ still make me catch my breath? Yes and no. Only ‘yes’ if the ‘far country’, the ‘critical space’, is located not in some transcendent realm but in very earthly locations: for Fraser the long personally-internalized history of Catholic Anglicanism’s social conscience, and the placards borne by the community of the Occupy camp outside St Pauls, placards which literally faced him with the words of Scripture and ‘read’ him.

John Drury, ‘Ruskin’s Way: tout à fait comme un oiseau’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156–76 (156). 34 See Stephen Pattison, ‘A Vision of Pastoral Theology: In Search of Words that Resurrect the Dead’ in A Critique of Pastoral Care (3rd edn; London: SCM Press, 2000), 217–53. 35 ‘A troublesome priest? I get fitted up as Wat Tyler, but I’m no radical’, interview of Rev. Dr Giles Fraser by Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian, Friday 28 October 2011, 16–17. 33

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Evolution, language and the Biblical text: Towards a theological synthesis Oliver Davies

Introduction When we do theology, and perhaps especially when we attempt something new, the question of what Scripture is somehow appears in the background. And after all, Scripture is the authoritative ground that allows us to do new theology or to do theology in a new way. Thus I intended Theology of Compassion. Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition (2001) to be a work of metaphysics and phenomenology, but found in the writing of it that it made more sense to see it as an extended exegesis of Exodus 3.14 (‘I am Who I am’). This took me into very creative early rabbinic interpretations which understood Yahweh to signal God as compassionate. Through the influence of Scriptural Reasoning, with its distinctively Jewish inheritance, I became ever more interested in the way in which language and world combine, or at least converge at an extraordinary depth. The Creativity of God. World, Eucharist and Reason (2004) explored that dynamic, drawing in also the question of how we reason rightly in the world if language and reason turn out to be so deeply related. By the time I came to Transformation Theology: Church in the World (with Paul Janz and Clemens Sedmak, 2007) and Theology of Transformation. Faith, Freedom and the Christian Act (2013) something else was on the table. An early section of The Creativity of God explored medieval cosmology (in which world, Scripture and reasoning tightly combined within a pre-modern, effectively ‘scriptural’ cosmology). Here it slowly became clear just how deeply our modern world-view (pervading our theologies of course

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which need to show their relevance in the world of the day) was dependent upon a series of scientific discoveries, over a good period of time, leading to specific technological innovations, with powerful social and economic implications. Most particularly, Gallileo’s sight of the transiting moons of Jupiter, in 1610, called into question the world as represented traditionally in Scripture. Almost a century earlier, Zwingli’s fierce debate with Luther over the nature (or possible nature) of Christ’s humanity, in the light of early materialist science, already pointed to the really central role that the Church was going to play in the reception of the new cosmology and the elaboration of its possible meanings. At this stage, I was beginning to understand the implications of Christianity’s commitment as an incarnational religion to a specific, transformational understanding of matter and the material order. This points to the possibility of profound anthropological, ecclesiological and indeed eschatalogical innovations, even beyond theology itself, since the Church appears in this light as a community uniquely committed to distinctively cosmological modes of thinking (i.e. about what matter is, or indeed testifying to matter as transformational). And as the penny finally dropped, I realized that the further implication of this is that the Church and her theologians may be in a particularly privileged position to reflect on return through contemporary science to a non-reductive physicalist world-view which – paradoxically – lies much closer to the scriptural world-view than it does to our own Newtonian inheritance. One of the tasks for us today then is beginning to think through how we might approach a re-imagining of the text of Scripture (and what that particular text is, with its pneumatological presuppositions), in the light of contemporary science. It is a challenging prospect, but nevertheless an immensely exciting one. In this discussion we shall focus upon the relation between theology, as thought which points to and somehow represents revelation, discipleship as the embodied Christian life that witnesses to revelation, and the scriptural text itself, according to its ontology.

Language: The first and fundamental question We can describe theology as the movement of self-reflection which is intrinsic to the concrete witness of faith. This is a witness which is borne in



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the embodied lives of Christian disciples over the centuries, as these are held and transformed in Christ, whose own living and glorified body has become the axis of history itself. As self-reflection of the witness of faith, Christian theology is not in itself that active witness of faith as a patterned life (much as it would sometimes like to be), but is rather its reflexive communication: at times apologetic, at times proclamatory or even critical. Saints do not need to have studied theology, but theologians do need to study and listen to the saints. But what of Scripture? Is that in itself the concrete witness of faith, or is it rather theology written down? Is it, in essence, the ‘reflexive communication’ of faith in distributed form? Or is it, in essence, itself part of the concreteness of faith: its deep, historical, embodied and material history? It seems unlikely that it can be both. There are perhaps schools or at least trends within Christianity which tacitly or explicitly support one or other of these positions. More strongly inspirationalist accounts of the provenance of the text of Scripture tend to look to the latter position first, of scriptural texts as concrete witness, bound up more directly with the dynamics of incarnational revelation. This is the Origenist account for instance.1 Traditionally such accounts look to the materiality of the sign in Scripture as the basis for the display of the Spirit’s power in the world, within an overarching picture of the cosmos as theophanic, underpinned by the robustness of the traditional account of the doctrine of the Creation. The scene looks different in our modern period however, where there is a sharper disjunction between the materiality and historicality of scripture, on the one hand, and its diverse theological interpretations on the other. For the modern mind, the material nature of the scriptural sign anchors the text in its own historical past, as having its origins in ancient times. For us today then, materialist accounts of scripture lead to a focus on the textus receptus, while constructive systematic theological ways of reading scripture find their focus in the expanding horizons of textual interpretation for the modern reader.2 For an exemplary treatment of the cosmic, materialist understanding of the interpenetration of Scripture and world, and of the transformational power of the former through strong inspiration, see R. A. Markus, Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996). 2 David Kelsey’s magisterial reading of Scripture in his Eccentric Existence: a Theological Anthropology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009) is an excellent example of this. 1

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This polarization between historical-critical readings with their linking of the words of Scripture to the point of the origination of the scriptural text in ancient times, on the one hand, and the constructive, theological readings of the text for today, on the other, is familiar enough to us. The former presupposes the priority of the ancient reader, while the latter prioritizes the modern reader. But it may be that this polarization itself is the result of the distinctively modern presuppositions concerning the nature of language itself (and its place in history) that we bring to the scriptural text. Our first and fundamental question then, concerning the nature of language itself, holds out the possibility that the biblical text can be judged to be itself theological by virtue of its very nature as matter. The materiality of the text does not have to be purely historical, anchoring it in the past; it can also be modern, anchoring the text also in the material present. And once we grasp the nature of its materiality for us as human beings, in terms both of its historical origins and its present actuality for us, we may also be able to gain a better understanding of the transformative work of the Holy Spirit who holds the two together, ancient and modern within this text at the same time, and in ways that have the power to change both us and the world. Rather than leaving the question of what language is untouched, and allowing whatever presuppositions we may have to shape our understanding of Scripture and so pragmatically its ‘ontology’, I shall seek in this chapter to develop initial understandings of what language is on the basis of significant new advances in evolutionary biology and in social neuroscience. These will potentially offer us a more thoroughly critical understanding of what language is, and so also a more fundamental resource for historical-critical and systematic theological approaches to Scripture alike.3

The history of thinking about language There is something challenging about seeking to objectify the mode of objectification itself, and language is for us precisely that mode of objectification. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Kai Vogeley and Prof. Gary Bente of the University of Cologne, and to Prof. Agustín Fuentes and Prof. Celia Deane-Drummond of the University of Notre Dame, for their invaluable teaching and advice in the areas of niche-construction and the neuroscience of social cognition (any infelicities are of course entirely my own).

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Language constitutes our global interface with the world, a two-way permeable membrane of meaning. And in fact, a brief review of ‘philosophy of language’ (or attempts to define language) in the history of thought shows us that such projects of inquiry are in fact few and far between. Much more common are engagements with the question of the nature of meaning itself. But of course, questions of meaning are inevitably tightly bound up with what are surely prior questions regarding the nature of language, begging questions again as to whether our thinking about meaning has not in fact generally already been committed to unreflected and so also uncritical presuppositions about what language is, in which meaning occurs. Moreover, the history of philosophy of language as such tends to show the same sharp contrasts that separate the pre-modern and modern periods. Dante on language stands squarely with the ‘porous’ self of Charles Taylor’s analysis of pre-modernity, just as Hegel and Husserl on language stand squarely with the ‘buffered’ self who is so characteristic, in Taylor’s analysis, of the modern world.4 We could characterize the former as ‘non-scientific’ and the latter as ‘scientific’, of course. But since the modern period has been so greatly influenced by Newtonianism, which has been superseded in our own times, we should be cautious of applying such terms of linear history. Progress in science may in fact not itself be so directly linear. It is in Dante that we find the classical pre-modern definition of language, which looks to Thomas Aquinas. For Dante, words are both sensuale and rationale: ‘This signal, then, is the noble foundation that I am discussing; for it is sensible, in that it is a sound, and yet also rational, in that this sound, according to convention, is taken to mean something.’5 This means that language, as a system of oral or visible signs, reproduces that peculiarly human mix that we ourselves are, of matter and mind, materiality and conceptuality. This is very close to our ‘rational animality’, in Thomist terms, and it presupposes a strong, pre-modern account of the Creation. In contrast, the Enlightenment, with Locke and Descartes, as well as Hegel, Husserl and Frege, shows a very different approach. For the rationalists, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia (trans. Steven Botterill; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1.3, 7 (Botterill’s translation of sensuale here as ‘perceptible’ could be judged to pull the word back to cognition rather than participative belonging in the world).

4 5

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material words are assimilated into the mental ideas they represent which take on a ‘substantial’ status. The idealist, Hegel, strongly accented the universal and abstract properties of language, annulling its particularity through analyzing its relation to the ‘here and now’. For Hegel, the speaking or writing by which we refer to what seems to belong to a particular ‘here and now’ effectively always dissolves it into a universality: speaking annuls spatiotemporal actuality by showing that it is effectively already held in the flow of consciousness and only properly exists there.6 Here Hegel was reproducing the scientific method of modernity in the field of the understanding of language, by performing the Idealist option of ‘thinking away’ materiality, grounding the self within the parameters of a ‘scientific’ dualism. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl likewise sets out a non-physicalist account of language on the grounds that language, as the vehicle of meaning, has to be sufficiently abstract and convertible with consciousness to be free of the vagaries of contextual change.7 There is the sense then that the challenge of defining language in the modern period has prompted a ‘heroic’ defence of the primacy of reason on the part of these philosophers. This is certainly the case with Frege and his advocacy of the Begriffschrift, which he describes as the attempt to fulfil the ‘task of philosophy’, which is to ‘break the power of words over the human mind’.8 The new logical code establishes the ‘conceptual content’ of things, freeing thought ‘from the taint of ordinary linguistic means of expression’ and from its dependence on ‘particulars’.9 Of course, there was also a reactive response to this Enlightenment account on the part of the Romantics and ‘Romantic’ philosophers such as Herder and Hamann.10 They were concerned more with the imaginative and emotive capacities of language which they felt were specifically linked with its material form. More recently, thinkers such as Marx and Kristeva drew upon the material nature of the sign, which binds language into the human body in interesting ways, but more generally linguistic ‘physicalism’ has been confined G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§90–110, 58–66. 7 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 (trans. J. N. Findlay; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), Investigation 1, §5, 187. 8 Gottlob Frege, Conceptual Notation and Related Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 104–6. 9 Ibid. 10 On this theme, see Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6



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to the margins of public society, closely linked with religion (and especially Judaism, with its long tradition of linguistic physicalism) and with the arts.11 The question that arises for us here once again is where might we find the source of a genuinely objective understanding of language, in order to bring a properly critical light to bear on what is otherwise repeatedly left at the level of presupposition? Since we ourselves are both body and advanced linguistic consciousness, and since language is itself a performative system (which most of the time involves us seeking to bring the world under our cognitive control through words and the concepts they support), the issue of objectivity becomes quite critical. And in fact, it is evident that the higher levels of objectivity we need here come more naturally from science than the arts. And since the contemporary science of language seems much closer to pre-modern rather than modern thinking on language, we are reminded that the incomplete nature of scientific knowledge can in fact defy the linearity of our cultural history.

The origins of language We shall have to dig deep into the archaeological record itself, in order to explore the origins of our human language. But neo-Darwinism is too blunt an instrument for tracing the refinements of language, and so we shall need also to look to a more nuanced variant in understanding natural selection which is currently influential today. This is the so-called ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ (EES), whose origins lie in the work of Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman.12 Unlike standard neo-Darwinism, EES allows the influence of environment, behaviour and symbolic interactions, as well as epigenetics (a behavioural adaptation of genetic inheritance), within natural selection. EES emphasizes that natural selection acts not directly upon the genes per se (the so-called genotype) but rather upon the phenotype, which is the living animal. See for instance Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 51, and Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (trans. Margaret Waller; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 86–9. 12 F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). See also Kevin N. Laland et al., ‘The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Its Structure, Assumptions and Predictions’, Proc. R. Soc. B., 282: 20151019. 11

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Within specific environments, interactively shaped by particular sets of animal behaviours, certain traits of the animal are favoured through processes of selection, and these have a ‘drag-effect’ upon the underlying genes. Here it is not the genetic code that is primary but the living animal who, through its behaviours within a specific environment, becomes itself integral to the process of natural selection. A central idea for EES therefore is that of the ‘niche’ (the dynamic inhabiting of a specific environment), and so of ‘niche-construction’ (making ourselves ‘at home’ in the world). If the symbolic is part of the behavioural, in the sense that in human society culture shapes behaviour and is passed down across generations, then we have to say that language is a mode of communication which may have profound implications for the symbolic element within our survival as genus Homo. In terms of the contribution of human behaviour within natural selection, we have to point to the hyper-cooperation of our species which has been key to our survival. There is evidence even from the times of our earlier hominin ancestors for altruistic and cooperative behaviour which supported viable, small-scale, hunter-gatherer societies in which there seem to have been high levels of social cohesion and collaboration.13 Here we find remarkably little evidence of social violence. Over almost all our history then, the human ‘niche’ has been profoundly shaped by our positive sociality.14 And it is in our sociality that we can see the first of the key factors in the origins of language. Robin Dunbar has pointed to the way that higher-primate grooming or mutual relating in the interfacial-space lays a foundation for human language, which can be seen as an extension of this practice.15 This aspect of our sociality is very ancient in fact, extending far back into hominin history. Cohesive forms of group behaviour have been essential to our survival throughout the archaeological record. And this is a form of sociality which we extensively share with other higher animals, for instance, who do not have our powers of language.

Michael Tomasello, Why we Cooperate (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2009) and A Natural History of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Agustín Fuentes et al., ‘Niche Construction through Cooperation: A Nonlinear Dynamics Contribution to Modeling Facets of the Evolutionary History in the Genus Homo’, Current Anthropology 51 (2010): 435–44. 15 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 13

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The second factor which is clearly important for language development is that of representation, associated with the production of material symbols in abstract form or clearly representing objects within the environment. Such symbol-making also occurs quite early in our past, perhaps half a million years ago, though it is much more recent than primate grooming. It is not clear that any of the other animals with which we share this planet also express themselves in such representational ways. This development may be indicative of the influence of ancient forms of tool use (such as Oldowan and Acheulian stone tools), dating back over two million years, in which some degree of preparation of the tool is evident (rather than simply deploying a stone as a tool, for instance).16 The third factor is more recent and much more sophisticated manufacturing of stone tools, according to Levallois techniques. Modern experimentation in flint-knapping shows that very precise motor skills are required for the successful preparation of these tools together with skilled judgement about the weight and place of the strike. Hascock has recently argued that the ‘lithic landscapes’ of lower Paleolithic sites some tens of thousands of years ago point to the transmission of a technology which may have been key for language development in genus Homo. The pre-preparation of flint cores, and their transportation to areas without flint resources, points to the ‘amodal’ use of the tools, which can – like words indeed –be carried from one context to another. The pre-preparation also suggests a creature with foresight, and so also arguably some memory and some degree of imagination.17 But there is a fourth factor which also needs to be considered. Evolutionary biologists make a distinction between anatomically and behaviourly modern human beings. Physiology is not always an accurate predictor of behaviour, and the social nature of genus Homo signals that social or indeed cultural factors may well have been key in the development of advanced human language. It is in the townships of the Levant (some 8,000 years ago), following the turn to territorial settlement and agriculture, that we perhaps first see the There is evidence that Acheulian tool making techniques trigger parts of the brain which are associated with speech. See N. T. Uomini and G. F. Meyer, ‘Shared Brain Lateralization Patterns in Language and Acheulean Stone Tool Production: A Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound Study’, Plos One 8 (2013). 17 Peter Hiscock, ‘Learning in Lithic Landscapes: A Reconsideration of the Hominid ‘‘Toolmaking’’ Niche’, Biological Theory 9 (2014): 27–41. 16

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incontrovertible signs that our ancestors were now speaking much as we do. The first representations of the human face belong to this period, as do signs of sophisticated ritual and burial practices, together with expanded populations of some three to four thousand living in close and stable proximity to one another. Evidence from bird species (with whom we share many features of language acquisition) suggest that ‘domestication’ (or ‘self-domestication’ in our case) may have had much to do with the rapid expansion of language, as a result of changed social conditions rather than longer term evolutionary factors.18 Our modern advanced linguistic consciousness may in fact sit within the ‘behavioural’ dimension of niche-construction, and be a very recent adaptation to specific forms of societal change.

Evolution, niche-construction and the challenge of modern human language It is difficult to be precise about when modern human language emerged – sometime between the larger group formations of hunter-gatherer societies in the Upper Paleolithic and the emergence of Neolithic cultures perhaps. But the settlement, territorialization and shared sense of place that agriculture brought does seem to have been key, leading not least to larger settled human populations who nevertheless had to achieve new levels of social cohesion for group survival. It is in the Neolithic too that we begin to see more evidence for the emergence of prosocial religions as an enhanced form of bonding, leading inevitably to tension between different groups, each with their own territory and agricultural investment. It is small wonder perhaps that in the movement from hunter-gatherer societies to Neolithic settlements, the levels of human violence in the archaeological record suddenly soar. Larger settled groups, with more powerfully cohesive symbolic systems and hierarchies, inevitably collided in the Neolithic world. Over a period of a few thousand years, smaller and larger scale empires would begin to emerge in which Kenta Suzuki et al., ‘Decreased Fecal Corticosterone Levels Due to Domestication: A Comparison Between the White-Backed Munia (Lonchura striata) and Its Domesticated Strain, the Bengalese Finch (Lonchura striata var. domestica) With a Suggestion for Complex Song Evolution’, J Exp Zool A Ecol Genet Physiol 317 (2012): 561–70.

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particular languages and particular religions appeared to become locally and regionally dominant. The earliest writing appeared in Mesopotamia, amongst the ancient Sumerians, around 5,000 years ago. In brief summary then evolutionary science suggests that modern human language may have appeared really very late in our human history and may also be very closely linked with early stone technologies. Neuroscience enhances this perspective by drawing our attention to the fact that words, like tools, are in effect material objects, or ‘potent real-world structures’ which ‘press minds like ours from the biological flux’.19 Andy Clark likens words to our contemporary adaptations of robotics, in that the human brain recruits material elements from the environment in order to greatly increase its own computational power. Words, from this perspective, are powerful descriptive tools for managing and ordering a complex world, on the one hand, and are likewise powerful social tools for bonding with other human beings on the other. But advanced human language also serves to establish and hierarchalize our social identities, leading to a strong sense of who is ‘inside’ our group and who is ‘outside’ it, and so potentially leading also to conflict between and within groups. Neuroscience adds very interesting insights on the possible dating of language to those of evolutionary biology in that the primary structure of interfacial human bonding (or ‘rapport’), appears to be rooted in our ancient motor system and so is not constituted by language. Rather, language appears to be a mechanism by which we can choose either to enhance our ancient power of social bonding or to suppress it. In this way, language arises precisely from intimate and long-term contact between our ancestors, seemingly living and surviving in close, socially cohesive, grooming groups, but the ability to deny another person’s humanity also has to be considered, for Vittorio Gallese, which is ‘probably one of the worst spin-offs of language’.20 From the perspective of ‘niche-construction’ therefore, which is the evolutionary account of how we have successfully made our home in many different environments, the role of language starts to take on a new importance. In genus Homo, the symbolic – and so also language – are intrinsic to the Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56, 60. ‘The Urge to Dehumanise Others is itself all’, New Scientist too-human, 211 (1952) (2014): 3.

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interactive behavioural dimensions which also belong to the process we think of as natural selection. In some ways, language has massively enhanced our capacities to manage and shape the world, and to create new levels of social cohesion or at least collaboration. But from another perspective, the great gulfs that divide one culture or continent from another, and which include different ways of apprehending the world in which we live, and different encodings of values, leave us very vulnerable to splintering as a species and to turning against each other. One thing that the evolutionary argument clearly suggests is how relatively recent the emergence of our advanced human linguistic consciousness is likely to have been, and so also how relatively unstable. Indeed, it may itself be the product of the social revolution of the Neolithic settlements and may also be slipping from our control on account of another social revolution that is upon us: globalization and the global city. And perhaps it is inevitable that a recent powerful ‘add-on’ such as advanced modern language, with strong links to ‘lithic’ technological production, should arguably mask the deep problems that we have as a species with managing our industrial and military technologies in ways that make sense on our shrinking planet.

Towards a theological synthesis And so what does this tell us about the ‘Word made flesh’, and more specifically about the words which constitute the text of Scripture? This brings us now to a theological reflection on what language is, or becomes, in Scripture, which presupposes of course a prior ‘naturalist’ account of what language is. As we have seen, such a naturalist account deploys the scientific argument that words are first and foremost material forms (sounds and then textual shapes) which have become internalized within the brain, the manner of which closely approximates to the ways in which we have also internalized our environment in the development of tool-use. A key function of language then is that it allows us to shape and organize the world around us, just as it also allows us to access and indeed to enhance the ancient, pre-linguistic sociality of our motor-based ‘rapport’ system, by which we bond viscerally with another or others. The materiality of words (highlighted by contemporary



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science), which mind nevertheless ‘inhabits’ in and through the communication of meaning, places our advanced modern language capacity within the field of human niche-construction. It is also through language that we make our home in the world, as a species. But language too is itself the result of niche-construction, just as tools are. In each case we have entered into the environment in new ways to gain power over the environment. In the case of language, of course, one key way in which this has happened is that language allows us to have greater control over our ‘social embodiment’, which is to say the ‘rapport’ that is embedded in our ancient motor system of human bonding. Our advanced language skills (in which it is always presupposed that we can choose whether or not to speak, and can choose what to say), allow us to suppress our ‘social embodiment’ or to enhance it, in the construction of stronger and more cohesive community. But language is such a powerful social tool that it can turn our innate sociality into the ground of violence by constructing a human other who must be instrumentalized or even destroyed, in favour of our own ‘insider’ group. In our capacity for language, recently evolved, we have indeed experienced a kind of ‘fall’. This is a fall from the primacy of an inclusive, species-wide sociality which we share with other higher primates, to one which is in a sense ‘turbo-charged’ but which can also define our social identity through constructing a human other who is defined as a threat to be overcome. Advanced human language controls, hierarchalizes and instrumentalizes, on the one hand, while also being the extension and intensification of the innate, pre-linguistic, ‘rapport’ system by which we bond so strongly with others, on the other. What does such a ‘fall’ mean then in terms of the outline of a theological synthesis of evolution, language and the biblical text that we are presenting here? Three sets of New Testament texts appear to offer insights into a theology of human niche-construction, centred upon language, both as the result of a process of niche-construction and as a vital tool for the continuation of that niche-construction, or making a viable place for ourselves in the world of today. The first finds its focus in the account of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2.32-3: ‘Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear’), while the second is the Eucharistic text recorded in 1 Corinthians 11.23-6 (‘This is my body that is

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for you […] This cup is the new covenant in my blood […])’), and the third is St Paul’s attestation that the community at Corinth ‘are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God’ (2 Cor. 3.3).21 In all three cases we are concerned with the living embodiment of Christ and his relation to language. The placing of the human body of Jesus in heaven – which is to say the traditional doctrines of the ascension of Christ, leading to his heavenly session or exaltation – is itself a Christian recognition of the possibility that we can be ‘at home’ cosmically, throughout the universe as a whole. Jesus’ entry into heaven makes concrete new possibilities for our embodied existence. In its own times, the ascension is a powerful doctrinal tool for imagining our ultimate at-homeness and survival in the universe, through the new life of the incarnation. Even though we have lost this particular coding, we need to hold to the principle of our creatureliness as ultimate belonging in God’s creation. But in the case of our pericope from Acts, something else is in play here. Jesus now connects directly with us through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the early Church, from his new heavenly body, at the moment of Pentecost. This is a transformative point in the formation of the Church, especially as prophetic community within which there is both linguistic or cultural diversity and unity. As Daniela Augustine has pointed out, Pentecost represents the overcoming of the tower of Babel with its linguistic separation and isolation.22 We can see this too as the social re-integration during the early Neolithic of the new Levantine township settlements, with their imperialist ambitions. Daniela Augustine suggests in fact that it is the Holy Spirit who ‘unfolds the cycles of history into a salvific progression towards the eschatological horizon where this world stands transfigured into the Kingdom’.23 In this way, ‘the global village’ becomes transfigured as ‘the city of God’.24 In the second set of – Eucharistic – texts, we are considering the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper which at their point of origin preceded Pentecost. The Church’s celebration of the Eucharist follows Pentecost however and looks indeed for its theological foundation as sacrament to the exalted All biblical quotations are from the NRSV. Daniela C. Augustine, Pentecost, Hospitality and Transfiguration. Towards a Spirit-Inspired Vision of Social Transformation (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2012), 30–4. 23 Augustine, Pentecost, Hospitality and Transfiguration, 2. 24 Ibid., 14. 21 22



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Christ in heaven. When we consider these words against the background of niche-construction and our human history, they can be read as showing the point of Jesus’ own explicit translation of his bodily self-offering, or sacrifice, into its cultural and verbal expressions. If we know today that our fundamental, embodied, social engagement with the other is pre-linguistic, and that our more recently evolved linguistic consciousness can restrict or militate against its natural species-wide inclusivity, then in the words uttered at the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus specifically brings human culture and language back into their putative origins in the sociality of our ancient, hominin, pre-linguistic self-offering. Indeed, the Eucharist itself becomes for the Church the performance of that fundamental unity of mind and body which a ‘thick’, niche-centred, scientific account of language supports. In Jesus’ words spoken here (which we may think were uttered under the influence of the Holy Spirit and in anticipation of the pouring forth of the Spirit at Pentecost), the disjunction between the controlling power of our recently evolved language and our species-wide embodied inclusivity, is overcome in a way in which we too, through the Spirit and through the Eucharistic re-presentation of Jesus’ living sacrifice, are able to share. Thirdly, St Paul’s words, written in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (‘you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God’) appear to restate this strong link between words, embodiment and self-sacrificial action, specifically from the perspective of the Holy Spirit.25 It is as if the Holy Spirit can transform our words into an intense, communicative manifestation of our bodily presence. This occurs precisely where our words are used in ways that enhance our body’s deep, pre-linguistic sociality. Under the guidance of the Spirit, words can efficaciously and transformatively speak our body’s life, as openly inclusive social bonding. It appears however that this is not something which we can do by our own power; for it is only by the Spirit’s indwelling, transforming power, as the Spirit was ‘poured forth’ from the living body of Jesus, entering into and circulating among his body the Church, that our advanced linguistic consciousness and our ancient social embodiment can become one. Oliver Davies, ‘Spirit, Body and Letter’ in Paul Fiddes and Günter Bader (eds), The Spirit and the Letter: A Christian Tradition and its Late Modern Reversal (London: T&T Clark Continuum, 2013), 179–94.

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Niche-construction theory creates a space within the human story then which can tell us new things about ourselves, according to our own truth as a late developing hominin life-form: sole surviving hominin species in the modern age. But it creates a space too for the role of the imagination in ‘seeing’ ourselves at home in this universe. Though here the implication is that our at-homeness in the universe will require just that universal energy which has been released through trinitarian, incarnational revelation, communicated in the inspired words of Scripture and the Christian kerygma. It is this spiritual power that can enter our human language, in all its particularity and separateness, drawing forth from within it the deep, inclusive sociality of the ancient history of the human body; in ways that unite and redeem.

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Scripture used implicitly within public bioethics Robin Gill

In this chapter1 I look at the pivotal role that Scripture has contributed to my work in public bioethics. As I will explain in the final section, Scripture has fascinated me since early childhood and a critical appreciation of Scripture has been a force for personal liberation from my late teens onwards. However it was not until I published Health Care and Christian Ethics a decade ago that I articulated in detail how Scripture can relate specifically to public bioethics. There I sought to address the question: what was I as a theologian supposed to contribute to public committees concerned with bioethics? More specifically, what was I as typically the only theologian on such committees supposed to contribute that was different from, but still intelligible to, philosophers, social scientists, lawyers and, of course, doctors and medical scientists? In framing the question in this way I was inevitably addressing different audiences: fellow theologians for whom Scripture is crucial; academics and practitioners (some secular, some religious) engaged in public ethics; and perhaps even academics concerned to evaluate competing truth claims in meta-ethics. In seeking a solution I started with my fellow theologians (the first of these audiences) by making a distinction – actually it was an ‘ideal type’ – between theological purists and theological realists.2 I argued that theological purity is an approach that seeks to derive doctrine and moral precepts exclusively from Scripture or other sacred texts and then to regard them as being in An earlier version of the first part of this chapter appeared as ‘Faith and Truth in Public Ethics’, Theology 117/5 (2014): 334–41. Reprinted by Permission of Sage Publications Ltd. R. Gill, Health Care and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41–4.

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radical conflict with the secular world. In contrast theological realism sees continuities between theological and secular thought and is sceptical about the capacity of Scripture or any other ancient text to deliver unambiguous, specific and self-sufficient moral precepts appropriate for the modern world. The first of these positions tends to see a sharp contrast between the faithful and the secular world. It presupposes that the world at large is fundamentally secular, and that Christians (and similarly Jewish or Muslim purists) should look exclusively to their sacred texts (whether scriptural or Patristic) to shape their moral beliefs and actions. The second, in contrast, does not make such a clear distinction between the faithful and the ‘secular’ world, tends to see the latter as more pluralist than secularist, and tends to regard sacred texts as crucial, but not as sufficient, resources for moral belief and action today. Although I personally inclined towards theological realism I could see obvious strengths and weaknesses in both positions. Theological purists have a tendency to claim too much and to fuel so-called ‘culture wars’. It is after all unlikely that Scripture or other sacred texts will be able to deliver convincing verdicts on the perplexing array of moral dilemmas posed by late modernity, especially those dilemmas created by advances in recent genetic science or medicine. That is perhaps why theological purists often appear so anachronistic and divisive to the second audience, namely the public forum of a late-modern, pluralistic society. In contrast, theological realists may appeal more to this second audience, but have a tendency towards redundancy. By conceding too much to secular argument within this audience theological realists run the risk of losing their Christian identity altogether. As Robin Lovin, our most significant living defender of theological realism concedes, such theology ‘is reduced to saying what everyone already believes’ and, as a result, its inadequacy ‘becomes more apparent over time, as beliefs change and what inspires one generation loses credibility with the next’.3 If theological purity is prone to hyperbole, public irrelevance and divisive other-worldliness, theological realism is prone to evaporation and overaccommodating this-worldliness. The position that I finally adopted in Health Care and Christian Ethics leant heavily towards theological realism but also sought to learn from the Robin Lovin, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr in Contemporary Scholarship’, Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 489–505 (499).

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scriptural approach of theological purity (to which I will return at the end of this essay), looking at length at Synoptic healing stories to identify the virtues that appeared to be most characteristic of Jesus’ ministry – namely compassion, care, faith/trust and humility. I argued that: [T]heological considerations can bring critical depth and parameters, as well as moral motivation, to Health Care Ethics and even to genetic issues. However moral discernment in the complex and fast changing world of genetic science (and, indeed, innovations in health care more widely) is possible only if theologians are prepared to listen carefully to their colleagues in science and moral philosophy. On complex ethical issues arising from genetic and medical science neither theology nor church bodies have privileged access to moral discernment.4

Using these four virtues of compassion, care, faith/trust and humility (within the second audience) – albeit without making explicit their scriptural underpinning – I have been happy to make alliances with other faith traditions (including non-theistic religious and humanist traditions) that deploy some or all of these virtues. Some theological purists in the first audience may regard this move as faithless. In contrast I regard it as being true to the Synoptic Jesus who lavished especial, but characteristically unexplained, praise upon individuals outside his own faith tradition (Mk 7.29; Mt. 8.10 and 15.28; Lk 7.9) and, more dangerously, even upon individuals regarded as ‘heretics’ by his faith tradition (Lk 10.33 and 17.16). In the context of, say, the global disaster of AIDS I have argued that it is imperative that we make such alliances for the common good, despite deriving these virtues from radically different meta-ethical frameworks. Even simply among Christians I have been only too conscious that meta-ethical frameworks differ radically. However, I was prepared to be as elusive as my mentors Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor about the meta-ethical status of virtues (in particular about how far either of them is finally committed to natural law theory), while not being wholly convinced by the theological underpinning of the otherwise excellent work of John Hare. Lisa Cahill’s recent book Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics5 expresses well the Gill, Health Care and Christian Ethics, 57. Lisa Sowle Cahill, Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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sort of not wholly resolved meta-ethical tensions that I have long felt. Perhaps this is as far as a theologian engaged in public ethics can go.

Recent developments in meta-ethics Two recent books however have persuaded me not to stop here: Mark C. Murphy’s God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality6 and C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligation.7 Stephen Evans, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University, is well known for his work on Kierkegaard and divine command ethics. He writes to great effect in pellucid prose and is admirably fair to others even when he disagrees with them. In this new book he seeks to argue that divine command ethics based upon Scripture need not be seen as a mutually exclusive rival to either natural law or virtue ethics, but as an approach to Christian ethics that is both enhanced by and, in turn, enhances both of them. Read alongside Mark Murphy’s God and Moral Law, to which he responds at length, I believe that a combination of Evans and Murphy – the first from an evangelical background and the second from a more Catholic background – offers a real breakthrough in meta-ethics. Separately and together they offer different ways that Christian ethics might still be able to make a serious contribution in the public forum, my second audience, and Evans in particular has also some effective points to make to my third audience. Both divine command ethics and natural law ethics have, for different reasons, struggled to be taken seriously in pluralistic societies. If the whole of ethics is finally based only upon God’s commands known through Scripture (Christian, Jewish or Muslim), then it is likely to appeal most to those who are already religious committed. Exponents often claim that divine command ethics offers a distinctively robust and theological account of moral issues. Yet many Christians from Augustine onwards and many modern Jews have been troubled by some of the seemingly immoral, or at the very least capricious, commands given by God in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (and perhaps Mark C. Murphy, God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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modern Muslims about some commands in the Qur’an). Natural law ethics, in contrast, does allow that religious and nonreligious people alike have access through reason or intuition to moral laws. But critics have long noted that natural law theorists by no means all agree with each other, that social perceptions of morality vary considerably across societies, and that even the great Aquinas concluded that men were naturally superior in intellect to women, and women to slaves, and that animals, having little or no intellect, exist simply to serve humans. Many non-theistic ethicists are also sceptical about deriving normative judgements from nature in any form. Intriguingly, Mark Murphy argues in his short but complex book that, despite previously defending a critical use of natural law, there is a viable third approach that can go beyond the weaknesses of natural law and divine command. He develops this from recent theological discussions about God’s relationship to the physical world, especially those that argue that (beyond classical deism and theism) human beings can, in some sense, be co-creators with God. He terms this third approach ‘moral concurrentism’. Physical concurrentism assumes that ‘God and creature are complementary causes … God contributes general, undifferentiated power, while the creaturely agent contributes the specific way that this power will affect other objects; together, these constitute the causing of [a] unified effect … [a] joint action’.8 Moral concurrentism, similarly, assumes that ‘moral necessitation, and thus moral law, is immediately explained both by God and by creaturely natures … they somehow jointly morally necessitate’.9 This concept of ‘moral concurrentism’ is, I believe, his most useful contribution to public ethics. So far so good. There is not space here to pursue the particular path that Mark Murphy outlines suggesting how this co-relationship between God and human beings might work, not least because he elaborates this path within a detailed point-by-point discussion of Robert Adams’ work. In any case Murphy admits that other ways are possible, although he does not elaborate them. The general point that he makes is interesting, namely, that there may be a path somewhere between the modified natural law approach of Christian ethicists such as Lisa Cahill and Stephen Pope and the more inclusive forms

Murphy, God and Moral Law, 145. Ibid., 148.

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of divine command ethics such as Alan Verhey. There is some affinity here with those theologians who have attempted to use various forms of philosophical compatibilism to ‘explain’ how human free-will and an omniscient/ omnipotent God can be held together. My hunch is that such tactics do not actually ‘explain’, but they do serve to reduce theological dissonance. That in itself is worthwhile. However, Mark Murphy’s argument is more adventurous than this. He seeks no less than to give an account of moral norms from God’s perspective. He wishes to establish an explanation of morality derived directly from a belief in an absolutely perfect being. Such an explanation, he argues must be ‘explanans-driven’ not simply ‘explanandum-driven’. If the latter typically looks for gaps in secular ethics that might be better explained by theistic arguments (my third audience), the former focuses only upon God and attempts to see how morality appears from God’s perspective. He recognizes that explanandum-driven arguments are more obviously useful for apologetics than explanans-driven arguments. But apologetics, he insists, is not his task. He simply assumes the existence of an absolutely perfect being and wishes to establish the ethical implications of such a being. This is a bold philosophical move, but one that as a theologian I found less than persuasive. It quickly moves him into claims about what an absolutely perfect being can or cannot be. I found little acknowledgement here of the analogical nature of theistic language and, thus, of the limits of human concepts applied to God. Stephen Evans is also not entirely convinced by Murphy’s solution, although he welcomes his more inclusive approach (as I do). Instead, starting from divine commands, Evans argues that they are more relevant to moral obligation than to the specific contents of morality – a point that actually has obvious affinities with Murphy’s concept of ‘moral concurrentism’. For Evans, moral obligations seen properly are objective, provide compelling reasons for moral action and moral duty, and help us to understand the universality of morality. Given this he argues that divine commands are not capricious but already presuppose a concept of the ‘good’. To understand the latter natural law theory is particularly helpful. Altruism might suggest an example here. A degree of altruism and cooperation may well be ‘natural’ for otherwise self-centred human beings – as many



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sociobiologists, and the occasional theologian, have argued.10 Yet, to become intentional, let alone morally obligatory, for individuals, divine command – especially the second Dominical Command – gives an authoritative spur, for my first audience, beyond the thin accounts of altruism typically offered by sociobiologists.11 Likewise altruistic virtues nourished within faith communities help to shape the characters of those who feel altruism to be ‘natural’ but know it to be obligatory from their divinely inspired (albeit fallible) consciences. In summary Evans argues: a divine command theory is far from constituting a complete theory. It rests on a framework of normative truths, including an account of the good, such as the natural law theory provides, and it needs an account of the virtues as well. These kinds of ethical theories not only answer different questions than does a divine command theory. They also provide a context which transforms our understanding of moral obligations themselves.’12

Evans’ God and Moral Obligation is a very challenging, well-argued and interesting book. Read together with Murphy’s book it opens up fresh paths for ecumenical dialogue and wider engagement in public ethics (my second audience) and perhaps for public debate about meta-ethics (my third audience). Even if determined secularists remain unconvinced, they might at least be encouraged to pay more attention to moral obligation. The Christian philosopher John Hare identifies this as ‘the moral gap’.13 In contrast, responding to Peter Singer’s atheism, he argues interestingly as follows: My suggestion is that by thinking of ourselves as following a God who sustains the moral order of the world, we gain resources for actually living in a way that fits that order. By taking theism out of the picture, we lose those resources, and the attempt to live that way becomes unstable in a way it was not before.14 For example, Stephen J. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11 See Pope, Human Evolution, 221–7 and Roger Scruton, The Face of God (London: Continuum, 2012), 26–30, 67–8 and his The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 55–7. 12 Evans, God and Moral Obligation, 87. 13 John Hare, The Moral Gap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 14 John Hare, ‘Morality, Happiness, and Peter Singer’, in John Perry (ed.), God, the Good, and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 93–103 (103). 10

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It is good to see a Christian philosopher addressing this moral gap so energetically in the interests of faith and truth. In Health Care and Christian Ethics I argued that the bioethicist Jonathan Glover,15 perhaps unwittingly, provides a striking example of the moral gap in his monumental book Humanity. He describes in great detail some of the major ‘atrocities’ of the twentieth century, noting that ironically at ‘the start of the century there was an optimism, coming from the Enlightenment, that the spread of a humane and scientific outlook would lead to the fading away, not only of war, but also of other forms of cruelty and barbarism’.16 He also acknowledges that ‘the evils of religious intolerance, religious persecution and religious wars are well known, but it is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have also come from principled religious commitment … The decline of this moral commitment would be a huge loss.’17 Yet his own secular grounds for moral obligation are surprisingly thin: As authority-based morality retreats, it can be replaced by a morality which is deliberately created. The best hope is to work with the grain of human nature, making use of the resources of moral identity and the human responses.18

In his influential book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Harvard psychologist, Stephen Pinker, makes only very limited use of Glover’s book and clearly does not share either his despondency about the effectiveness of ‘the spread of a humane and scientific outlook’ following the Enlightenment, or his wistful admiration of principled religious commitment. On the contrary, Pinker uses a mass of longitudinal data to argue that homicide rates have declined radically over the last 500 years (once compared as a percentage of contemporary populations), as have barbarous forms of punishment and torture. Further he argues that ‘the most destructive eruptions of the past half millennium were fueled … by ideologies, such as religion, revolution, nationalism, fascism, and communism’.19 Using a mixture of prudential arguments Hare, Health Care and Christian Ethics, 99–101. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 6. 17 Glover, Humanity, 405. 18 Ibid., 409. 19 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York and London: Viking and Penguin, 2011), 815. 15 16



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drawn from sociobiology, games theory and the Golden Rule (all interpreted by him as avoiding ideology) he concludes that: Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can only pursue selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force. And the data we have seen in this book show that it is a goal on which progress can be made – progress that is halting and incomplete, but unmistakable nonetheless.20

The moral passion (and caricature) is obvious here – and indeed in the rest of this long book – but is never quite explained or even acknowledged. Somehow he seems to derive normative judgements from statistical and prudential considerations. Now just suppose that every ‘fellow thinker’ agrees with his mass of comparative statistics (which is unlikely, especially when deciding, say, the comparative moral weight that the Holocaust should be given compared with the Inquisition) and with his mixture of prudential arguments (which is also unlikely given tensions in and between them), why should all share his moral passion, his normative judgements and his strong sense of moral obligation? In common with Stephen Evans I would argue that ‘some framework of normative truth’ – shaped by, but not wholly constructed by, particular social contexts and determinants – is essential for an adequate account of moral obligation. For me, working explicitly as a theologian, it is a concept of grace that most adequately depicts endemic human weakness/sinfulness, grounding moral behaviour finally in divine rather than human assistance. Using elements from both Murphy and Evans a broad meta-ethical map for Christian ethics in the public domain of bioethics might look as follows. Pinker, The Better Angels, 840.

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It would start for me (within the first audience) from the four virtues gleaned from the Synoptic healing stories, namely compassion, care, faith and humility. However it would quickly note (moving to the second audience) that there is a natural law basis – reinforced by the slow process of evolution – for at least elements of the first three of these virtues. It is natural for humans to feel compassion for, care for and trust members of their own family and companions. Indeed, parents who do not care for their own children are properly regarded as ‘unnatural’. Mammals – or at least female mammals – naturally succor and care for their young and many also show respect for patriarchs and matriarchs. However, using Murphy’s concept of ‘moral concurrentism’, nature is not simply to be adopted as it is. It does seem to be ‘natural’ for some dominant males to kill offspring which are not their own. Human step-fathers are also more inclined than biological fathers to abuse or even kill their adopted children. As a result of deeply embedded virtues (surely with religious roots) we now regard such human behaviour as deeply ‘unnatural’. Following Evans we have imbibed divine commands to love and do good beyond our families and companions and, in turn, these commands have shaped our moral intuitions and consciences. Almost any list of inter­ national ‘rights’ contains an interesting mixture of things that we can know from natural law and things that have also been shaped by religious virtues. As a result people of faith can properly make common cause with secular people who are committed to these rights or virtues. For people of faith (moving now to the third audience) their faith gives them an added sense of moral obligation, especially when it is reinforced by communities of faith and a sense of grace, but it does not give them a monopoly of moral sensitivity or wisdom. And, if they think that it does give them such a monopoly, then they have surely forgotten the fourth Synoptic virtue, namely humility.

Critical issues in my use of Scripture Having given this, doubtless fallible, account of my evolving role as a theologian in public bioethics, I need to address more explicitly the central question of this book – what place Scripture? All of the contributors have been encouraged to be (embarrassingly) autobiographical both in terms of method and context.



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My parents said that at the age of five I announced that when I grew up I wanted to be a country vicar like my beloved maternal grandfather (just as he had similarly followed his father). Once they discovered this childish (albeit life-long) aspiration they always encouraged me, even though they only went to church themselves when visiting my grandfather. At the age of nine I realized that I needed to do more than say private prayers and read Bible stories. I wanted to go to church regularly as well. So I joined the choir of my local Anglican church. I also began to read the Bible (King James version) from cover to cover. By the age of thirteen I had completed this task twice. I was both enthralled and appalled by this experience – noting wonderfully lyrical chapters like Job 28 but also what I regarded as obvious contradictions between, say, Kings and Chronicles, as well as moral abominations such as that depicted in 2 Kings 2.23-24. The discovery of biblical criticism in my mid-teens was a personal liberation – it enabled me to contextualize my jejune reading of Scripture. My school used ‘religious education’ solely for moral edification and not for academic purposes. So I had to wait until university to explore biblical studies more rigorously. There I opted to do New Testament honours and was liberated once more by the dedicated and inspired teaching of Christopher (C. F.) Evans and Morna Hooker. We spent a whole term with them in a small seminar group studying Philippians 2.1-11 and three times a term we also spent an entire morning or afternoon in private tutorials with Christopher Evans. I am sure that we were partly responsible for the long publishing delay of his tour-de-force Saint Luke.21 Today I never preach on Luke without first studying this magnificent commentary. For me it as essential as W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison’s Matthew is for preaching on that Gospel.22 Both are classic works of the sort of detailed exegesis that seems to me to be an essential prerequisite for responsible biblical interpretation and application. A love of the Synoptic Gospels continued in my PhD. There I attempted to bring together biblical studies’ accounts of ‘Kingdom of God’ sayings with philosophical and systematic theology studies of Christological C. F. Evans, Saint Luke (Trinity Press International Commentaries; London and Philadelphia: SCM and Trinity Press International, 1990). 22 W. D. Davies and Dale C. Alison, Matthew (International Critical Commentary, 3 vols, London and New York: T&T Clark, 1988). 21

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language. I summarized some of its conclusions in a small and long-forgotten paperback, Faith in Christ,23 and acknowledged the obvious limitations of my youthful PhD in my recent Theology in a Social Context: Sociological Theology Volume 1.24 It is this same love of the Synoptic Gospels that informs my Health Care and Christian Ethics. Searching for a secure basis for a theological understanding of health care I was drawn naturally to the Synoptic healing stories. In preparation for this I devoted the whole of a six-month sabbatical to a detailed analysis of the parallel Greek texts of these stories. Now, of course, all of this may strike readers as puzzling and idiosyncratic. However I find myself equally bemused by colleagues who believe that St Paul (or Karl Barth) is the most secure theological basis for bioethics. Indeed one of the striking findings in my A Textbook of Christian Ethics25 is that in the classical and modern texts selected for this book references to verses in the Synoptic Gospels take up less than a sixth of the index of biblical references while Pauline references take up about a quarter. In contrast it is within the Synoptic Gospels that I find myself closest to, and most challenged by, Jesus and it is within stories of Jesus reaching out to those pleading for care and healing that I most clearly see faith in practice. More specifically, it is within stories of Jesus touching and being touched by desperate people who were ritually unclean (such as the man living with leprosy) that I and others have derived injunctions, reported in my edited book Reflecting Theologically on AIDS,26 about how we should respond to those living with AIDS today. This last example gives one response to the question – with whom do you read Scripture? In December 2003 UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS, supported a workshop of Christian theologians at Windhoek, Namibia. We were encouraged to produce a framework for theological reflection addressing the growing challenge of AIDS. UNAIDS was of course fully aware both of rates of HIV inflection that had been increasing dramatically in many countries around the word, and in particular those in Sub-Saharan Africa, and of the devastation caused by AIDS disease especially among the poor. UNAIDS emphatically did not need academic Robin Gill, Faith in Christ: Christian Claims in a Changing World (Oxford: Mowbray, 1978). Robin Gill, Theology in a Social Context: Sociological Theology, Vol. 1 (2 vols; Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1. 25 Robin Gill (ed.), A Textbook of Christian Ethics (London: T&T Clark, 4th edn, 2014). 26 Robin Gill (ed.), Reflecting Theologically on AIDS (London: SCM, 2007). 23 24



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theologians to do epidemiology. What UNAIDS wanted was theological reflection, including careful reflection upon Scripture, explicitly stating that it ‘recognizes and values the efforts carried out by religious groups in care and treatment of people living with HIV infection and AIDS’.27 With the support and endorsement of UNAIDS Reflecting Theologically on AIDS emerged from this workshop. One of the more remarkable features of the workshop was that about half of the sixty-two theologians present were Catholics and half were not. It soon became obvious that in practical terms the Catholic church, principally through the work of Caritas Internationalis, had responded to the challenge of AIDS more energetically than most other Christian bodies. Reading Scripture together was an essential part of the workshop and of reaching the conclusion that there does need to be wider and deeper theological reflection about the challenge of AIDS today. Critical biblical scholarship is sometimes thought to impede faith and faithful practice. Perhaps it can. However my experience has been quite the reverse. Such scholarship first liberated me from a naïve reading of the Bible from cover to cover. Then it forced me to study biblical texts in prolonged and extensive detail. And finally it has helped me to deepen an understanding of applied theology in bioethics. I would not expect my secular colleagues to understand any of this. It is too context-specific usefully to be made explicit to them. But it has allowed me to engage with other Christians, notably on AIDS, who have been shaped by very different traditions and approaches to Scripture. In the context of the Namibia workshop Scripture was used explicitly. This was, after all, a workshop of theologians who had no difficulty relating the Synoptic healing stories to the pastoral situation of those living with AIDS today. Just as Jesus related to the vulnerable with compassion, care, faith and humility, so Christians in turn should do so with those living with AIDS. However UNAIDS itself is a secular body – a branch of the United Nations – serving people of many different faiths and those claiming to have ‘none’. For the work of UNAIDS to be effective it cannot be framed solely or perhaps at all in the terms of any one faith. Within that wider context, as in my other work

UNAIDS, A Report of a Theological Workshop Focusing on HIV and AIDS-related Stigma, February 2005, 2. Available online http://www.unaids.org

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in public bioethics, the virtues of compassion, care, faith/trust and humility are still relevant and significant, but an explicit connection with Scripture would, I believe, be less than helpful. Hence the title of my chapter. One final point about context and method: my mentor Christopher Evans belonged to that generation of academic theologians who were also ordained and active in their local churches. By the time that I became a professor that connection had been much reduced. There is, I believe, a loss involved in this. He (and I) faced a weekly challenge of trying to relate Scripture studied critically in the academy with Scripture heard and preached in local churches. For us Scripture was a feature of both the academy and worship. He always insisted that the same ideas could be communicated in both contexts albeit using different styles and language. Congregations did not need to be protected from critical thought nor did universities need to bypass theological thought. In other words he treated congregations as adults and, not least in wearing his clerical collar in the university, he did not pretend to be a purely secular academic. In my own career I have tried to follow him and generations of ordained theologians before him. In my case this also included an abiding commitment to parish-based, albeit non-stipendiary, ministry. For many years I combined my full-time university career with being priest-in-charge of a succession of rural Anglican parishes. Within an Anglican liturgy committed to a lectionary this inevitably has involved me in an ongoing engagement with readings from Scripture that I have not selected myself. More recently helping at Gibraltar Cathedral brings daily engagement, together with my colleagues, with scriptural readings – some more edifying than others – but all enhanced by following the Greek text of the Septuagint and New Testament. In this way fresh connections are made, crucial terms such as compassion, faith and righteousness are tracked across texts, and new links between the Old and New Testaments are seen. For me Scripture remains fascinating, engaging, frustrating, uncomfortable and demanding. It engages the heart, the brain and the soul. And, however long one lives with Scripture, there is always something fresh to discover. As an applied theologian engaged in public bioethics Scripture, rather than any church ‘teaching’ or report, is the bedrock resource, and biblical criticism, far from undermining it, helps to contextualize and deepen this resource.

5

Learning to live within a tradition Timothy Gorringe

Reading theology at university I learned the biblical languages and above all the historical-critical method but the broader question of how to understand Scripture, and hermeneutical questions, were not touched on. The same went for seminary, where there was no discussion of what we were supposed to be doing when we were preaching. Putting the question to fellow clergy after ordination the answer seemed to be that preaching was a matter of trying to encourage people to live a useful life, using the Bible as a peg to hang exhortation on. As a response to perplexity I started working through the Church Dogmatics and in my first curacy worked on the first two volumes (I/1 and I/2) closely. Here I encountered Barth’s account of the threefold form of the Word, with his Reformation account of Scripture speaking like a king through the mouth of his Herald, and of the authority of the Word and freedom under the Word. This account was Barth’s developed response to the cultural captivity of the Church which made it so completely incapable of critique during World War I. At the heart of it is the idea that the Church never possesses Scripture, but is always judged by it, that it has to go back to it again and again. According to Barth it is Scripture that prevents the church simply talking to itself. ‘Apart from the undeniable vitality of the Church itself there stands confronting it a concrete authority with its own vitality, an authority whose pronouncement is not the Church’s dialogue with itself but an address to the Church, and which can have vis à vis the Church the position of a free power and therefore of a criterion.’1 This authority is Scripture. It Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975; 2nd edn), 106.

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is partly the written character of Scripture that accounts for this, but what distinguishes it from all other written texts is its self-evidential power. ‘It is the Canon because it imposed itself upon the Church as such and continually does so.’2 If we thought we could say why this is so, we should be ‘acting as if we had in our hands a measure by which we could measure the Bible and on this basis assign it its distinctive position. Our ultimate and decisive wisdom would then be once again the wisdom of a self dialogue about the Bible.’3 All that we can say is that the Word of God becomes knowable by making itself known. We cannot go a single step beyond this.4 In fact Barth does go beyond this, because Scripture is ultimately important for him because it witnesses to Jesus of Nazareth, and in particular the resurrection. ‘Revelation’ is the living person of Jesus of Nazareth, and Scripture only witnesses to that. The concept of witness is crucial. Even this witness cannot be compelled. Barth famously appeals to the image of the pool of Bethesda: only when the angel stirs the waters is there revelation.5 We cannot defend the position of Scripture as a witness to revelation with rational arguments, or arguments not derived from Scripture. But how are we to understand the claim that the whole of Scripture attests to that revelation? What does the claim that God ‘spoke’ to Moses or the prophets mean, and what sense are we to make of all the difficult passages – stoning adulterers, committing genocide, etc.? Barth appears to pre-empt discussion: ‘When the Bible has spoken as a witness to divine revelation, and when it has been recognized and acknowledged as such, we are forced into this position; we have our work cut out to do what we have to do in this position … we are neither able to find reasons nor justifications for our attitude.’6 Scripture has ‘self attesting credibility’.7 This sounds like a rather petulant refusal to engage in rational discussion but in fact Barth argues for free exegesis and a free Bible – a very MacIntyrean idea- a point to which I will return.8 It was only after I had worked through the Dogmatics that I finally read Barth’s second Romans. In the preface Barth locked horns with historical

Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 107. Ibid. Ibid., 246. 5 Ibid., 111. 6 Ibid., 461 7 Ibid., 539 8 Ibid., 106. 2 3 4



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criticism in a way which made complete sense of my university studies of theology. When he turned to the standard commentaries of Jülicher or Lietzmann, he wrote, people for whom he had the utmost respect, he found that they contained ‘no more than a reconstruction of the text, a rendering of the Greek words and phrases by their precise equivalents, a number of additional notes in which archaeological and philological material is gathered together, and a more or less plausible arrangement of the subject matter’.9 By contrast, Barth said that the question of the nature of interpretation was ‘the supreme question’ because the New Testament contains material which ‘urgently and finally concerns the very marrow of human civilization’.10 This sentence has probably been the heart of my understanding of Scripture ever since. The New Testament guild, said Barth, reduced the text to runes. These commentaries, and this way of handling the text, were a sign of the subordination of the Church to the bourgeois cultural norms expressed in the Prussian Academy as, mutatis mutandis, so much English language commentary expresses a similar subordination. So historical criticism is only a very preliminary first step. But what to put in its place? Barth spoke about learning to measure words and phrases by ‘that about which the documents are speaking’. ‘The Word ought to be exposed in the words. Intelligent comment means that I am driven on till I stand with nothing before me but the enigma of the matter … till I know the author so well that I allow him to speak in my name and am even able to speak in his name myself.’11 The exegete must learn to ‘attentively think after’ the concepts of the Apostle.12 As we do so, and the Word in the words becomes clear, this has practical, indeed explosive, consequences. It led to Barth’s famous formula for preaching: take the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other – which I have tried to follow. Thinking through this material later on Barth spoke of the ‘kontingente Gleichzeitigkeit’ of Scripture which is a way of saying that it continually and unexpectedly illuminates our present.13 This was one of the things which infuriated the New Testament guild about Barth’s exegesis, but it anticipates Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edward Hoskyns; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 26. 10 Barth, Romans, 9. 11 Barth, Romans, 28 12 Ibid., 11 13 Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 164. Bromiley translates, ‘contingent contemporaneousness’. 9

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Clodovis Boff ’s idea of the ‘correspondence of relationships’ in which we move from Scripture in its context to ourselves in ours.14 Barth saw clearly that if we went to Scripture looking only for historical material, that is what we would find. But equally we could find merely moral commentary, or pietism. Some years after this study of Barth I came across another truly great biblical commentary, Ched Myers’ Binding the Strong Man. Myers combines historical materialist insights with the insights of structuralism. He begins the book by distinguishing four predominant types of exegesis. There are those for whom the dispute between fundamentalism and modernism is the key, but both of these approaches, he notes, share an allegiance to empire. Secondly there is theological hermeneutics: both scholastic and pietist. This aims to extract the ‘gold’ of timeless truths from the ore of historical particularity. Its reading is fundamentally idealist. Thirdly there are the hermeneutics of privatism which we encounter in parish preaching. Here the texts help the individual’s search for holiness or authenticity. Fourthly there is an archaeological approach which views the text as a window on to the past. For Myers, by contrast, Mark must be understood as a story by, about and for those committed to God’s work of justice, compassion and liberation in this world.15 Myers combines literary, sociological and political hermeneutics. To illustrate how this ‘political’ reading works we can take the puzzling little story about binding the strong man, from which Myers takes the name of his book, which follows the allegation that Jesus casts out demons through Beelzebub (Mk 3.20-25). Nineham tells us that the passage shows us that it was ‘sin of the most grievous kind’ which brought Jesus to the cross. For Schweizer its significance is that ‘man should take courage to live in the presence of the almighty God and under his promise’. For Myers these verses represent the climax of Jesus’ first ‘campaign’, and reveal the stark polarization he has brought about. When the ruling class feels its hegemony threatened it neutralizes its critics by identifying them with the cultural arch demon – just as critics of United States policy are invariably labelled ‘communist’. Jesus intends the overthrow of the ‘strong man’ – the scribal establishment represented by the demon. Jesus’ Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations (trans. Robert R. Barr; Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987), 147. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988), 11.

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words about ‘blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’ are a way of saying that what is not pardonable is to turn real human liberation into something odious.16 Barth and Myers share a commitment to historical-material method, the indispensability of setting a text in its context. This in turn follows from a concern about the world in which we live. Marx elaborated this method (in The German Ideology) not the better to understand Democritus but to get to grips with a world in which the poor were crushed. The method is born from a passion for justice. Barth found in Scripture Der Ganz Anders – but not in an Augustinian sense as belonging to the next world, unmarked by sin, but as opposed to all attempts to reduce Christianity to a harmless bourgeois cult so that, as Wendell Berry puts it, modern Christianity has ‘stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogan of empire … It has admired Caesar and comforted him in his depredations and defaults … He prays, he says, and churches everywhere compliantly pray with him. But he is praying to a God whose works he is prepared at any moment to destroy.’17 Precisely this was what Barth opposed with his account of the ‘Wholly Other’. Trying to understand Barth’s account of Scripture I turned to Blake’s remark to Dr. Trusler: ‘What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the understanding or reason?’18 Blake anticipates Barth here in his polemical critique of Enlightenment reason. This fails to get to the heart of the matter, he says. He recognizes that it is not just Scripture which liberates the imagination, but he claims that Scripture does this par excellence. The liberation of imagination, we could say, in words he would disdain, is at the heart of his hermeneutics. To unpack this theologically: the claim is that in Jesus of Nazareth we have the best clue we have to what the Wholly Other, or the NAME, is up to to make and to keep human beings human, as Paul Lehman described the sense of the gospel. This clue points Ibid., 164–7. Wendell Berry, ‘Christianity and the Survival of Creation’, in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon 1992), 93–116 (115). 18 Letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799 in The Complete Works of William Blake (ed. Geoffrey Keynes; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 793. 16 17

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to the presence of the Wholly Other at work in ordinary affairs, amongst the humble, to be found in the depths of the secular in every dimension. As Barth above all points out, it raises very skeptical questions about the centrality of religion to the presence and activity of the Wholly Other. This story liberates our imagination, it sets everything in a different light, it refracts everything with the divine laughter and the divine tragedy. Two other books now came to shape my understanding of what was discussed as ‘the authority of Scripture’. The first was David Kelsey’s The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology.19 Kelsey argues that Scripture is not a set of propositions but, especially for Barth, more like the narrative identification of an agent. It tells us who God is and what God is like. We cannot therefore, say, simply appeal to 1 Corinthians 14 to say women can’t be ordained, but must attend to the whole picture of God we obtain in the whole of Scripture. For Kelsey the authority of Scripture lay in the fact that it gave the Church its identity. If you ask, why use this book, rather than Shakespeare or the Imitation of Christ, or anything else, the answer is, that these books do not bear on the identity of the church in anything like the same way. It is not a matter of Scripture being ‘the first witness’ but of this whole collection of documents, including all the texts of terror which liberalism wishes to edit out, being identity forming, for good or ill. This argument was then refined for me by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which rationality?, which lie behind the title of this chapter. MacIntyre argues that all rationality is tradition constituted. Traditions, MacIntyre argues, embody continuities of conflict. A living tradition is ‘an historically extended, socially embodied argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition’.20 This led me to think that the whole Reformation debate, Scripture and/or tradition, was misconceived. Rather, Scripture was itself tradition, the history of a long argument in which Jesus and Paul themselves take sides. Thus, once again, one cannot simply say: ‘the Bible says’ (and this problematizes the kind of view Barth argues for in Church Dogmatics I/1) but rather, ‘In our Scriptures one finds these arguments’. And it is real arguments of which we are speaking. There is a splendid remark by Saul Alinsky, that ‘[t] he only places where one David Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (London: SCM, 1975). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985, 2nd edn), 222.

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can have movement without friction is either in outer space, which is friction free, or in a graduate seminar of a university, or in a church conference that emphasizes reconciliation. ‘Reconciliation’ as the term has been used is an illusion of the world as we would like it to be.’21 Well, I don’t find this world in Scripture – rather, a passionate, often angry, sometimes ironic and humorous, contest about what the NAME is up to. To be Christian or Jewish, as any inspection of the tradition makes absolutely clear, is to join in that argument, to take sides. ‘The rival claims to truth of contending traditions of enquiry’, says MacIntyre, ‘depend for their vindication upon the adequacy and the explanatory power of the histories which the resources of each of those traditions in conflict enable their adherents to write.’22 Christianity is not exactly a tradition of enquiry, but it is a lived tradition in which many voices contest the truth and adequacy of other voices as measured by Scripture. This is what Barth means by the authority of the Word and freedom under the Word. Scripture is itself tradition constituted, and it is the fountain head of Christian tradition in every dimension. It is also the norm of the tradition in virtue (and here I continue to agree with Barth) of its witness to Jesus of Nazareth who died a slave’s death at the hands of the Roman empire and whose disciples alarmed people into thinking that they were turning the world upside down (the mainstream church has spent two thousand years assuring people that this is not the case and that there is no cause for alarm). It was after reading this work that I arrived at a – very Anglican and very conventional – account of theological method which has informed all my writing. Theology, on my account, happens in a triangle between Scripture, tradition and experience, where ‘tradition’ involves not simply previous theologians, or Papal pronouncements, but architecture, painting and music, and where ‘experience’ is the whole gamut of human experience from sexuality to town planning, in every area of which God, or The NAME, is to be found. This triangle is not equally weighted, for the reasons that Barth and Blake have set out. It is not, as C. H. Dodd argued, that Scripture is the founding text of our tradition, though that is also true, but that Scripture grounds our identity as Christians and, as Barth argues, that it stands in the way of our solipsism

Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1969), 224. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality (London: Duckworth, 1988), 403.

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by the way in which it constantly challenges our attempts to possess it. In fact the history of Christian theology might be understood as an ongoing tussle between attempts to tame Scripture, to make it serve our own theological and ideological schemes and the disruption of those schemes. Before turning to my own work I need to mention two interpreters who have shaped my use of Scripture. The first is Bas Wielenga, with whom I worked in India. To sit in a class where Bas was expounding Scripture was to experience the Shekinah: the barrier between the fifth or sixth century bc and the present disappeared and, as Barth put it, ‘Deuteronomy speaks and the person of the twentieth century (as it then was) hears’. Bas’ small volume of published work in English, on the book of Revelation, on the Hebrew Bible and on Paul has been central to my understanding of Scripture. I will give one example of his interpretation. At university I had read R. P. Martin’s study of the ‘Christ hymn’ of Philippians 2.5ff., which reviews countless theories but never once considers that the word doulos (slave) in the passage might have had an immediate sociological relevance in Paul’s context. The index, which is a compendium of theological and historical-critical theories, mentions neither slaves nor slavery!23 Bas reads the passage in terms of divine solidarity. The key thing is that this is written in a world where slavery forms the bedrock of much economic practice. This means that it is completely misleading to translate Philippians. 2.6, ‘though being in the form of God’. ‘The Greek text does not say so and the whole message suggests the opposite: Because he was in the form of God, because of his love and solidarity, which wants to set us free, he chose to become a slave.’24 Crucifixion was the lot of slaves and rebels, and this was the scandal of the cross. ‘That did not fit into any philosophy or mythology. It identified Jesus for all who heard the message with the lowest of society, and with those who protested against it.’25 Bas also introduced me to Ton Veerkamp, the editor of Texte und Kontexte for forty years and one of the great exegetes of the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. A Dutchman working in Berlin, both divided and undivided, he engaged deeply with the Jewish tradition R. P. Martin, Carmen Christi: Philippians ii 5–11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 24 Bas Wielenga, Biblical Perspectives on Labour (Madurai: TTS Press, 1982), 77. 25 Ibid., 78. 23



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and, of course, with Jacob Taubes. He elaborated the understanding of Scripture which I included in my first book, Redeeming Time. Christian Bibles are organized, following Jeremiah 31, into two parts, an ‘Old’ and a ‘New’ Testament and this has often led to an acknowledged or unacknowledged Marcionitism. How often does one find in Anglican churches that clergy feel free to dispense with the ‘Old’ Testament? If one comes from a radical Barthian position, however, that is not a possible option. Veerkamp thus proposes a different model. The basis of the model is the Tenakh, which is organized around a series of courtyards.26 Torah is at the centre, as, for Jews, the heart of God’s self- giving to history. Around this are the prophetic books, which, in the Jewish bible include what we call the ‘history books’. Around these are the Wisdom writings. Each level comments on the others. There is mutual penetration in all directions. Now, Veerkamp proposes, for Christians we should add a fourth courtyard, the Messianic writings, the writings which witness to Jesus as Messiah. Reading Scripture like this means, first, that we never forget that Jesus is a Jew who lived and spoke out of that tradition and second, the nature of our Scriptures as a record of a living tradition is made much clearer. It is more difficult to fetishize Scripture as a divinely given record of truth which can then answer all our questions. It is also Veerkamp who has taught me to refer to God, in line with Jewish practice, as the NAME, the One disclosed to Moses and known in Christ (Phil. 2.5f.). I used this model in my first book, Redeeming Time, which was an attempt to respond theologically to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (I wrote the book as The Pedagogy of the Spirit but my publishers said no one would understand the word ‘pedagogy’!).27 The book tries to think about what on earth the church might be about as a form of the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and revisited, as best as I was able, ideas of the kingdom, of Spirit, of grace, and of the so called ‘sacraments’ by attending to the biblical texts, probably with a certain weight on the Hebrew Bible, but anyway with Veerkamp’s model in mind. The book was written in India and, I later came to realize, failed dismally to reflect the ‘experience’ side of the theological triangle but, in my view, did represent the fruits of a close reading of Scripture. In Ton Veerkamp, ‘Im Lehrhaus, von der Einheit der heiligen Schrift’, Texte und Contexte 22 (1984): 4–38. See Tim J. Gorringe, Redeeming Time (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), 25. Gorringe, Redeeming Time.

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particular when I turned from the standard introductions to the ‘doctrine of the Holy Spirit’ to Scripture I found that these introductions all synthesized the material. In fact, material about ruach/pneuma is by no means consistent in Scripture, but occurs, by and large, in three great bands: one in Judges, one in the post-exilic prophets, and one in Paul. Why? Well, in all three of these bands freedom is a crucial issue, and in all three there is an absence of an overruling authority. Judges I read with Norman Gottwald as an account of the free tribal confederacy, before the dead hand of the monarchy got its ideological hands on the understanding of God; during the ‘exile’ the monarchy had disappeared and all existing social and political waymarks with them; and in Paul a new world announced itself for which the keyword was, as Jacob Taubes said, ‘all’, a world which announced the end of the key divisions of the Roman empire. I tried to follow this method in a couple of books about Spirit and providence back in England, but this was also the time of Margaret Thatcher and Capital and the Kingdom was written as a cry of rage against the economic doctrines which informed her government.28 The book begins with Deuteronomy which, my critics said, I read far too selectively as a text of liberation, omitting all the unpleasant material. What reviewers should have said (but didn’t) was that I had not sufficiently done my economics homework. I wrote the book without having read Herman Daly or Wendell Berry, so I failed in that second corner of my triangle, ‘tradition’. In terms of my use of Scripture, however, I tried to let prophecy and wisdom shape my understanding of work, and the means of production and distribution. One reviewer said it was based on the work of Henry George. I’m ashamed to say I had not read Henry George at that time, but Scripture led me (rightly or wrongly) to views about economics as a moral science and an account of the economy as a means to fullness of life which I still hold (though I hope now better informed by the alternative tradition in economics). At this time I was working on a book on Barth in which I was able to re-read the Dogmatics and try to come to terms with Barth’s account of Scripture. The record of that is in the first part of this essay. I was also teaching a paper on the atonement. Ferreting around the nineteenth century expositions led me to Timothy J. Gorringe, Capital and the Kingdom (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994).

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criminal justice, and the result of that was God’s Just Vengeance.29 The first part of this book attempted to examine the biblical sources of ideas of atonement, offering a very Girardian account of sacrifice, and an argument, already anticipated in Redeeming Time, for reading the cross in terms of solidarity. In the third part, which addressed contemporary issues, I appealed to Scripture for an emphasis on restorative justice understanding forgiveness as at the heart of the Scriptural witness. A peremptory invitation to talk about the ethics of the built environment led to a consuming interest in this theme which issued in two books attempting to reflect on it. Of course, Scripture has almost nothing to say about ‘the built environment’, so what role does it play? In the first book Scripture (more particularly Torah) supplies an account of the land, drawing on Brueggemann and on work in Texte und Kontexte.30 Jacques Ellul’s polemical The Meaning of the City, which is an exegetical account of biblical texts relating to the city was one of my guides (though principally in opposition) and my reading of koinonia is fundamental to my account of community. The second book (written as Grace and the Common Good, another title rejected by the publisher) attempts to bring together biblical perspectives on grace and the thought of Christopher Alexander.31 Although I of course draw on Patristic and Scholastic accounts of the common good these seem to me to be firmly rooted in Torah and prophets. All this time I had taught courses on theology and art, chiefly because a narrow focus on politics seems to me to lose too much of the fullness of life to which Christ invites us. The upshot of this was a book on art in which the reader might justifiably think that Scripture was not the guiding voice it was in other books.32 In fact I think it is. Barth above all taught me (even more than Auerbach) that the Bible is a profoundly secular book, not very interested in ‘religion’. I tried with students, therefore, to think about what we learn about where the NAME is to be found and what the NAME is up to in portraits, still Timothy J. Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 30 Timothy J. Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 31 Timothy J. Gorringe, The Common Good and the Global Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 32 Timothy J. Gorringe, Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 29

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life, landscapes and abstract art. In addition, a visit to the Louvre introduced me to Louis le Nain, I would not hesitate to say one of the greatest liberation theologians in art and therefore to the theme of peasants in art. Naturally I learn from the art critics as far as possible, but art criticism combines metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. The idea that aesthetics can be separated from ethics and metaphysics is a positivist myth. My understanding of what it means to be human, therefore, (portraits), of the created world (landscape), of ordinary life (still life), of social justice (peasants), and of the nature of reality (abstract art) is principally shaped by Scripture. At the same time I am sure we can learn from the artists here, and the greatest of them throw a great light on Scripture, and not just, or even principally, in their religious paintings. I could illustrate this further from other books, but it would simply make the point over again. A very senior Anglican theologian once remarked to me that readers would be hard put to find my theological method. However that may be, in terms of what I have attempted, beginning from a conviction, gained from Scripture, that the NAME is abroad in the whole of life, very sceptical (as a priest) about the importance of the specifically religious dimension of experience, I have tried to reflect on quite fundamental aspects of our experience (like the streets we walk and shop in and the houses in which we live) in the light of a conversation between Scripture, what our ancestors have had to say, and our own experience of the world. In this conversation Scripture is the first and last voice, the voice which I attempt to go back to again and again because, it seems to me, that here I overhear a voice which is not my own, nor the reflection of any human voice, but an echo, an overhearing of the Wholly Other, the NAME who addresses us.

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Sola Scriptura, the community of the church and a pluralist age: A Methodist theologian seeking to read Scripture in and for the world Tom Greggs

My earliest readings of Scripture all took place within the context of community. There was the community of my family, where the stories of Scripture were first taught and learned, and where attendance to Scripture was first demonstrated; not a reader, my Wesleyan father really is a homo unius libri. And there was the community of the church in which the stories of Scripture were taught in Sunday school, and in which the text of Scripture was read, prayed, preached and sung in hymnody in the presence of the congregation. My father had come to faith in my very early childhood (and my mother had followed) as a result of reading the New Testament by himself: having had a nominal faith, it was the Word of God which had penetrated his heart like a sword. In that sense, I was self-consciously an evangelical from my earliest years – filled with the belief that Scripture ruled supreme over the church, and expectant that it would speak to me with its living Word. In fact, my earliest memories of my heart feeling ‘strangely warmed’ (as Wesley put it),1 revolved around the reading of scripture as it referred to itself: my first ‘Methodist moment’ was reading Psalm 119.105: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.

Scripture has never, therefore, for me been a text read like or among any other. It has been the text from which I have sought to hear God speak and to W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (eds), The Works of John Wesley, vol. 18: Journals and Diaries I (1735–8) (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), 249–250.

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discern God’s guiding path. As Karl Barth once commented early in his career, the Bible contains a world we as humans do not know, ‘the world of God’.2 This means that there is always in Scripture an overstretching beyond those things of which we are capable – beyond intellectual treatment of the text as an object. In Scripture is the address of God to humans who hear in faith: ‘There is a stream in the Bible that carries us away once we have entrusted ourselves to it; it carries us from ourselves to the seas!’3 While much systematic theology is focused (especially in the evangelical traditions) upon what it means for Scripture to be God’s address, God’s Word, my own theology has been much concerned to consider that this Word has a terminus: Scripture is God’s Word to humanity. The condition of reading Scripture is the faith that God addresses us (and, importantly, not just me). Rather than an academic object of enquiry alone, Scripture calls to humanity: We need only dare to follow this drive, this spirit, this stream in the Bible, to grow beyond ourselves and to reach for the highest answer. This daring is faith; and we read the Bible properly not when we read it with a false humility, reserve, or other alleged sobriety but when we read in faith, as those who travel along on the way which they are led. … Where the grace of God encounters us, where we are led, pulled and made to grow, there, the Bible becomes clear.4

Reading the Bible in faith requires an attentiveness to where its guiding paths are leading us as human beings in the world today. In this chapter, I wish to look at the way in which a belief in the authoritative address of Scripture to humanity requires careful consideration of the reading communities of which we as humans are a part. My own engagement with Scripture is, I think, shaped by the sense of the differing places where and communities in which God’s Word encounters me (as part of these communities), and this has in turn shaped my theology. God addresses us by God’s Word. What constitutes that ‘us’ is variously determinative of the Word heard.

Karl Barth, ‘The Strange New World Within the Bible’, in The Word of God and Theology (trans. Amy Marga; London: T&T Clark, 2011), 15–29 (19). 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 19–20. 2



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In the community of the church The first locus in which the Word of God is heard is the church. The Word is read, heard and proclaimed; it forms the basis of the liturgy and is sung in the Psalms or in poetic form in hymns. Before we attend to personal readings of Scripture in devotion or in our studies, it is important to remember the public context of the reading of Scripture. The books of the Bible were originally written to be read aloud: in a context of low levels of literacy, the public reading of Scripture was central to the life and liturgy of the church. The context of hearing the Bible was the church, the gathered people of God awaiting God’s Word addressed to them. This is not to say that the church rules over Scripture, but that Scripture (and Holy Communion) is the efficient cause of the gathering of the community of the church: hearing Scripture brings the people together as the Word of God is spoken to them, and Christ becomes present in their gathered midst by the power of the Holy Spirit. Even at the Reformation, with its principle of sola Scriptura, the Scripture to which the sola referred was for most people the Word of God read aloud in the context of churches. Sola Scriptura is a doctrine primarily with ecclesial consequences, rather than a justification to allow any given person to claim direct authority from the Word apart from the church: it is about Christ’s sovereignty over the church, not the believer’s autonomy in relation to the text.5 Sola Scriptura flows from solus Christus and is meaningful only in the context of sola fidei as an act and event of the grace of God (sola gratia). As Barth puts it: In the 16th century … the Evangelical [Evangelisch] decision was taken that the Church has not to seek and find the Word and authority of Jesus Christ except where He Himself has established it, that it and its word and authority can derive only from the word and authority of the biblical witnesses, that its word and authority are always confronted by those of the biblical witnesses, and are measured and must be judged by them. This is what the Reformation was trying to say and did say in its affirmation that Holy Scripture alone has divine authority in the Church. It was not ascribing a godlike value to the book as a For a more detailed account of this point, see my ‘Relational Responsibility in Biblical Hermeneutics: Towards a Protestant Account of the Authority of Creeds for Scriptural Interpretation’, in Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Malcolm (eds), The Future of Biblical Interpretation: Responsible Plurality in Biblical Hermeneutics (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2013), 93–105.

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Theologians on Scripture book and the letter as a letter—in some sinister antithesis to spirit, and power and life. But it wanted Jesus Christ to be known and acknowledged as the Lord of the Church, whose revelation would not have been revelation if it had not created apostles and prophets, and even in the present-day Church can only be revelation in this its primary sign.6

In reading Scripture, the believer first hears the Word of God in the context of the community of faith that is the church. God’s Word is received in the context of the church to whom he speaks, in order that, upon hearing the Word, the church might speak to the world. As a preacher, it is this high view of the Word of God in its address to humanity in the church that governs my approach to the Bible as a theologian. The activity of preaching regularly demands that I recognize the ecclesial contexts of theology, and the direct impact of theology on the life of the church. Theology should help the preacher to reflect on her sermon in order to make her next sermon better: it should help the theologian to be more attentive to the speaking of God, to listen more carefully. There are two senses in which this is the case. First, my primary, direct engagement with theology and the text of the Bible comes in sermon preparation. Attentiveness to the details of a given text of Scripture in the context of a given congregation on a given Sunday shapes the way in which I read the text. I read thinking about how the Word of God is to be heard. Preaching is in the first place an activity of attentive listening to the Bible, which involves not only an attentiveness to the text itself but also (simultaneously) an attentiveness to what the text might be saying to the specific spatio-temporally located ekklesia.7 My own theology is not only shaped by this activity, but I have become more and more interested how to describe what happens in this event theologically. In relation to the latter, my current project of a three volume ecclesiology seeks to describe the life of the church from a Protestant perspective, taking as key the centrality of the Word’s being heard and proclaimed by the power of the Spirit. The centrality of pneumatology to this project is indicative of the concern to describe the Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight; London: T&T Clark, 2004), 581. 7 See the Preface to my Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6



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community which receives the Word of God in space and time.8 My own practice thus far has been not to publish sermons, singularly on the grounds that the event of the sermon relates to its being heard in the community of faith: the sermon is an act and event of the Spirit in gathering the church around Jesus Christ who is known by his Word. This primary engagement also leads to the second sense of the way in which my theology is related to the life of the church through the activity of preaching. Since I am concerned with the Word heard, there is in my theology the sense that theology ought not simply be addressed to a guild of specialists, but ought to have a broader audience than the academic community.9 In this way, I have tended, as well as publishing academic monographs, to publish pieces either directly related to the life of the church, or which are more popular versions of academic works, which seek to address a more focused ecclesial audience.10 Moreover, some of my work has sought directly to address the particular ecclesial community of which I am a part. My edited collection, New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology: Engaging with God, Scripture and The World sought to ‘open our [evangelical] theology up to a generous particularism which recognizes the complexity of scripture and of human life’.11 In this, attentiveness to the actual details and complexities of the biblical tradition (rather than reducing them to neat doctrinal packages or motifs that function almost as ecclesial or para-ecclesial Shibboleths) has been important. Commenting on this volume, Richard Hays stated: I am particularly heartened to see Greggs’ emphasis on the complexities of Scripture and human life. One of the grave shortcomings of some popular evangelicalism is its too-easy assumption of the simple unitary character of

I think in this way my work differs from more Christocentric accounts such as those offered by Karl Barth and more classical accounts that begin with God’s aseity as can be seen in the likes of John Webster’s current theology. 9 See Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xv. 10 For example, my article on how to preach inter-faith engagement (effectively arising from an exegesis of the Good Samaritan) arose out of more academic engagements with the question. See my ‘Preaching Inter-faith: finding hints about the religious other from the Good Samaritan’, Epworth Review 36 (2009): 60–70; cf. ‘Legitimizing and Necessitating Inter-faith Dialogue: The Dynamics of Inter-faith for Individual Faith Communities’, International Journal of Public Theology 4 (2010): 194–211, and other articles as well on this topic. 11 Tom Greggs, ‘Beyond the Binary: Forming Evangelical Eschatology’, in Tom Greggs (ed.), New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology: Engaging with God, Scripture, and the World (Routledge: Abingdon, 2009), 153–67 (161). 8

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Theologians on Scripture the biblical witness, and of its application to our lives … By contrast, one of the encouraging features of the present volume is the … willingness to grapple with actual close readings of the biblical texts and to acknowledge the presence of tensions and perplexities that stimulate careful scholarly study and interpretation. To treat the Bible’s complexity with this sort of alert respect is to grant it more, not less, authority than those interpreters who superimpose a priori propositional grids upon it. … To acknowledge such complexities in both world and Scripture is not to be less evangelical, but to insist that the good news with which we are entrusted must truthfully acknowledge our created and fallen human condition and the historically contingent manner in which God has chosen to reveal himself to us.12

David Ford also comments on the detailed re-engagement with the actual text of Scripture in this work, which helps guard against hardened doctrinal abstraction by recognizing the complex historical formation of doctrine around interpretation of Scripture, and instead allows Scripture, with renewed and refreshed engagement, to address the evangelical community around central theological themes.

In the communion of saints It is in relation to this sense that doctrine emerges around interpretation of Scripture that my second context of reading Scripture might be considered: the Word of God is heard for me within the communion of saints, of which all Christians of every age are a part. For all of my concern that we hear the Bible in the contexts of which we are a part within the church, there is a simultaneous concern that we hear and read the Word of God in communion with the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before. I have addressed this theme directly on another occasion,13 but Scripture is heard in every age because of the faithful promise and constancy of God. Read in the life of the church, Scripture is also read in the context of tradition and, most of all, is Richard Hays, ‘Postscript: Seeking a Centred, Generous Orthodoxy’, in Tom Greggs (ed.), New Perspectives, 216–18 (217). 13 Tom Greggs, ‘Being a Wise Apprentice to the Communion of Modern Saints: On the Need for Conversation with a Plurality of Theological Interlocutors’, in Rachel Muers, Simeon Zahl and Tom Greggs (eds), The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford (Eugene: Cascade, 2013), 21–34. 12



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read in light of the church’s collective interpretation of the Bible through the creeds and ecumenical symbols. Since, as I have already stated, I understand sola Scriptura to mean that Scripture is sovereign over the church (and the individual under and in relation to the whole church), when we read Scripture, we hear it as a part of the church, which in its apostolicity has offered an authoritative interpretation of the Bible (or a dense minimal coda which arises from Scripture for future readings of Scripture). While the Magisterial Reformers shouted ‘sola Scriptura’ at the top of their voices, they also were at pains to point out that the early councils were governed by the interpretation of Scripture,14 and that the worth of the early councils should be measured by the extent to which they adhered to faithful interpretation of Scripture. Even in making claims that do not appear to be directly present in the Bible, according to the Magisterial Reformers, the councils were doing so on the basis of the teaching of the Bible.15 Councils, according to this view, did not create doctrine, but preserved the teachings of Scripture as understood by the church, and refuted heresy.16 Thus, in his treatize On the Councils and the Church, Luther argues that councils do not do anything new, but only confirm inherited truth from Scripture against heresies and innovations.17 If there is an ecclesial locus for the reading and hearing of the Word of God in the first instance, then in reading and hearing the Word of God as part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church we read Scripture with that church (together as an ekklesia) in a particular and apostolic manner. This particular manner gives the creeds their authority in a context in a way which will determine the minimal parameters in which subsequent readings will take place within that community. To read Scripture is to share in the reading of the saints of all ages. In Barth’s words:

This is an issue I have discussed in detail in ‘Relational Responsibility in Biblical Hermeneutics’. For example, Calvin asks those who argue that the term ‘consubstantial’ is not found in Scripture the following question: ‘what else are the Nicene fathers doing when they declare them [the Father and the Son] of one essence but simply expounding the real meaning of Scripture?’ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. Ford Lewis Battles and John Thomas McNeill; London: SCM Press, 1961), II.1165. 16 This is, indeed, how the fathers understood themselves. See, for example, Athanasius Contra Arianos. Athanasius, Select Works and Letters (Oxford: Parker, 1892). 17 See Martin Luther, ‘On the Councils and the Church’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 41 (ed. Eric W. Gritsch; trans. Charles M. Jacobs; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 9–178. 14 15

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Theologians on Scripture [I]t is impossible to speak without having first heard. All speaking is a response to these fathers and brethren. Therefore these fathers and brethren have a definite authority, the authority of prior witnesses of the Word of God, who have to be respected as such. Just because the Evangelical confession is a confession of the vitality and the presence of God’s Word actualised again and again, it is also a confession of the communion of saints and therefore of what is, in a sense, an authoritative tradition of the Word of God, that is, of a human form in which that Word comes to all those who are summoned by it to faith and witness in the sphere of the Church and by its mouth—of a human form which is proper to it in the witness of these fathers and brethren …18

In this way, much as I am concerned with reading Scripture in the church of this given today, I do not read without a sense of tradition. While I have direct ecclesial and contextual concerns, I do not read Scripture in the way that ‘contextual’ theologians (in the narrower sense) might. As a Methodist, I have to consider the relation of tradition underneath the authority of Scripture: both tradition and experience must be considered in relation to one another. Contextual experience cannot be the singular, dominant governing feature in interpretation of (or rejection of) Scripture, and interpretation of Scripture must be done in a reasoned and reflective manner. There is freedom in relation to the communion of saints’ minimal authoritative interpretation of the sensus plenior of scripture in the creed, but this freedom is always in relation to the communion of saints as a part of it, not apart from it or in complete rejection of it:19 we are bound to the communion of saints and must converse and dialogue with it with all due proportion and respect. Alongside reading the texts of Scripture in relation to the creed, to read Scripture in the communion of saints also means reading Scripture with the many others who have gone before who have also read Scripture. My manner of reading theological figures from the past is to see them also as co-interpreters of Scripture in the ecclesial contexts in which they found themselves. Good practice in reading Scripture is, therefore, to read across the breadth of theologians from the past, and to seek to find from them wise, creative and helpful ways of reading the text of the Bible in the present. It is important in this that we do so, not in a way that gives absolute priority Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, 573. Cf. Karl Barth, Learning Jesus Christ Through the Heidelberg Catechism (trans. Shirley C. Guthrie; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 21.

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to past theologians (allowing them the final word), but as part of the communion of saints ourselves. Reading Scripture ecclesially in the context of the communion of saints cannot prioritize the readings of the past (any given moment in the life of the church) any more than it can prioritize the readings of the present: both tradition and contemporary context are important, and we read the interpretations of the past in order to enable us to hear the Word of God better in the present. To use one single period or figure or school as the basis for all theological judgements runs entirely contrary to the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura, and fails to appreciate the plurality of saints with whom, and the full breadth of the catholic church of all generations with which, today’s church and theologian is to be in dialogue. In reading Scripture with other figures of the church we recognize that they, too, read Scripture in their own context. Thus, when we read the interpretations of other theologians in the communion of saints, we read Scripture alongside them, and then – having attentively listened with due respect to the difficulties of reading across historical periods – we seek to use, shape, and form their readings, reading not only with but also through, alongside and beyond such figures.20 I have referred to this approach in a number of works as formative interpretation.21 Rather than understanding theology as a constructive or historical task, I seek to understand theology as a task of forming theological speech, by inheriting the doctrinal ecclesial readings of the past and seeking to shape the tradition in the present, rather than simply to describe or repeat it. Reading the Bible alongside great interpreters of Scripture from the past is intended to shape theological speech in the present much as potters might form their clay. We read these figures in order to hear Scripture and to interpret it better in our own context. There is no binary choice between context or tradition: in our present context we inherit a living tradition as a part of it, and we shape the tradition we inherit in the present contexts in which we find ourselves.

A more detailed account of this approach to hermeneutics is found in my ‘Being a Wise Apprentice to the Communion of Modern Saints’. See my New Perspectives, 9; and Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, 1–2, 6–9.

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In the vastness of God’s mercy and grace Reading Scripture in the church does not only mean that we look back (and potentially forwards) to the communion of saints across time; it also involves looking around us to the world of which we are a part in space. For me, the most pressing question in my own reading of Scripture has been how to read with an attentiveness to the reality that we live today in a post-Christendom context. While, after Constantine, most Christian theology was undertaken in a dominantly Christian context, we find ourselves today in a context in which there are people of different faiths or none.22 The question of how to read the Bible faithfully in this context is an important one: how are we to listen attentively to the Word of God as it speaks to a post-Christian (or at least post-Christendom) cultural context?23 In this, I have read the Bible in a way that seeks to have it speak Good News to the world outwith the bounds of the church, and to the church at a time when it may feel its status and power diminished. And I have sought to make use of the interpretations of the Bible from those who have also lived outwith the context of Christendom, and especially from those who have reflected on those who are not Christians in that context (particularly Barth and Bonhoeffer from the modern period, and Origen from the pre-Constantinian period). In relation to this reading in a post-Christendom context, I have first tried to read Scripture alert to its own context as coming into being (both in its individual components and as a canon) outside of the context of Christendom. Reading Scripture once more with fresh eyes and without the presumption of the insider status to a Christendom society has helped to bring out the plain (which is often by virtue of its plainness more complex) sense of texts. I have written theological commentary on a number of texts in relation to this approach. What, for example, are we to make of the sheep and the goats (Mt. 25) as a story when we read the church as the supposedly ‘insider’ group who discover they are outsiders?24 Those who expect to be sheep find themselves as goats, and those who expect to be goats find themselves as sheep. Reading This was a primary concern in both my Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation and Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (London: T&T Clark, 2011). 23 The context of secularization is a complex one to describe. See my Theology against Religion, 248–51. 24 For further details of this, see my essay ‘Beyond the Binary’. 22



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Scripture today reminds us that those in history who are seen by the insider religious community (read ‘church’) to be on the inside or outside do not necessarily equate with those who at the end find themselves on the inside or outside respectively. Matters are a little more complex than that, and a degree of humility from the church today should be countenanced. Furthermore, I have also, second, attempted to focus on those aspects of Scripture which offer hope to those outside the bounds of the church. While we might identify a greater separationist tenor in the likes of the Gospel of Matthew (even with the above proviso), St. Paul provides us with a strong degree of universalism in his theology. To cite just two of numerous examples: ‘for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ’ (1 Cor. 15.22); and ‘For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 8.38-39). Furthermore, I have sought to contextualize and reflect on ideas which seem straightforwardly separationist and point to a binarized opposition between the church and its wider community setting.25 For example, in considering a broader hope for humanity, I have pointed to the texts on hell and sought to demonstrate that much of the contemporary use of separationist imagery certainly owes more to Milton and Dante than it does to the Bible. The primary word for hell used in the New Testament is the word ‘Gehenna’ (used thirteen times).26 It is important as a contemporary reader to be alert to the historical context of this imagery, however. Gehenna refers to a valley on the south side of Jerusalem called the Valley of Hinnom, which in Hebrew is ‘Ge Hinnom’ from which Gehenna is derived. This was seen as a place of unrighteousness, associated with the idolatry of Manasseh and the human sacrifices of Molech. For the early Jewish gospel communities (hence the focus of the material in Matthew), the message about Gehenna would have been understood in terms of a literal place. For them, the discourse would have been seen as one using literal imagery concerning the Valley of Hinnom, rather than a physical place called ‘Hell’ after death. To interpret in our present context with a sensitivity to this kind of historical context is important.

A more detailed consideration of this is found in my Theology against Religion, Ch. 5. The other word used for ‘hell’ in the New Testament is ‘Hades’; this is used ten times.

25 26

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Beyond this, I have, third, tried to understand Scripture’s teachings for a church which finds itself existing as a minority. There is a temptation in this to think of the church as some form of holy remnant; that has not been my desire. Instead, I have sought to focus on what it means in Scripture to be the church that stands with and for the world. Rather than seeing salvation simply in terms of an eschatological outcome of either heaven or hell, I have pointed to the variegated understandings of salvation (such as being first in the Kingdom of God, storing up treasures in heaven, etc.) and to the significance of sanctification in the Christian life.27 Moreover, in relation to sanctification, I have sought to consider what it means for ‘non-believers’ to display the fruit of the Spirit in their lives: how are we to make sense of the display of this fruit if their source is only from the Holy Spirit of God. In all of this, I have wanted to use some of the complexities of Scripture that arise from a serious reading of its plain sense, in order to move away from binary categories in relation to salvation, and away from an elect-reject, saveddamned, insider-outsider self-understanding of the church-world relation. However, I have not wanted to do this by down-playing Scripture, but by attending attentively to the details of the Bible: my account of the wider hope is based on Christian particularism and not on a principle of universalism found outside of the pages of the Bible.28

In the community of the children of Abraham Aware of the need to hear the Word of God in the contexts and communities in which providence places us, a particular focus of my reading of Scripture has been in relation to people of other faiths. We live in an age when religion has become a major issue in the world once more. As Jeffrey Pugh puts it: ‘Chaos, dead bodies, havoc and the sight of passions inflamed as chants are yelled and gunshots fill the air. And somewhere in the world where these This is clearly a very Methodist focus, and one that is felt throughout my work. See my Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, 161–6, 210–11; and ‘A Strangely Warmed Heart in a Strange and Complex World: On Assurance and Generous Hope’, in Julie Gittoes, Brutus Green and James Heard (eds), Generous Ecclesiology: Church, World and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 2013), 120–39. 28 Hence the subtitle of my monograph Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity, and repeated references in my work to ‘generous particularism’. 27



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things take place you just know that the name of God, Allah, or Shiva is going to be invoked.’29 If we are to hear the Bible in the historical context in which we are, how do we listen to it wisely in relation to the pressing question of how to find peace between the religious communities at a time when religion has been politicized and radicalized? And how do we do this without removing a deep commitment to Scripture and its authority (sola Scriptura and the solus Christus whence it stems)? My response to the issue of how to read the Bible faithfully and in light of its tradition, and with an awareness of its need to be understood contextually in a setting where it is often read unwisely so as to fuel discord between religious people, has been to read Scripture authentically as a Christian theologian and preacher alongside Muslim and Jewish peers who seek to do the same from their religious communities’ perspectives. My long term involvement in Scriptural Reasoning has produced a further community of people with whom I read the Bible and seek to hear God’s Word. As I have described it elsewhere,30 Scriptural Reasoning is a method of inter-faith dialogue which originated with Peter Ochs, David Ford, Daniel Hardy and Basit Koshul.31 Drawing on the model of engagement between Jewish philosophers (called ‘Textual Reasoning’), Scriptural Reasoning offers a mode of interfaith dialogue for members of different religious communities (dominantly Abrahamic communities in practice) with each other. Crucially, the manner of this engagement does not involve the rejection of deeply held faith commitments in order to enter some ‘shared’ (liberal) secular space that relativizes truth claims, undermines faith commitment and underplays differences.32 Scriptural Reasoning takes place, rather, in the shared reading and discussion of the sacred texts of the faiths – the very particular and exclusive basis for the faiths. The practice, therefore, revolves around a shared sense of mutual hospitality in order to facilitate the dialogue. As a mode of study, the practice Jeffrey C. Pugh, Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 69. 30 See my Theology against Religion, 209ff.; and ‘Inter-Faith Pedagogy for Muslims and Christians: Scriptural Reasoning and Christian and Muslim Youth Work’, Discourse 9 (2010): 201–26. 31 There is an ever burgeoning literature on Scriptural Reasoning, as it spreads as a practice in different forms throughout the world. For an indicative survey, see David F. Ford and C. C. Pecknold (eds), The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 32 I have discussed these issues in my ‘Legitimizing and Necessitating Inter-faith Dialogue: The Dynamics of Inter-faith for Individual Faith Communities’, International Journal of Public Theology 4 (2010): 194–211. 29

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is largely undertaken by people of faith from the perspective of faith, and it seeks to offer participants the possibility of thinking rationally from within their tradition, and of recognizing that modes of reasoning arise from within different traditional discourses. Scriptural Reasoning, thus, does not stand at odds with other modes of interpretation or undermine them: it seeks to draw from those other community readings of Scripture in a different community setting in which new interpretations of the Bible might arise from challenge, debate, disagreement and fresh understanding. Moreover, from and because of these fresh insights that this community brings to the text of the Bible, I have engaged not only in reading with but also for this community of Scriptural Reasoners, asking questions of how I as a Christian understand the existence of other religions. In this, I have been attentive to the religious plurality of the New Testament’s context (which importantly is not a context of Christianity) and to ideas of otherness and religion present within the Christian scriptures. Again, attentiveness to the text’s historical context is key in this. What does it mean to hear the text as it would have first been heard? How do we remove the idea of some form of proto-Christianity within the stories of the gospels or the Hebrew Bible? And crucially, what might this have to say to the contemporary church community as it wrestles with its own identity, in which Christianity finds itself with neighbours of other faiths and of no faith? In a sense, therefore, it might be possible to conclude where this chapter began. In reading the Bible (even with due attention to its historical context), I read it in order to listen to what it says to the church today: I read it as a living book. If the Bible is a living book which addresses with an ultimate authority communities of faith, and if that book contains the Word of God which is sharper than any two edged sword (Heb. 4.12), then by the activity of the Spirit who illuminates God’s Word in the present, we should expect to hear God speak through Word and Spirit (always together) to the contexts in which the church finds itself today. Learning to hear this Word will involve careful engagement with those who have listened for it before in their earlier contexts, but in the end it will depend on placing our faith in the living Word which we encounter in the church which exists in and for the world. The solus Christus is found sola gratia only in sola fidei through sola Scriptura; but this Word is found in the church of today – a church in a pluralist age.

7

Christian doctrine and the discipline of reading Scripture Mike Higton

I work in the field of Christian doctrine. Were you to plot my location on those maps of the theological subdisciplines that have shaped many departments and seminaries in the last two centuries, I would fall in the territory marked ‘systematic theology’, rather than in those marked ‘biblical studies’, ‘historical theology’ or ‘practical theology’. Looking at such a map more closely, you might find me located downstream from my biblical studies colleagues, collecting and arranging the scriptural data that they have harvested. My distinctive task would be to build all that harvested material into a coherent structure – or to use it to repair and extend the structure I have inherited from earlier labourers in this territory, whose work is studied by the historical theologians. I would then hand over to my practical theology colleagues, who would ask how Christians today might inhabit the structure that I had helped to build. In recent decades, the criticism of such maps has become as familiar as the maps themselves, and this chapter will be no exception. The picture painted above does not do justice to the ways in which I hope for my work to be ‘systematic’; it doesn’t do justice to the ways in which my work relates to questions of ongoing Christian practice; it doesn’t even (quite) do justice to my relation to historical theology. Above all, however, it fails to correspond at all to the ways in which I, as systematic theologian, understand myself to relate to Scripture, or to the work of biblical scholars. How I do, instead, understand those relationships will take the rest of this chapter to explain, and my explanation is going to revolve around the idea of

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the ‘rule of faith’. That is because, as a systematic theologian, I understand my role to be that of investigating and elaborating the rule of faith. To understand the relationships in which my work stands to Scripture and to other forms of theological labour, I therefore need first to understand the relationships in which the rule of faith stands to those things. I will begin by sketching very briefly how Scripture and the rule of faith appear together in the life of the church. The rule of faith is, I will argue, not an imposition upon Scripture, but it is nevertheless a rule for the devout reading of Scripture, and it is only when read under this rule that Scripture is authoritative for the church. The twofold task of the systematic theologian is, I will then claim, to elaborate that rule (and so to elaborate the ways in which Scripture should be read in the life of the church), and to help restrain our collective attempts to stray beyond the rule. Finally, I will argue that, in pursuit of these tasks, the systematic theologian needs to be in constant unruly conversation with biblical scholars, with the contemporary practice of the church, and even with members of other faiths, and that those conversations are messy and their implications for systematic theology unpredictable.

Reading and the Rule of Faith The church was founded as a community of witnesses to Jesus. Whether you trace it to the commissioning of the women at the tomb in Mark 16.7, or to the Great Commission in Matthew 28.19-20, or the pentecostal commission promised in Acts 1.8, the church exists for the same purpose that John assigns to his gospel: to witness to those in and around it so that they ‘may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing … may have life in his name’ (Jn 20.30). The church’s relation to Scripture is governed by this purpose. When the church was founded, its scriptures were the existing Hebrew scriptures – but it was given, in its founding, a new relation to them. It was when, on the Emmaus road, the resurrected Jesus took his companions through ‘Moses and all the prophets’, and ‘interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’ (Lk 24.27) that those scriptures became Christian Scripture. And when these witnesses themselves went on to produce further texts, they were



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precisely texts of witness – and they became Christian Scripture precisely to the extent that they were recognized as faithful and true witnesses. 2 Timothy 3.16 famously says that ‘[a]ll scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching’, but that claim flaps emptily in the wind without the previous verse: these scriptures are useful for teaching insofar as they are ‘able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’. Later generations of the church, heirs to this beginning, do not simply inherit the text of Scripture on its own, as if they should ideally take from it only what it yields when read without presuppositions. We don’t receive this text cold and, upon reading it, discover a number of things, among which are some claims about Jesus. Rather, we inherit it accompanied by a rule, and the most basic form of that rule is this: It’s all about Jesus. Scripture is Scripture – it is inspired and useful for teaching, it is trustworthy and true, it is authoritative for Christian life – insofar as it witnesses to Jesus as Lord. Scripture is Scripture only insofar as it witnesses to Jesus as Lord. There are, of course, other ways of approaching this set of texts. One can, for instance, quite properly approach them as historical artefacts, and use them for the purpose of historical investigation. That is, however, a different task from the task of reading them as Christian Scripture, and there is no saying in advance or in principle how these two forms of reading might interact, or be of relevance to one another. Christians reading these texts as Scripture can only work out their relation to other practices of reading on the fly, as they pursue the ongoing task of discovering what it means to read these scriptures as witness to Jesus as Lord. That ongoing task – of discovering what it means to read these scriptures as a witness to Jesus as Lord – is where systematic or doctrinal theology comes in.

All for the sake of witness: The rule elaborated One way of understanding the early development of doctrine is to see it as the ongoing elaboration of the rule of faith as a rule for reading Scripture. That is, it is a process in which the animating questions are, first, what are the scriptures that witness to Jesus as Lord, and second, how may these scriptures be read together as a unified witness?

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The emergence, for instance, of the doctrine of creation in the second and third centuries is (at least in part) the story of the confirmation that the Hebrew Bible is to be read as witness to Jesus as Lord. That is, it is the confirmation that the church called to witness to Jesus as ‘the Messiah, the Son of God’ is called to witness to him as the Son of the God of Israel, who is the God of the whole world, and to witness to him as the fulfilment of Israel’s hope, which is hope for the whole of creation. This is not in any straightforward sense a deduction from Scripture, because it was a process bound up with establishment of the canon that constituted Scripture, but it bequeaths to Christians the ongoing task of reading the two testaments together, and it is tested, and in a sense authorized, by the ways in which it turns out to make sense to go on doing so. The emergence of the doctrine of Trinity was in turn (at least in part) the elaboration of a set of rules for taking this canon as a unified witness to Jesus as Lord. This unwieldy set of texts includes a bewildering variety of forms of ascription of saving action to different names or characters in the narrative. In the trinitarian debates, various ways of holding those ascriptions together as a unified witness were ruled out – such as those that tried to read it as the story of a single divine character, now appearing as Israel’s God, and now as Jesus. Instead, it was determined that these scriptural ascriptions can best be held together if they are seen as irreducibly attributable to three ‘characters’, that is three interrelated foci for the attribution of the unified divine action witnessed to in Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity is not so much a deduction from particular scriptures, as a framework for reading all of it together. It provides a complex way of holding the canon together as a unity, revolving around God’s gracious love for the world in Jesus. It is tested, and in a sense authorized, by the way in which it enables ongoing, fruitful reading of Scripture as witness to Jesus. That trinitarian development itself made necessary a further elaboration of the rule (and was itself only fully justified because it did allow this further clarification). On its own, the fourth-century doctrine of the Trinity, precisely as a framework for allocating ascriptions of action in Scripture, could be taken in such a way as to make a mess of the ascriptions of action to Jesus in the gospels. Either it could end up pulling those ascriptions apart until they were assigned to two different characters, or it could make it impossible to take



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fully seriously the range of patterns of action ascribed to the one character Jesus. The Chalcedonian solution can be read as proposing a pattern for allocating ascriptions that makes it possible to read the gospels as a witness to Jesus as Lord (as truly the subject of divine action) without any pressure to read them as something other than the story of a fully human life. Once again, this is a way of holding the scriptural witness together as a unified witness, and it is tested, and in a sense authorized, by the ways in which it enables fruitful ongoing reading of Scripture as witness. These are, of course, wholly inadequate sketches of doctrinal development – no more than pointers to ways in which one might begin to construe complex historical processes. I hope it might nevertheless be enough to indicate what I mean when I say that the development of doctrine can be understood as, in significant part, the development of rules for the devout reading of Scripture – the ongoing elaboration of the basic rule that Scripture is to be read as witness to Jesus as Lord. Doctrine provides a grammar of exegesis, a way of holding together as a unity the ongoing task of Christian reading. One of the tasks of a systematic theologian, as I understand it, is to seek to understand, to clarify, to re-present this history, and so to explore what it means to take the rule of faith as a rule – a framework, and only in that sense a ‘system’ – for reading Scripture. This is a significant part of what it means to understand doctrine: to learn what it means to read Scripture under doctrine’s tutelage.

Only for the sake of witness: The restraint of ruled reading There is a second aspect of my work as a systematic theologian, closely allied to the first, because the ongoing elaboration of the rule of faith as a rule for reading also involves the identification of forms of reading that are outside the purview of the rule. The motto for this process could be provided by 1 Corinthians 2.2: ‘I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ To put it starkly and negatively: where it does not witness to Jesus as Lord – where it does not contribute to filling out the central claim that God was, in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world to God’s self – Scripture is not

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authoritative. This is the sense in which I am, in the end, happy to call myself a systematic theologian: theology has one subject matter, and only one subject matter, and anything that cannot be shown to communicate that one subject matter does not belong. Let me explain what I mean a little further, by discussing an example that (whatever might be true elsewhere) is not a live question in my context. Consider Scripture’s teaching about creation. We are faced with the question: does Scripture authoritatively teach us that the earth was created some thousands of years ago, in a sequence aptly described by the opening chapter of Genesis? If we understand Scripture’s authority as the authority to witness to Jesus as Lord, I think we have to say that Scripture does not authoritatively teach us this. I do not think, however, that this is primarily because Genesis 1 is poetic in nature, so that some kind of genre mistake is being made by young-earth-creationist readings. My belief that Scripture does not authoritatively require us to be young earth creationists would not be overturned whatever new discoveries we made about the genres of ancient near eastern writings and their epistemological intents. Nor do I think that we are let off the creationist hook because these elements of the Genesis narrative are clearly culturally determined or conditioned – having to do with the way in which the message of the Bible is accommodated to its surrounding culture, rather than with the eternal heart of that message itself. I really don’t know how to make much sense of the attempt to divide what we find in Scripture into what is culturally determined or conditioned and what is not. No. The reason that I do not believe that the scriptures authoritatively teach us that the earth is young is because that claim is not germane to the gospel. If this were to be an authoritative Christian teaching, then as far as I can understand it, it would have to be an authoritative Christian teaching in addition to the gospel. We would have to say, in our catechesis, ‘Do you believe that, in Jesus, God was reconciling the world to God’s self – oh, and do you also believe that the earth was created some thousands of years ago?’ I can certainly see how the claim that God is creator of all that is, seen and unseen, is germane to the gospel. I have given, above, the very beginning of a sketch of how the doctrine of creation can be understood as a necessary elaboration of the basic rule of faith. To say ‘I believe in God … creator of heaven and earth’ therefore seems to me quite clearly to be part of what we



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need to say if we want to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ with full seriousness. But I cannot see how this further claim, about the timing and mechanism of creation, is a necessary elaboration of the rule of faith in the same way – however clearly I might think it stated in Scripture. To insist, therefore, that Christians be young earth creationists seems to me to amount to preaching something other than Jesus Christ, and him crucified. In other words: to take seriously Scripture’s authority as witness is to take seriously the question of what Scripture is not. Scripture is not a science textbook. That is not to say that Scripture says nothing that falls in the realm of what we might call science, nor even that Scripture authoritatively teaches nothing that pertains to what we call science. It simply means that the church is not required to approach Scripture asking the question, ‘What do we learn here about the structures and processes that govern the natural world?’ independently of asking what Scripture is teaching us about the lordship of Christ. As I say, in my context, the young-earth creationism debate is not a live one, and I can therefore fairly safely use it as an example. The issues become considerably sharper for me if I move on to questions about gender and sexuality. That is because, just as I want to say that the Bible is not a science textbook, so I want to say that it is not a moral textbook – at least, not a moral textbook independently of its witness to Jesus. So, for me, in my church’s debates about gender and sexuality, the question is not simply, ‘what messages about gender and sexual ethics can we find in Bible?’ It is not even, ‘what, if anything, does the Bible consistently say about these matters?’ It is certainly not, ‘what is culturally determined and what is not in what the Bible says about these matters?’ Rather, the question – the only question – is, ‘what is germane to the gospel in what Scripture says about gender and sexuality?’ What is authoritatively demanded of us in the realm of sexuality as we are schooled by the scriptures in saying ‘Jesus is Lord’, and what is not? For instance, at the point I have currently reached in my ongoing and unfinished thinking about these things, I can’t yet see how most of the claims about gender complementarity that I encounter in my church (claims that insist that men and women are by nature different in their gifts, aptitudes and callings) can be anything other than additions to the gospel, if we take them

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to be authoritative Christian teachings. That is, if they were to be authoritative for Christians it could only be because we said, in our catechesis, ‘You must believe that, in Jesus, God was reconciling the world to God’s self – oh, and you must also believe this other thing: that men and women have essentially complementary ways of being.’ This doesn’t tell me whether claims about gender complementarity are right or wrong, but it does mean that until I am shown how they are required by the gospel – how they are not an addition to it, but inherent to it – we must not treat them as binding Christian teaching. That claim is independent of the question of whether complementarian messages are present, widespread, or even consistent in Scripture. It is not wholly independent – because the more some form of complementarianism does turn out to be present, widespread or consistent in Scripture, the more I am forced to ask whether it is germane to the gospel – but the presence or prevalence of the idea in Scripture does not itself determine the answer to the question of what we must teach, any more than does the discovery that the scriptures persistently and consistently portray a geocentric universe.

Reading with others Determining what is and is not germane to the gospel is not easy. I do not think that the answers are at all obvious, whether in relation to the issues at stake in my church’s debates about gender and sexuality, or in relation to other telling debates in Christian life. And it is certainly not enough for me, as an individual theologian sitting in privileged isolation in my study, to ask whether these matters are germane to my personal understanding of the gospel. Rather, what is required is a corporate conversation – a serious and almost certainly painful conversation over Scripture – in which we look at how the teachings we have taken from Scripture do and don’t connect, and so discover whether we have been either adding to or taking away from the gospel. To be a systematic theologian is, in my understanding, to be called to facilitate that kind of conversation about connections. Systematic theology therefore needs to be animated by reading with others – especially reading with others who see differently the deep connections



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that might hold the materials of Scripture together. In the remainder of this chapter, I have identified three main kinds of conversation over Scripture that I have found myself engaged in over the years, pursued in different contexts and in different ways: conversation with historical critics; conversation with members of other faiths; and conversations about contemporary church teaching.

Reading with historical critics I do not believe there is any single or systematic answer to the question of how the approach to reading I have been advocating – reading the scriptures as witness to Jesus as Lord – relates to the readings of historical critics. Historical critics pursue many different kinds of reading, and any generalization can’t help but slip into caricature. There are, therefore, all sorts of aspects of engagement with historical criticism that I could touch on at this point. To the extent, for instance, that I read Scripture not simply as a free-floating text but as the witness of specific people to the human being Jesus of Nazareth, my claims about Scripture unavoidably include claims about what at least some of it meant in the contexts of its original reception and transmission. I could not treat those claims seriously without the help of historical critics. In the context of this chapter, however, I want to draw attention to two rather different aspects of my engagement with historical criticism, aspects especially relevant to the task of testing the connections that hold together reading of Scripture as a single activity, within the rule of faith. Precisely because exploring and testing these connections is part of my task as a systematic theologian, I find myself in conversation with forms of historical criticism for which the whole activity of making connections across the canon is precarious or suspicious. By reading the various texts of the Bible as artefacts that belong in specific, differing contexts, such criticism tends to draw attention to the local and particular. Where I might want to make connections between the patterns of activity ascribed to God in a prophetic text from the fifth century before Christ and a letter written in the first century after, such criticism will draw my attention to the vastly different political and cultural contexts of those texts, and ask whether the connections I see are more than wishful thinking. As one whose stock in trade is the making and

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testing of connections, attention to such questioning is a necessary discipline; it forces me to ask exactly what I am claiming when I make the connection, and what forms of testing are appropriate to those claims. Similarly, I find myself engaging with critics who draw attention to the ethics or politics of specific texts – often to the ways in which those texts are problematic. That forces upon me the question of whether and how those problematic meanings connect to the gospel – whether they are bound up in my ways of understanding and presenting the gospel, whether they are in some way unavoidably required by the gospel, or whether the gospel gives me somewhere to stand over against them. Engagement with such criticism is a proper and necessary discipline for systematic theology.33

Scriptural reasoning Most of my engagements with historical critics are mediated by their writings: I engage by reading their books and articles. I am also, however, regularly engaged in another set of conversations over Scripture, mostly conducted face to face. I have for ten years or more been involved in ‘scriptural reasoning’ conversations, in which small groups of Jews, Christians, and Muslims – and increasingly people of other faiths as well – meet to discuss extracts of their respective scriptures together. It is simplest, in the context of this chapter, to focus on the conversations with Jewish readers that are part of this process, because I already mentioned above the idea that the Hebrew scriptures are properly part of the canon of Christian scripture – yet we are by no means those texts’ only readers. We are faced with the question of how Christian readers of these texts will relate to their Jewish readers, and to the markedly different ways in which they read them. Participation in scriptural reasoning has allowed me to explore a particular kind of answer to that question. On the one hand, because members of scriptural reasoning groups are not required to agree (or to seek agreement) about I have explored these issues further in Mike Higton and Rachel Muers, The Text in Play: Experiments in Reading Scripture (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), Chs 1 and 7; Rachel Muers and Mike Higton, Modern Theology: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012), Ch. 10; Mike Higton, Christ, Providence and History: Hans W. Frei’s Public Theology (London: Continuum, 2004).

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what texts are authoritative, or about the kind of authority they have, or about how they should be read, I can participate in those conversations as someone who is committed to a Christian reading of texts of the Hebrew Bible – to reading them within the rule of Christian faith, as Old Testament witness to Jesus as Lord. On the other hand, reading alongside Jewish readers calls me not to deny in word or action, explicitly or implicitly, that they read these same texts too – and that they are as much their texts as mine. That of course means that my readings are not likely to be authoritative or even acceptable to my Jewish colleagues, and that their readings are not likely to be authoritative for me; we are engaged in different reading practices, with different rules. Nevertheless, because we are both committed within our rules to attending to how the words run, our readings together can’t help but be mutually challenging. Reading with someone who reads the same text differently, who asks questions about the connections that seem to me to be natural or proper to this text, and who insists that quite other connections should be made, is profoundly and productively unsettling. If one of my central tasks as a systematic theologian is precisely to explore and to test the connections that hold together the scriptures for Christians, these conversations are a rich resource – they draw me in to forms of re-examination and testing that I could not have reached on my own.34

Reading Together as a church The third set of conversations over Scripture in which I am engaged is the one most directly connected to my work as a systematic theologian. That is the set of conversations that take place within the church – conversations about what we as Christians can learn from Scripture, how we should live in response, and how we can handle the ways in which we give differing answers to these questions. These are conversations in which, at least in principle, we are all governed by the question, ‘What does obedience to Jesus as Lord demand?’ and our differences are differences in how to make sense of that question, and how to answer it.

See Higton and Muers, Text in Play, Chs 8, 9 and 12; and Mike Higton, ‘Scriptural Reasoning and the Discipline of Christian Doctrine’, Modern Theology 29 (2013): 120–37.

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Part of my task as a systematic theologian, especially in a church riven by deep conflicts in which the interpretation and use of Scripture is being fought over, is to try to facilitate these conversations. It is to delve into the construals of obedience – the identifications of what is and is not germane to the gospel, and why – that are present on all sides in our debates. This cannot, however, simply be a conversation of academic theologians or of our counterparts in the hierarchy of the church. It is a conversation that needs to look also to the lives of ordinary Christians around the world, because those lives are themselves a form of commentary upon the text of Scripture. Each way of living a faithful Christian life construes the gospel in a particular way. As such, each way of living a faithful Christian life displays connections, it articulates the rule of faith – and it does so in ways that I might not otherwise see. And just as can a patristic debate or a modern scholarly commentary, so these lives might teach me to break a connection I have habitually made, or to make a connection I have previously missed, and might teach me either a way in which obedience to the rule of faith can be construed, or (at times) a way in which, once it has become visible, the rule of faith now demands to be construed. (So, I might ask: how have gender identities and relations been lived by Christians, and how are they being lived? Does attending to those lives help me to see what is germane to the gospel in this area? Do they send me back to Scripture to re-articulate what I find there?) My task as a systematic theologian, as I seek to elaborate the rule of faith, and to explore the limits of what it demands, is therefore properly also a descriptive task, attending to and taking seriously the grammars of Christian faith lived out by others, around the world, who live it differently – and whose ways of construing the rule of faith challenge mine just as much as mine might challenge theirs. It is a task in which attending to the lives and to the readings of others should send me back again and again to Scripture, to examine the way in which I have understood its witness. And it is in this give and take, in the ongoing conversation of members of the Body of Christ about their obedience to their head, that Christian reading of Scripture properly belongs.35

See Mike Higton, ‘The Ecclesial Body’s Grace: Obedience and Faithfulness in Rowan Williams’ Ecclesiology’, Ecclesiology 7 (2011): 7–28.

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Scripture in liturgy and theology Stephen R. Holmes

From pulpit to lectern: Locating my own journey I studied theology first in preparation for pastoral ministry; I had, then, no thought of forging an academic career. I took ordination vows assuming that my future lay in pastoring a local Baptist congregation. Although my vocation led me to an academic role, at least in terms of my paid employment, I have rarely been out of local church leadership, and I still see what I do as a way of fulfilling my ordination vows. Perhaps because of this personal context my first answer to the question of how I use Scripture as a theologian is simple: I preach it, and I pray it. I engage Scripture most intensely and most intentionally in preparing for sermons, and I engage Scripture most often in reading lections as a part of my devotional discipline. I want to insist that this primary engagement is not irrelevant to my use of Scripture in my explicitly academic work, but I acknowledge that the relationship is far from straightforward, and I reflect that I have not previously identified the connections, either in writing or in my own thinking. I confess that my direct work with the texts – preaching, leading Bible studies, and so on – has been disconnected from my more straightforwardly academic work, and I have been uncomfortably aware of this disconnect, without really knowing how to solve it. At one level, I might evade the question: most of my serious academic work so far has been historical in nature, and so my academic engagement with Scripture has been at one remove: reflecting on how Jonathan Edwards (e.g.) engaged with Scripture is easy; whilst I might be personally challenged by

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his example, I do not need to evaluate it in working historically in describing his theological methodology. In a recent book on the doctrine of the Trinity, I identified a certain exegetical deficit in trinitarian theology, but did not feel the need to offer any corrective proposals; the book was working in historical mode.1 That said, at a deeper level the question is obviously not evadable: I work as a theologian; I make, from time to time, constructive claims; those claims must bear some relation to the Bible. Further, my work has led me repeatedly to reflect on the way the Bible is used in the ecclesial communities to which I belong, and the theological claims that must be true for those patterns of use to be proper.2 In particular, I have, in different ways, repeatedly suggested that the perspicuity, or clarity, of Scripture is a necessary doctrine. Theology in a recognisably Reformed tradition requires a confession of the availability of the plain sense of Scripture; Baptist practices of church government require the belief that church members gathered in prayerful assembly have some sort of privileged access to Scripture. Such reflections could suggest, and have often been taken to suggest, that stressing perspicuity and ecclesial reading in an account of the nature of Biblical authority somehow removes, or seriously reduces, the need for scholarship. I feel the force of such a criticism whilst wanting to resist it; I have had it urged on me, occasionally fairly angrily, by fellow academics when I have presented these ideas in conferences or seminars. I believe one of the advantages of the account of the relation of theology to Scripture that I outline below is its ability to hold on to the primacy of ecclesial readings of Scripture, and also to a proper account of the perspicuity of Scripture, whilst retaining a necessary and central place for serious scholarly activity – which, of course, has always been native to Christian ecclesial existence, and so must not be excluded from a responsible account of how Scripture is used in the churches. So, my history, my present personal engagement with the Bible, and my theological commitments all suggest that a certain primacy should be granted Stephen R. Holmes, The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Life (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012), see esp. Ch. 2. 2 See, for example, Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Evangelical Doctrines of Scripture in Transatlantic Perspective: The 2008 Laing Lecture’, Evangelical Quarterly LXXXI (2009) 38–63; ‘Baptists and the Bible’, Baptist Quarterly 43 (2010): 410–27; ‘Kings, Professors, and Ploughboys: On the Accessibility of Scripture’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 13 (2011): 403–15. 1



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to the ecclesial use of Scripture. The Bible is most properly heard, and best understood, in the context of Christian worship. What does this imply for the use of the Bible in theology – and how has my own work exemplified that? In what follows, I first trace the necessary implications of this recognition, then discard a possible account of systematic theology as merely the orderly arrangement of biblical propositions, before suggesting that some of the historical work I have done highlights the possibility of a richer and more interesting account of how the work of the systematic theologian might relate to the text of Scripture.

The angularity of scripture In writing about the Bible, one of my concerns has repeatedly been to emphasize the sheer strangeness of the text we have received. To speak of ‘Scripture’ is already to make a difficult – and disputed3 – doctrinal decision, that those books accorded canonical status in some way belong together in a class which excludes all other writings. In employing the term we claim that, somehow, Leviticus and Daniel belong with Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in a way that Clement’s First Letter to the Corinthians does not; this is surely counter-intuitive (indeed, much contemporary academic biblical scholarship in practice appears to refuse this claim). Whichever canon we choose, the books collected do not have any straightforward commonalities that would propose their belonging together;4 we are not collecting all the books by a particular author, or from a particular community, or addressing a particular theme, for instance. Nonetheless, this point precedes any material content we give to the doctrine of Scripture: a claim that the attributes shared by books in this class have the quality of ‘authority’ or ‘inerrancy’ or ‘perspicuity’ or whatever requires the establishment of the class to be even worthy of consideration. The strangeness of this claim points towards my first thesis in this chapter: Scripture is, in its very nature, resistant to systematization. These texts are awkward and angular; they do not fit straightforwardly together into any In that different Christian traditions hold to somewhat different canons of Scripture. Of course, defences of the class have been offered, most famously perhaps by Calvin, Inst. I.vii.

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neat arrangement. We have different genres, developing thoughts, visible arguments, apparent blind alleys, responses to questions we cannot reconstruct, and impenetrable references (such as the urim and thummim, or baptism for the dead). It is not impossible, certainly, to collate claims made in these disparate texts and to present them as an orderly system, but it is difficult to argue that this is a natural way of dealing with the texts that come to us as Scripture. Indeed, when we look at intertextuality in the biblical books – how Scripture uses Scripture – we do not find any real effort at systematization. Rather, we find imaginative deployments of complex intertextual connections, with which, we might argue, scholarship is only just coming to terms. ‘Intertextuality’ is a term originating in French poststructuralism, capturing in its most radical sense the idea that every text, new or old, is merely bricolage, a stitching together of words that have already been said.5 In recent literary criticism, however, the full implications of such a radical claim have been resisted; ‘intertexuality’ tends to refer either to the tracing of historical influences on a text (‘diachronic intertextuality’), or to the discovery of textual echoes and patterns between texts that, although not indicative of any relationship of dependence, are instructive in discovering meaning in the text (‘synchronic intertextuality’).6 Biblical scholarship has embraced the term, particularly within the rise of canonical criticism, but has generally focused on diachronic intertextuality, which is an obvious development within the historical-critical method.7 The creative ways of combining texts that are I believe the term was coined by Kristeva; the most famous developments are Barthes’s announcement of the ‘death of the author’ and Derrida’s assertion that ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ and ‘The Bounded Text’, both collected in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (trans. Thomas Gora; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 64–91, 36–63; Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text (trans. Stephen Heath; New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142–8; Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967), 227–8. 6 There are of course practices that fit this definition of ‘synchronic intertexuality’ that are longestablished and entirely unremarkable. Even lexical work, examining the use of a particular term in the relevant historical period, can fit the definition. That said, the practice is usually rather more adventurous (‘playful’) and contestable than this. 7 Niall McKay, ‘Status Update: The Many Faces of Intertextuality in New Testament Study’, Religion and Theology 20 (2013): 84–106 (89): ‘Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the language of intertextuality continued to act as a convenient placeholder for questions of allusion and influence.’ See also the discussion in Will Kynes, ‘Intertextuality: Method and Theory in Job and Psalm 119’, in Katherine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce (eds), Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 201–13 (201–6); and the various essays in Richard B. Hays, Stefan Aikier and Leroy A. Huizenga (eds), Reading the Bible Intertexually (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009). 5



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visible in Hebrews, the textual allusions that fill the gospels, and particularly the complex redeployment of other biblical symbols in Revelation each look far more like some of the more daring practices of synchronic intertextuality, however. It is sometimes proposed that the task of theology is, fundamentally, the collection and orderly arrangement of biblical data (see, for example, Charles Hodge8), and this proposal is held by its advocates to be treating the Bible with particular seriousness and reverence. But to impose a wholly foreign systematization on texts that not only do not demand it but seem actually to resist it is hardly treating those texts with ‘seriousness and reverence’! A theological method like this seems often to hover very close to the claim that Scripture is the wrong shape, and so the theologian’s task is to reshape it into what it always should have been in the first place; I prefer to believe that the triune God’s act of self-revelation through the inspiration of the prophets and apostles resulted in the right text, not the wrong one. To develop my thesis somewhat: Scripture is intentionally resistant to systematization. By introducing intention here I am of course making a claim about the origin of Scripture, about what is usually termed ‘inspiration’: the strange class of books that we call ‘Scripture’ are in some way what they are through divine action. It is this shared origin in divine action that makes them a class. As soon as we make a claim about divine intention, however, the problem of the angularity and awkwardness of Scripture becomes even more acute. We claim that God intended the strange and complex library that we term the Bible; God could have intended otherwise, and (for example) provided a clear and straightforward system of theological propositions, neatly ordered, lucid, and complete. God did not. The fact of the angularity and strangeness of Scripture, then, suggests either that we must abandon any claim to divine intentionality in the origin of these texts, or that we must accept that systematization is not their only proper end. The biblical texts, that is, demand more than merely being mined for doctrinal Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (3 vols; London: T. Nelson, 1871), 18: ‘If natural science be concerned with the facts and laws of nature, theology is concerned with the facts and the principles of the Bible. If the object of the one be to arrange and systematize the facts of the external world, and to ascertain the laws by which they are determined; the object of the other is to systematize the facts of the Bible, and ascertain the principles or general truths which those facts involve.’

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propositions that are then re-ordered in a better way. We cannot propose that Scripture has its final end in dogmatic system.

The proper use of Scripture What, then, should we propose as the final end of Scripture? Phenomeno­ logically, the answer is clear in outline, if disputed in detail: Scripture is to be read in public worship. The purpose of these books is either to form the centre of the liturgy of the church (in a more Reformed understanding), or at least to play a significant part in that liturgy. As I say, this is a phenomenological claim, not a theological one; I am not arguing that this is what Scripture should be, or that this is its core inner nature, merely that this is, observably, its normative context.9 (No doubt my own history makes me particularly willing to accept this observation, but I believe it is something that should be accepted by anyone reflecting on the place of the Bible in Christianity.) I am making a similar point here to that made by Jenson: ‘The volume we call the Bible is a collection of documents. The single book exists because the church in her specific mission assembled a certain selection of documents … Saying this, I mean something commonsensical, that should not ignite theological argument …’10 Levering has argued that the most frequent references to ‘Scripture’ in Scripture come precisely in liturgical contexts; as he puts it ‘Scripture envisions itself as primarily being read and interpreted liturgically’.11 This claim is significant for the work of the theologian: the theologian’s task is primarily to explore the faith confessed by the churches (and secondarily In this sense I agree with my colleague John Webster’s cautions about doctrines of Scripture that make its ecclesial location the core fact of its ontology; Scripture is read in the church because it is Scripture – the place (again, pre-empting my argument) of divine self-revelation. I am claiming that the nature of God’s self-revelation in Scripture is such that its basic, normative, form is communal reading in the context of worship; I am also claiming that this fact is important in our understanding of the nature of Scripture and its relation to theology. I suppose Webster might agree with the former point; I suspect he would disagree with the latter. See John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7–8; see also Matthew Levering’s engagement with Webster on this point in Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel through Church and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 60–74. 10 Robert W. Jenson, ‘Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church’, in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds), Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 89–105 (89). 11 Levering, Engaging the Doctrine, 75, summarizing his discussion on 70–4. 9



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to offer modest points of correction, explication, or development of that same faith); the faith of the churches is primarily expressed in worship; so the theologian must be attentive to implicit liturgical claims to do her work well. This is not, of course, to abandon truth claims; it is to insist that theological truth claims are made more properly in worship than in an academic seminar. Worship is (to borrow a phrase) first-order theology; systematics, even at its best, is only ever second-order. This observation helps to advance the line of argument I am developing. If liturgical reading is the proper end of Scripture, then we should not expect the biblical texts to be particularly amenable to systematization, because texts read in public worship will not, generally, be systematized. In preaching, or in the attentive minds of worshippers, or indeed in liturgical items such as prayers or songs, there will be much space for the drawing of imaginative intertextual connections, but the activity of systematization is non-native in this context. As a preacher, I might occasionally engage in a certain level of ad hoc systematization – demonstrating that this passage does not contradict the one we read last week, for instance – but my primary work is the application of piecemeal truths, not their arrangement. Just as I suggested for the Bible’s own self-citation, diachronic intertextuality is not absent from the liturgical hearing of Scripture (classically and obviously in prophecy-fulfilment pairings of Old Testament and New Testament texts, around Christmas and Pentecost for example), but synchronic hearing is, I suggest, far more native to the process. The work of pre-critical interpreters (Jewish and Christian), who offered playful and imaginative combining of disparate texts that happened to use the same word or phrase to develop creative, often startling, readings, looks far more faithful to the practice of liturgical reading than the leaden systematization of Hodge’s less-capable disciples. That is to say, the practice of liturgical reading does imply or impose some form of harmonization or unification on the disparate texts so read. The distinction between ‘imply’ and ‘impose’ here is not inconsiderable, but also not relevant to my argument. Either these texts inevitably belong together, and in choosing to read them together in liturgy the churches are merely recognizing an antecedent unity, or the church in choosing these texts, and not others, to read in liturgy is imposing a unity on them. This distinction

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corresponds to Jenson’s Protestant/Catholic distinction12 – although his is perhaps more happily phrased in recognizing that what is at stake is difference of emphasis, not absolute disjunction. On either side, the outcome is the same.13 What is this unity or harmony? Jenson proposes two things: first, that it is an achievement, not a given, depending for success on well-constructed liturgy, and second that it is an enactment of the gospel: ‘If our liturgy accurately and richly enacts the gospel, then within it, Scripture will say to us what God intends it to say.’14 I am somewhat less convinced of the absolute power of poorly-constructed liturgy to eviscerate the Scriptures than this quotation seems to imply; more seriously, perhaps, I am unsure that, without further specification, ‘the gospel’ is an adequate criterion here. There are many competing accounts of the nature of ‘the gospel’; it may be that different liturgies are ordered around attempts to makes the biblical texts announce these different gospels, but that road leads inevitably to a theological relativism which I cannot accept. We know that the organizing principle for Biblical reading proposed by the earliest leaders of the church was the regula fidei, the ‘rule of faith’.15 Although somewhat fluid in statement, the regula fidei was fixed in form: triadic, speaking of Father, Son, and Spirit; and proposing a unifying narrative of salvation. The Valentinians and others were wrong, Irenaeus argued, in part because they saw in the story of Jesus a reversal, not a continuation and consummation, of the story of Israel; their proposal went against the basic soteriological narrative of the regular fidei.16 As time goes on, we see the regula Jenson, ‘Hermeneutics’, 89. For myself, committed to the basic reality of Scripture as the place of God’s self-revelation, I stand firmly on the ‘Protestant’ side here: the unity of these texts is a result of divine action, inspiration. I make the point in the way I do to point out that my argument does not depend on my Reformed convictions at this point. 14 Jenson, ‘Hermeneutics’, 91 (emphasis original). 15 See, variously, Henri Blocher, ‘The Analogy of Faith in the Study of Scripture’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 5 (1987): 17–38; P. M. Blowers, ‘The “Regula Fidei” and the Narrative Character of Early Christian Faith’, Pro Ecclesia 6 (1997): 199–228; Paul Gavrilyuk, ‘Scripture and the Regular Fidei: Two Interlocking Components of the Canonical Heritage’, in William J. Abraham, Jason E. Vickers and Natalie B. Van Kirk (eds), Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 27–42; B. Hägglund, ‘Die Bedeutung der “reglua fide” als Grundelage theologischer Aussagen’, Studia Theologica 12 (1958): 1–44; Zdravko Jovanovic, ‘St Irenaeus, Regula Fidei, and the Ecclesiological Context of Interpretation’ Philotheos 13 (2013): 134–40; and Eric Osborn, ‘Reason and the Rule of Faith in the Second Century AD’, in Rowan Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 40–61. 16 I suppose from his other writings that when Jenson speaks of ‘the gospel’ he means precisely this 12 13



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fidei concretized in the creeds of the church,17 creeds which are still recited in at least some Christian liturgies today. Now, the creeds have been extensively criticized recently precisely for their failure to instantiate the sort of narrative of salvation that I am arguing for here,18 so I should pause at this point to defend the coherence of my argument. I suggest that the focus on liturgy I have been developing offers a good response to the point. Consider a fairly standard liturgical shape for morning prayer in the Western tradition: it begins with invocation and confession and proceeds as follows: Psalmody Old Testament Lesson Canticle (generally from Old Testament) followed by the Gloria Patri New Testament Lesson Canticle: sometimes from New Testament (e.g. Magnificat); sometimes from the early church (e.g. Te Deum) Gospel reading Apostles’ Creed The Lord’s Prayer, petition, intercession, and closing sentences follow.

The liturgy begins, after confession, with participation in Israel’s worship (psalmody and the Old Testament canticle) and a hearing of an excerpt from Israel’s story (the Old Testament lesson). It moves on to a hearing of the Church’s story and participation in the Church’s worship (New Testament lesson and canticle), and culminates with a hearing of events from the life of Jesus (the Gospel reading) and the recitation of the creed. In a liturgy like this, the creed offers a framing narrative for the biblical stories that have been read, and for the biblical worship that has been offered. Its recitation can be understood to be the liturgical claim/explanation, ‘You have joined in the sort of unified soteriological narrative, and so I am not disagreeing with him here; my point is merely that to speak of ‘the gospel’ without definition is inadequate. 17 Historically speaking, this is a considerable over-simplification; of course. The regula fidei sits alongside baptismal confessions as summaries of faith; the baptismal confessions, being liturgically located, tend towards fixity of formulation; from these formulations we derive the great creeds. That said, it is the same accepted narrative faith that is being summarized. See Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds (London: SCM, 2002). 18 Such criticisms have come variously from Biblical theologians noticing the omission of the story of Israel from the creeds; from New Testament scholars lamenting the lack of any mention of the life and ministry of Jesus, the central subject of the gospels, in the creeds; and from neo-anabaptist theologians arguing that the centre of Christian faith is an ethical practice of discipleship, living in imitation of the Jesus of the Gospels.

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worship of Israel and the Church, and heard of their stories; now be reminded that the God to whom Israel and the Church offer worship is properly named as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the stories you have heard are brief chapters in a larger story that runs from creation to “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”; you have heard a brief tale of the winsome wonder of Jesus; know that this tale is part of a larger story that runs from birth from a Virgin by the Spirit’s power, through cross, grave, resurrection, and ascension, to a coming return to judge the living and the dead.’ The creed, that is, does not mention the story of Israel, the story of Jesus, or the story of the church, because it serves to frame and give context to these stories as they are slowly read and heard in the liturgy of the church. I argue therefore that the liturgical use of the biblical texts – which, I have suggested, is their normative location – proposes a fundamental narrative unity into which these texts fit.19 This location within a particular narrative unity is therefore determinative for reading them correctly.20 In writing this, I do not mean to align myself with some of the rather tired generalizations about the superiority of narrative theology over systematic theology that emerged from the aftermath of the genuinely creative work of the Yale School; rather I am making the specific point that, given the native liturgical location of biblical reading, the proper native unity of the various texts of Scripture is within a trinitarian soteriological narrative, not within the construction of a system.

Rightly relating system to Scripture What, then, is the relation of specifically systematic theology to the biblical texts, if it is not the organization of truths found in the biblical texts? I propose that it is the imaginative proposal of concepts and distinctions which, once believed, allow the biblical texts to be taken with increasing seriousness. What of less formal liturgies – such as those of my own, Free Church and charismatic, traditions? Here the sermon fulfils the role of locating the reading within the broader narrative of salvation, and of applying that narrative to the gathered congregation. The emphasis on preaching in such traditions is right: the sermon needs to do significant work to locate the text read in the broader narrative of salvation, and then to apply it to the gathered congregation. 20 For a defence of how this idea of normed reading can sit alongside a commitment to sola scriptura, see Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), 95–116. 19



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I derive this understanding first from considering some historical data on the fourth-century trinitarian debates.21 As is clear to any attentive reader of the primary sources, and as has been highlighted very helpfully by a new wave of secondary literature,22 the fourth-century debates were essentially and irreducibly exegetical. The exegesis, however, rapidly reached a series of impasses: the pro-Nicene theologians had texts which seemed to offer indubitable support for their position (‘I and the Father are one’, Jn 10.30); the anti-Nicene theologians had texts which seemed just as compelling on their side (‘The Father is greater than I’, Jn 14.28). Visibly, the advances made – on both sides of the argument – came when a particular writer stepped back from the immediate exegetical task to propose a distinction or a conceptual development that allowed Scriptures to be heard differently. The easiest example comes in Book IX of Hilary of Poitiers’ De Trinitate:23 borrowing language from the Christ-hymn of Philippians 2, Hilary suggests a proto-Christological distinction, that some texts speak of the divine Son ‘in the form of God’ and others of the divine Son ‘in the form of a slave’. This allows him to take a text like John 14.28 with full seriousness, without compromising on his commitment to pro-Nicene doctrine.24 Now, because Hilary borrows his language from Philippians 2, this example could be seen merely as ‘allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture’; this would be a mis-reading, however: Hilary has proposed a rule for exegesis which is nowhere explicit, certainly, in Scripture, even if he has borrowed scriptural language (and a scriptural distinction) to propose it. Elsewhere he follows the same procedure with far less straightforward biblical backing: in Book VII, he introduces two conceptual developments (both borrowed, but creatively, from

The deep roots of this conception of the work of systematic theology are thus in my historical work on the Trinity. That said, in my Holy Trinity I did not formulate the point explicitly. I work it out in some detail in my response chapter, ‘In Praise of Being Criticised’ in Jason S. Sexton and Thomas A. Noble (eds), The Holy Trinity Revisited: Essays in Response to Stephen R. Holmes (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2015), 137–55, esp. 138–43. 22 See particularly Lewis Ayres, Nicea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 23 There are two good critical editions; I have used G. Pelland (ed.), La Trinité (SC 462; Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1999). 24 For a general introduction to Hilary’s exegesis, see Jean Doignon, Hilaire de Poitiers: Disciple et témoin de la vérité (Paris: Études Austiniennes, 2005); on his exegesis in De Trin. specifically, see Charles Kannengiesser, ‘L’exégèse d’Hilaire’, in Hilaire et son Temps (Paris: Études Austiniennes, 1969), 127–42, and Mark Weedman, The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 119–35. 21

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recent Greek theology), which, he claims, will enable his exegesis to approach much more nearly to the divine mystery than it has up to that point. One concerns a distinction in names: some are merely arbitrary; others express the nature of a thing. The other concerns a developed conceptuality of eternal generation, focusing on the shared nature of that which is born, which allows him at the same time to insist on the real existence of the Son, and to refuse any account of subordination. As he returns to the direct exegetical work, these theological distinctions allow him to read a wider selection of texts straightforwardly without compromising his pro-Nicene commitments (see especially the extended reading of Proverbs 8 in Book XII, which can hear the text speaking of Lady Wisdom, whom Hilary identifies with the divine Son, as ‘created’ and the ‘first of his [God’s] works’, without denying the plain meaning of the text, and without compromising on Nicene doctrine). Hilary’s reflections on names are interesting, in that similar reflections drive the developments in anti-Nicene exegesis. We can see this even in his own work: the discussion of divine names in Book XII of De Trin. which I have just referenced in fact shows some further conceptual clarification from the discussion in Book VII. Hilary withdraws from his claim that certain names directly express the nature of a thing, instead suggesting that such names as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are analogical, and that the limits of analogy need to be respected. We know that Aetius was coming to prominence around the time Hilary was finishing De Trin., and that a theory of how names correspond to things was near the heart of the theology of Aetius (and his more famous successor Eunomius); it is tempting to assume that Hilary was responding to something like Aetius’s theory in his clarifications in Book XII. Aetius argued that names correspond to essences in a one-one mapping.25 (Obviously, this theory has its deep roots in the Cratylus, but probably the direct influence in Iamblichus.26) The proper name of God is ‘the ingenerate’; the Son, being generate, is something ontologically other than God. Again,

See L. R. Wickham, ‘The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean’, JTSNS 19 (1968): 532–69, for an edition of the text and much helpful discussion. On this see Jean Daniélou, ‘Eunome l’Arien et l’exégèse platonicienne du Cratyle’, Revue D’Études Grecques 69 (1956): 412–32, and Lenka Karfíková, ‘Der Ursprung der Sprache nach Eunomius und Gregor von dem Hintergrund der Antiken Sprachtheorien’, in Lenka Karfíková, Scott Douglass, and Johannes Zachhuber (eds), Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium II: An English Version with Supporting Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 279–305, esp. 279–85.

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this is a conceptual clarification that is proposed to make exegesis easier; Aetius ends his brief technical discussion of language and ontology with the comment: He who is per se ingenerate Deity, who therefore is the sole true God and is so addressed by Jesus Christ whom he sent, Christ who really existed before the ages and who really is of begotten substance, this God will keep you in strength, men and women, free from false religion in Christ Jesus our Saviour, through whom be all glory to God the Father both now and always and unto all eternity. Amen.27

Hilary’s invocation of analogy is an attempt to avoid the exegetical results of an argument that is at least very like Aetius’s; Basil of Caesarea’s invocation of the category of epinoia – ‘mental construction’ – for theological statements is a similar response to Eunomius. For all three writers, the construction of a technical theory of names was an attempt to propose rules by which the seemingly-disparate Biblical texts might be heard to speak in concert. I have argued, then, that the work that we would now name ‘systematic’ in the fourth century was not an attempt to construct a logical edifice out of the texts of Scripture, so much as an attempt to imagine what must be true for every text of Scripture to be taken as true in plain sense. Systematic theology, that is, is not a task of building on top of Scripture – building a system up taking the various biblical claims as axiomatic – so much as a task of building beneath Scripture – constructing an underlying set of conceptions and distinctions that allows the whole of Scripture to be taken seriously without resort to hermeneutical gymnastics. Now, I have constructed this account using only one historical example, albeit a fairly central one; I have a work in preparation suggesting that it is a useful and generative way of understanding the particular role of systematic theology in relation to Scripture in the context of other historical debates, whether illuminating the nature of the historical discussion or suggesting a better way forward than was in fact achieved in the historical debates. I propose nonetheless that this is the way systematic theology should relate to Scripture: constructing the necessary concepts and distinctions that allow every text of Scripture to be heard as simply true in what it asserts. Wickham, ‘The Syntagmation’, 549.

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Basil argued against Eunomius that theological claims are all epinoia; the Greek term captures a sense of creative and imaginative intellectual construction, which endeavour seems to me to be at the heart of the work of the systematic theologian. That creativity, however, should not be a flight away from Scripture, or even a building, however brilliant, upon biblical axioms; rather it is a modest work of exploring foundations, demonstrating how the faith implied in the liturgy of the church, where Scripture is read and joyfully asserted to be an authoritative act of divine self-disclosure, is in fact intellectually plausible. Systematic theology, that is, is no more, but no less, than the work needed to confirm that the proper liturgical response to the daring claim ‘This is the Word of the Lord’ is in fact the response ‘Thanks be to God!’

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Gathering gifts under gunfire: A feminist use of Scripture Lisa Isherwood

The central question of this volume concerns the place of Scripture in contemporary theological work and in the case of this chapter in feminist theological work. Feminist theology covers a broad approach and so in this chapter I will refer to my own use of Scripture as a feminist, liberation theologian. The title gives away some of my position which is that we should not, as some have suggested,1 throw away the texts because they have been extremely harmful to women but equally we should not forget that using them does require caution. It is clear then that the texts are not considered to be authored by the hand of God but rather are understood to be reflections on life and the role of the divine in it by largely male authors. Some scholarship has suggested that certain texts may have been written by women but this is contested and the number of possible texts is very small. Male authorship alone does not mean the texts cannot be used by women but does require that it be taken into account when reading them. Not only the authorship but also the selection of the canon and interpretation of the texts has been in the hands of men. Many would argue that despite women’s contribution to scholarship within the churches the assumed male possession of texts continues and the Word is still understood as male. As Mary Daly so forcefully stated while God is male then in the world the male is God.2 This has underpinned many of the legal, political and social arrangements in our culture and in many cases placed women historically on the back foot. The daughters of Eve are never quite rid Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (London: The Women’s Press, 1973). Ibid., 25.

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of that biblical heritage which affects their lives in diverse ways across cultures and across the centuries. While Christianity has never claimed that God was literally male the Hellenistic underpinning has led to many assumptions about the nature of God and normative humanity. There has been an unspoken, yet enacted, androcentric bias, which has reduced the place of women and men in the world holding them as it does to very outmoded and reductive notions of humanness. Rosemary Radford Ruether points out that there was a time when God was far more encouraging in terms of our own freedom, the business of reminding us of our divinity included putting down the mighty, releasing captives and vindicating the oppressed. She says, ‘if he could be it again he would free slaves, include Gentiles and perhaps even women!’3 Ruether is quite confident that it can happen again, because with the death of Jesus, the heavenly ruler has left the heavens and been poured out on the earth. ‘A new God is being born in our hearts to teach us to level the heavens and exalt the earth and create a new world without masters and slaves, rulers and subjects.’4 There can be no claiming of divinity for anyone while injustice and inequality stalk the earth. Ruether is keen to unleash the human potential bound by patriarchy because a tradition that promised a prophetic liberating tradition cannot be left in the hands of its manipulators and made into a static set of ideas. This feminist liberation optimism about human nature is biblically based in that God created all things and saw they were very good (Gen. 1.31). The fundamental goodness that is understood to be part of human nature can be used to transform dehumanizing situations and the reason we would want to use our fundamental natures in this way is because we acknowledge all people are part of the human/divine world that Christianity declares, so working for justice is understood as a co-redemptive activity. Within the framework of feminist liberation theology, therefore, it is not possible to speak of ‘pure faith’ since a faith without a social commitment is seen as empty. An implicit assumption then is that Scripture reading should enhance human potential and creativity and encourage action that is dedicated to the flourishing of all

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God Talk (London: SCM, 1983), 3. Ibid., 11.

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rather than be an activity that simply enhances private spiritual sensibilities and ensures personal salvation. In Western feminist theology Rosemary Ruether was amongst the first of those who declared that Christ was best understood as a liberator and following from that Christianity should be understood as a religion dedicated to liberation, not in the spiritual sense but in real terms in the political and social realm. Aware, as she is, of the demands for justice in the world she nevertheless set out a biblically based argument for an understanding of Jesus as liberator. She clearly demonstrates how the Christ of Judeo-Christian tradition was a radical liberative figure. Ruether wished to take seriously the Jewish roots of Christianity and Christian thinking and so was not prepared to merely brush over Hebraic messianic thought with the gloss of Greek metaphysics. Central to Jewish messianic hope was political action, since for the Jews religious and political life was synonymous. Even when their ideas around the Kingdom became more transcendent they never lost sight of the importance of politics. The Messianic Kingdom was one with its feet planted deeply in the earth; it was political and social. She argued that Jesus did not appear to accept such a hierarchical scheme and evoke Davidic Kingly hopes, rather he praised the lowly and outcasts for responding to his message while the reigning authorities stayed encapsulated in their systems of power. Further, he did not envisage the Kingdom as otherworldly, nationalistic and elitist.5 He saw it come on earth when basic needs were met and people could live in harmony. In this new community we would not simply be servants but brothers and sisters, thus replacing the old idea of the patriarchal family and its inevitable inequalities (Mt. 10.37‑38, 12.46‑50; ­Lk. 8.19‑21). Jesus also declared that God was not speaking in the past but rather speaking now to challenge the law and its outdated, life‑stifling interpretations (Jn 4.10, 8.4‑11; Mt. 9.10‑13, 18‑22, Mk 2.23‑28). Ruether argues that once we see Jesus in this light we find a Redeemer for women. She says: Jesus, restores a sense of God’s prophetic and redemptive activity taking place in the present‑future, through people’s experiences and the new possibilities disclosed through those possibilities. To encapsulate Jesus himself as God’s “last word” and “once for all” disclosure of God, located in a remote past and Ruether, Sexism And God-Talk, 120.

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institutionalised in a cast of Christian leaders is to repudiate the spirit of Jesus and to recapitulate the position against which he himself protests.6

Against this background the everyday experiences of women become valuable as disclosers of the divine redemptive process, rather than expressions of alienating ‘otherness’. Ruether argues that the disciples had not expected such a denouncement of their messianic hopes and patriarchal expectations and so they began to turn Jesus into a doctrine rather than risk embracing the event of eternal liberation.7 By now then I hope it is clear who I read Scripture with in order to expand a more just and inclusive world. Western feminists have learnt a hard lesson which is that we tend to see the world from ‘our place’ which despite what we may argue is a second class position within our societies historically it is nevertheless a place of white privilege. So, over the years the reading community of women has expanded and become more diverse, lending a richer flavour to the use of texts and a much wider vista in which to understand the call for justice and liberation which it is assumed Jesus stood for. Further, women take authority in their communal reading. This is not authority to dictate the final meaning of a text but rather authority within their own lives and experiences that they bring to the text against which they ‘test’ it. That is to say they consider the potential within the text for liberation within their lives and the lives of those within the reading community. Reading the text then is usually for feminist liberation theologians a ‘second act’ just as it was for our liberation theology forefathers. This is to say the lived experience of women is considered and the scriptural texts are then examined to see if they offer modes of liberation that are based in this world. In order to aid the reading women do not always first turn to biblical scholars. They may well read the texts in the light of economists, sociologists, psychologists or cultural theorists because the religious meaning of a text is understood to be in its life changing force, not simply in the tale it is considered to tell about a distant God. This is not unlike the Latin American fathers of liberation reading who, when faced with dehumanizing poverty, read alongside economists and political theorists in order to find a liberating understanding. Ruether, Sexism and God Talk, 122. Ibid., 110–11.

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Of course this raises the question of what to do with texts that do not and cannot offer such readings whoever one reads alongside. This question was addressed as long ago as 1895 when the octogenarian Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, an exegetical work in which all anti-feminist passages were cut out. These included racist, sexist and classist texts resulting in a much smaller Bible. She was severely criticized for it and completely misunderstood, as what she wanted to do was to highlight the fact that women figure only marginally in the most important religious texts in Christianity and often where they do appear they are the subjects of brutal behaviour. The significance of her contribution lies in the fact, that she started the long overdue process of biblical interpretation by and for women. Today many biblical scholars do not support her method, but she must be given credit for triggering a process which led to brilliant scholarly research by other women. Ruether, of course, does consider that doctrine or texts that in our day do not support full humanity for all should be dismissed. Others think that the dehumanizing texts should remain as lessons to us all of how not to think in relation to the divine. Phyllis Trible in her now famous Texts of Terror sets out in her own words to ‘tell sad stories’, stories that ‘are tales of terror with women as victims’ that belong to ‘the sacred scriptures of synagogue and church’.8 In her task she endeavours to get the interpreter out of the way and to bring the text and the listening community face to face. She does not wish to excuse the texts for being from another time and reminds us that the god of Hebrew scripture was the God of Jesus. Trible brings us the victims, women, children, the poor and poses the question why have they been used in this way and further why interpreters have either forgotten them or used their terrible, terrifying, mistreatment as a message about a just and righteous God. Trible herself brings these stories to light in order to simply tell them and face us with them. My reaction to these stories is to require that they are never used as stories about a just God and if they remain in use that they serve to draw attention to the horrendous abuse of women that still occurs in epidemic proportions in the world – and to state clearly that Christians do not understand the

Phyliss Trible, Texts of Terror Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (London: SCM, 1984), 1.

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bodies of women as objects that may be used either for individual pleasure or for faith communities to wonder at the marvellous actions of their God. This latter point has been brought home to scholars by womanist theologians in a very forceful way. Trible herself considers the role and abuse of Hagar as do many womanist scholars, their point being that the abandonment of Hagar and her son not only highlights the treatment of many women within slavery but also places the salvation narrative as a rather ‘white’ narrative with the chosen not being black. Turning to the Christian scriptures the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7.24-30 has been the focus of some womanist study. They point out the abuse aimed at the woman by Jesus and his reminding her that dogs take scraps from beneath the table. For these scholars, such as Dolores Williams9 and Emilie Townes,10 slavery rings out as does the contemporary situation of many black women around the Globe and they chose to emphasize her determination and dignity in resisting Jesus’ view of her rather than seeing this degrading text as an example of God testing faith. Implicit in this reading is the notion that Jesus too needs to be encouraged within his own divine becoming since such abuse for whatever ends is not acceptable. No examination of how feminists use Scripture would be complete without referring to Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza who has had such an enormous impact on almost all feminists who read Scripture. The development of her hermeneutic of suspicion made it possible for feminists to approach Scripture with suspicion but to still do something with it rather than simply walk away from it. Schussler-Fiorenza has always discouraged women from turning their backs on Scripture as it is a powerful and dangerous weapon in the hands of those who wish to reinstate conservative and oppressive regimes. The political-religious right claims the power to name and define the true nature of biblical religions against liberation theologies of all colors and geographical locations. Its well financed think tanks are supported by reactionary political and financial institutions that seek to defend kyriarchal capitalism.11 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God Talk (New York: Orbis, 1993). 10 Emilie Townes, In a Blaze of Glory. Womanist Spirituality as Social Justice (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995). 11 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Son, Sophia’s Prophet (New York: Continuum, 1994), 8. 9



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These right wing groups have portrayed emancipated women as signifiers of Western decadence or modern secular atheism and have also presented masculine power as divine power. In such a context women must not give up the power of naming by respecting conservative claims to ownership of the texts. The hermeneutic of suspicion is a useful tool as it does enable the placing of women back into texts as the assumption is that women must have been part of the environment in which the texts were written. It also allows for a new eye on texts where women are mentioned. A very good example of this can be seen in the work of Antoinette Clark Wire who,12 using Schussler-Fiorenza’s method, was suspicious that women talking in church in Corinth were simply gossiping as some commentators had suggested and asked the simple question, ‘what were they saying?’ She applied her own experience knowing that women do not just gossip and started an investigation using extra-biblical material to find out who they might have been and what they may have had as concerns that they spoke about in church. This work made at least two important contributions. Firstly, it brought to light a group of women prophets in Corinth and as such gave a voice to women long overlooked and made invisible in Christian biblical interpretation. Secondly, by finding these women and piecing together what their concerns were and may have been, the writings of Paul are placed in a new frame and we gain new understanding in relation to his theology. All this is obtained from wishing to celebrate the women told to keep silent and digging deep to find their role which has been obscured within our heritage. Too many to mention have over the years used the hermeneutic of suspicion with surprising and exciting results; many parts of the tradition as well as the texts have been opened to a wider understanding. Schussler-Fiorenza’s hermeneutic also allows for mourning the women we cannot find, those so buried in the story telling that they remain nameless or indeed invisible. This has been an important aspect of the hermeneutic as has her fourth aspect of it, creative actualization. While both have been used extensively by feminists they have also helped greatly in the creation of queer hermeneutics as has the feminist assertion that one may take authority in the

Antoinette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction Through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995).

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reading. This has allowed all the heterosexual assumptions usually employed in reading biblical texts to be put to one side and new eyes of experience to be cast over them. This has enabled theologians such as myself to start from a more positive place, not having to assume negative readings about non-heteronormative experiences, and being led into texts in a creative way by queer biblical scholars. Ken Stone’s work includes an interesting reflection on Jeremiah that he sees through his own and his communities’ experiential eyes.13 For Stone the exchange between Jeremiah and God appears like an exchange between an S/M (sado masochistic) couple with the bottom getting uppity and discontented. Such a reading opens the text to a wider community of readers and in so doing enriches the experience of the whole community of readers who are enabled to move beyond narrow assumptions of biblical lives and who may reflect on the nature of the divine within their lives. To many, this is still a shocking insight as the texts are in the main read as though they were about either celibate or heterosexual individuals. Why should this be the case? It is this assumption that has played a part in marginalizing non-­heterosexuals within the Christian tradition – they simply are not in the literature! Of course once reading communities take authority and apply a hermeneutic of suspicion it becomes clear that the biblical texts are populated by a diverse range of people. Schussler-Fiorenza has pointed out that despite the negative readings concerning women and others throughout Christian history, there has been what she calls ‘the egalitarian counter‑cultural trend’ which has spoken about the equality of women. Letty Russell is among those who believe that feminist liberation theology does offer women a way to find a usable past, although she acknowledges the difficulty faced in dealing ‘creatively and faithfully with tradition’.14 She argues that there is ample biblical evidence which illustrates that a completed and therefore static view of revelation was a late addition to Christianity which flies in the face of Jesus’ promise of the Spirit which will lead people forward to greater understanding and further interpretations (Jn 16.13). Russell demonstrates that none of the so-called infallible traditions Ken Stone, Practising Safer Texts, Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective (London: T&T Clark, 2005). 14 Letty Russell, Human Liberation From a Feminist Perspective. A Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 73. 13



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have actually been cast in stone by the divine. She illustrates her point by referring to the way in which the divine was imaged in the Hebrew Scriptures. God is often referred to in female terms and three of the most important ideas in Judaism are spoken of in the female. These are Skehinah (glory of God), Chokmah (pre-cosmic deity), Torah (laws of guidance). The female nature of these ideas was downplayed over the centuries, which illustrates Russell’s point that things do change. She says: the heresy of our time is not that of re-examining the Biblical and ecclesial traditions. It is the refusal of the Church to hear the cry of oppressed people and to speak and act on behalf of liberation for all.15

Schussler Fiorenza agrees that readings have changed over time and part of her huge contribution has been to search for divine wisdom, Sophia, understood as female and central within the scriptures. This is a difficult task since traces of her are buried in masculinist Christological traditions. Schussler Fiorenza argues the earliest traditions of the Jesus movement understood Jesus as the prophet of Sophia who was to make the realm of God available to the poor and marginalized. As a child of Sophia he also made the message experientially available to all through ministry and miracles. One of the earliest Jesus sayings states ‘Sophia is justified by her children’ (Q Lk 7.35) which signifies that Sophia is with all her children and is made just, in and by them. The statements that have been hijacked to proclaim Jesus’ atoning death can be seen in a different light as confirming that Jesus was the prophet of Sophia: Therefore also the Wisdom of God said “I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute.” (Lk 13.34)

Schussler Fiorenza suggests that the earliest reflections on the nature of Jesus were sophialogical and she wants to argue that Jesus does not close the Sophia tradition by being the last and greatest. This being a contradiction of the tradition, he opens it yet further. He stands in a long line of Sophia prophets, both men and women, who have been killed for the message they bring. Their deaths were not willed by Sophia, indeed they are lamented (Q Lk 13.34). Many scholars think that Jesus, the Word, replaced Sophia, wisdom, but according to Schussler Fiorenza close examination of the texts shows that Russell, Human Liberation, 103.

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Jesus is handed the attributes that Sophia always possessed (Mt. 11.2527), therefore he received them from her. The Father God does give Jesus knowledge but Sophia, who was present at creation with YHWH already, has the qualities that Jesus inherits. Schussler Fiorenza explains the exclusive father/son language as the drawing of boundaries by the early communities but she points out that the baptism of Jesus confirms her view that he was a prophet of Sophia as she descended upon him like a dove (the grey dove was the symbol of the immanent Sophia while a turtle dove was a symbol of her transcendence). Like Sophia, Jesus found no dwelling place amongst humans and so was given one in heaven (Sophia: 1 En. 42.1-2; Sir. 24.3-7). Similarly they were both exalted and enthroned assuming rulership over the whole cosmos (Phil. 2.6-11; Isa. 45.23). This Christ understood in terms of Sophia is the mediator of the first creation and as the enabler of a new qualitatively different creation: a creation that is not brought into being by her actions alone in some distant realm but is enacted in the world by those who embody her nature. This is not simply for exceptional prophets but for all who get involved in the messiness of life and act for justice. Of course, a Sophia tradition also brings to the front of readings a cosmic vista and one in which nature is saved from the battering of dualist metaphysics so rampant in much Christian interpretation. It makes possible an eco-theological reading of scripture which is long overdue. This mining of the texts and finding a different understanding of the divine profoundly affects how we may understand the nature and role of Jesus and by extension our own natures and tasks within the world. We are freed from notions of atoning death, women no longer have the sin of Eve hanging over them and we all, women and men, may embrace a divine nature. For me this work enabled a new look at incarnational doctrine which has been the centre of all my theological reflection.16 What has become known in my work as radical incarnation owes much to Schussler Fiorenza’s work on Scripture. My own use then takes to heart the way in which women scholars have approached the texts, the warnings they have given and the methods they have developed. They have enabled me to bring my own experience and that of my reading communities to the heart of theological reflection and to by-pass Lisa Isherwood, Liberating Christ (Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1999).

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destructive and oppressive readings and stories. Trible has made it almost impossible for a feminist liberation theologian to read a text of terror and attempt to find divine will within it. She has also strengthened our resolve to name and shame acts of abuse and terror carried out on women’s bodies in the name of religion, the church or theology. This has underpinned some of my own work in which I call for doctrine which lends itself to the creation of abusive situations, both personal and public, to be rethought. This can be clearly seen with the doctrine of substitution atonement where the notion that Jesus died for us is not a healthy paradigm in communities where coercion and suffering for the benefits of others has been, and remains, a harsh and lived reality for many. Further, there is a danger in this doctrine that the real suffering of people can be obscured by an emphasis on the suffering of Jesus and its beneficial effects. As women strive to be empowered within a tradition that has for centuries held them as second class it seems necessary to remove notions of surrogate suffering and replace it with dynamic divine energy for change. Of course connected with the notion that Jesus died for us is the explicit concept of self sacrificial love. The understanding of vicarious suffering as meritorious, as it has been upheld by Christianity, has had devastating consequences in the lives of women, especially when combined with the notion of male superiority . This is not a concept left in the past since domestic violence is at epidemic levels with more women dying annually as a result of it then from cancer, heart disease and road accidents combined. This doctrine has become ingrained in the fabric of Christian influenced society and affects women in Christian and non-Christian families alike.17 Further, throwing off ‘givens’ about how a text should be read in order to underpin traditional doctrine has allowed for much greater leeway for reading communities. Taking Trible’s method of reading what is there and Schussler-Fiorenza’s hermeneutic of suspicion I was able to read the Song of Songs alongside Stone and others without assumptions that the texts spoke of the marriage between God and the Church/the soul and God,18 understandings that have been in place for centuries yet fly in the face of Lisa Isherwood, Introducing Feminist Christologies (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 71–86, 87–102. 18 Lisa Isherwood, The Power of Erotic Celibacy: Queering Heteropatriarchy (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 128–30. 17

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the text which does not mention God or marriage. This reading enabled an exploration of human sexuality that brought to light issues as diverse as race, non-penetrative sex, the agency of the women, matriarchal kinship, abuse, sexual pleasure and gender power and politics. Once again I want to stress that feminist liberation readings do not wish to be set in stone, it would be a matter of great sadness if in years to come we found that people fixed on the readings we are unfolding in this moment. The process of reading, the context, the experiences would, we assume, affect the understanding of the text. This is not to say that feminist liberation readings completely ignore contexts of the time of writing, we have seen this is not the case, or theoretical methods of dissecting texts. What they do is place authority in the hands of the reading community not a pre-existing authority. As mentioned above this is always a second act, the texts are not looked to as definitive guidelines, that is to say they are not read cold in order to find a universal set of rules for how to live a Christian life. Rather, the community reflects on the situation in which they find themselves and then turn to Scripture for communal reflection on whether or not, and the ‘not’ is very important, what they find enables them to think of steps towards justice in their situations. This is not a universal reading, the context of the readers being a driving force in understanding, what seems to me unusual is the acknowledgement that the readings are subjective in terms of communities. It has often been the case that scholars believe they have found the definitive reading without taking into account their own situational understanding be that confessional or simply personal in terms of life experience. For myself I find understanding the biblical texts as conveyors of myth, the big stories that enable us to understand ourselves and the world in order to live more positively, an encouraging development. This is not to say that all feminist liberation theologians would use this terminology but it does seem to me that the way in which Scripture is approached does take the emphasis off looking for and finding THE GOD who inhabits its pages and places it on finding the living divine in one’s life and the lives of others as we strive for more justice in the world. I do not find that this in any way devalues Scripture which for me comes alive using this method. What is important for me is that this way of approaching the texts does to some extent guard against God’s ultimate and absolute word being found and people being



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excluded and persecuted as a result. Our history has sadly shown us too much of this biblically inspired terror. Much has been written about the so-called clobber texts,19 those texts used to persecute gay men, even to see them to the flames, as people condemned by the word of God and invisible in the texts themselves, too ungodly to be mentioned apart from being condemned. The situation for women and people of colour has been the same and so I really embrace a way of reading that gives authority in the process to those previously condemned and put in second class positions by the old white man believed to be lurking in the texts with the final word on all matters. This same approach of reading with new eyes and non-hierarchial vision has helped my work in the area of environmental and cosmic theologies.20 The traditional ways in which the created order has been understood by many theologians as something of little consequence to be overcome or renewed in a second coming are not borne out by feminist readings.21 Reading alongside many feminist colleagues has enabled me to suggest that the created order and perhaps even the cosmos itself are the very stuff of the divine, not simply reflections of the divine, but divine material. This of course raises many theological issues but also offers a large range of creative approaches with which to approach the issues. A Christian mythology that embraces the earth opens up in a positive light and the vibrant matter of which we are all part beckons us towards greater relationality and the creation of wider and more inclusive Christic communities, one in which we are ‘All in All’ (1 Cor. 12.4-6), human, non-human and divine entangled. So what place Scripture for my work? It provides the big stories that my various communities may reflect on as a second act and thus develop ways of being that are justice seeking. Crucially the Christian scriptures tell a story of incarnation which under the eye of feminist scholarship becomes a story of human aspiration and potential rather than simply a hero myth. Scripture is not a place I look for answers but rather a set of stories in which I, along with others, look for inspiration. I remain mindful of the power of this K. Renato Lings, Love Lost in Translation. Homosexuality and the Bible (Bloomington: Trafford Publishing, 2013). 20 Isherwood, Introducing Feminist Christologies, 71–86. 21 Elizabeth Johnson, Ask the Beasts. Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 19

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collection of texts and along with feminist colleagues will not abandon them to right wing readings, my theological work will continue to be based in the liberative strand that can be found throughout Scripture in the hope that the vision for a flourishing world found within may come to be embodied in all that lives.

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The virtue of attentiveness Murray Rae

Christian theology is the thinking and the speaking done in the light of Scripture’s story. The story itself is a complex one. It is told through numerous genres – prayer, prophecy, historical narrative, parable, allegory, moral instruction and more; it weaves its way through thousands of years and a vast history of events; it gathers up into its narrative prophets and peasants, kings and maidservants, fisherman and tax-collectors, each of whom bears witness, sometimes unawares, to the creative, redemptive and sanctifying work of God. Scripture is the story of God’s dealings with his creatures, of his calling and formation of a people to be his witness and a foretaste of his coming kingdom, and of that people’s bungling, and hesitant, and sometimes glorious response. This is a story, however, that does not remain fixed on the page. The basic plotline is established once and for all by the various texts that make up the canon of Scripture but the story is a living one. It continues to develop. The God of whom it speaks continues to gather up into his creative, and redemptive, and sanctifying work irritating prophets, expectant mothers, calloused fishermen, and whoever might be the contemporary equivalents of the New Testament’s lepers and tax-collectors and sinners. Christian theology is the thinking and the speaking done not only in the light, but also in the midst, of Scripture’s ongoing story. I consider my work as a theologian, therefore, to be founded upon, nourished by, and bound to the story that Scripture tells. My work counts for something only insofar as it sounds in harmony with the responsive gratitude of tax-collectors and sinners whose lives have been taken up into the merciful economy of divine grace. Although there are many things to be discovered, especially through scholarly means, about the historical circumstances, the cultural conditions

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and the people through whom the various texts of Scripture were formed, compiled and transmitted, and although considerable insight can be gained through the detailed study of the linguistic and formal features of these texts, a complete account of all such historical, cultural and literary factors would not be sufficient to explain the particular eloquence of Scripture and the power it has to engender faith, to transform lives, and to draw people into sanctifying communion with the God of whom Scripture speaks. That power comes from God who brings Scripture to life and makes it an instrument of his communicative presence. While the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture properly testifies to the work of the Spirit in calling forth the witness of faith that is now preserved in Scripture, the continuing eloquence of that witness likewise depends on the ongoing work of the Spirit who repeatedly brings that witness to life. Apart from such repetition of the Spirit’s work the texts of Scripture remain mute. Without the present, vivifying action of God, Scripture lies like an oboe in its case awaiting the breath of its player. An adequate doctrine of inspiration, therefore, certainly speaks of Scripture’s formation, but it must also speak of the work of the Spirit whose continuing work of inspiration vivifies the ancient texts so that they sound forth the Word of God, fresh for each new day. The affirmations made here constitute the basic framework within which I go about my theological work. It is a work founded upon, nourished by, and bound to Scripture. It is the work of telling Scripture’s story in the intellectual, cultural and missional context of our own day. That means, as I shall explain further below, that my theological work takes place in and with the church, in and with that community that listens to Scripture with the expectation that God will speak with us there. Towards the end of his life, Karl Barth wrote a little book on preaching in which he offered the following advice: The fact of the canon tells us simply that the church has regarded these scriptures as the place where we can expect to hear the voice of God. The proper attitude of preachers does not depend on whether they hold to a doctrine of inspiration but on whether or not they expect God to speak to them here.1 Karl Barth, Homiletics (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Donald E. Daniels; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 78.

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This account of the preacher’s task applies also to the theologian. As I understand it, the expectation that God will speak through Scripture is a conditio sine qua non of responsible theological work. Theologians, like preachers, have nothing important to say on their own account. As Barth advises elsewhere, ‘by our power alone nothing at all can be done’.2 The task of the theologian therefore is not invention but attentiveness to the God who speaks through Scripture and so gives the theologian something about which to speak. This expectation that God speaks through Scripture is not itself generated by some academic or theological argument. There is no proof that God speaks through Scripture except that which God himself provides.3 The expectation that God’s voice can be heard through the reading of Scripture is generated rather through participation in the life of the community that is gathered by the Spirit Sunday by Sunday, that cultivates together the practices of attentiveness and of waiting upon the Lord, and so becomes accustomed to hearing God’s voice (cf. Jn 10.27). My work as a theologian is done in the context of these practices, with the same disciplined attentiveness, I hope, and in service of the community that seeks to live in obedient response to what has been heard. The need for constant attentiveness arises because the communicative power and the semantic range of Scripture is not limited, I believe, to the original authors’ intentions. Such intentions are important in general terms. It matters a great deal that the various authors, and the redactors who shaped the collected stories into their canonical form, intended to speak of God’s involvement in human history and to wrestle with God’s demand upon us, but it matters as well that the communicative power of Scripture is not exhausted either by the limits of the respective authors’ own theological insight or by their own expectations of how and by whom their words might be received. The work of theological interpretation would still have barely begun even were it possible to determine completely and precisely what the original authors meant. There is still, and ever will be, the task of listening for what God has to say through Scripture now. My work as a theologian begins each day, therefore, with the reading of Scripture, and with prayer. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (trans. Grover Foley; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), 159. 3 The point is an adaptation of Karl Barth, Prayer and Preaching (trans. Sara F. Terrein and B. E. Hooke; London: SCM, 1964), 67. 2

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God’s repeated use of Scripture to comfort, encourage, guide and chastise his people in widely divergent circumstances indicates that the semantic scope of Scripture extends beyond the limits envisaged by Scripture’s original authors. Scripture speaks – or more correctly – God speaks through Scripture in ways not fully anticipated by the original authors thus giving rise to the need for renewed attentiveness. I have argued elsewhere that while we should expect to hear new things through Scripture – its meaning is ‘under­ determined’, to borrow Stephen Fowl’s felicitous term4 – we should also expect that what God says now through Scripture will cohere with what has been said in the past.5 We should not expect another gospel! But, God’s relationship with his people is a living one and God continues to speak through Scripture, guiding and encouraging and chastizing his people according to their need. The practice of Scripture being heard afresh and of God’s using Scripture to speak in new ways appears in Scripture itself. The identification of Jesus with Isaiah’s suffering servant in Acts 8.32-26 is a notable case in point,6 as is Jesus’ application of the Passover narratives to the drama of divine deliverance brought to fulfilment through his own life, death and resurrection. Given these and numerous other precedents of Scripture being understood in fresh ways, we may recognize the work of theologians in formulating the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, as a legitimate telling of Scripture’s story that extends beyond what Scripture’s individual authors may have understood themselves. Incorporation of trinitarian language into the church’s ongoing confession of faith may be understood as an expression of the church’s conviction that God is involved in this more expansive telling of Scripture’s story. In the same way, theological work today depends upon the continuing guidance of God as it seeks to keep conceptual track of the ways in which Scripture’s story continues to sound forth as the power of God for salvation. As my work as writer and teacher has developed over the years, I have sought more and more to make explicit the ways in which the doctrinal affirmations of Christian faith are themselves an attempt to articulate Scripture’s See Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 56–61. See my ‘Texts and Context: Scripture and the Divine Economy’, Journal of Theological Interpretation 1 (2007): 23–45 6 My point depends on it being the case that Second Isaiah had some other figure in mind when he wrote of the suffering servant – probably Israel as a whole. This is certainly the view that is legitimately maintained by Jewish readers of Scripture. 4 5



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story. This is perhaps most evident in my most recent book, Christian Theology: The Basics.7 In that work, the doctrinal affirmations commonly follow an exegesis of particular biblical passages that have given rise to the doctrinal affirmations. Attention to the call of Abram and Sara in Genesis 12, for example, precedes a discussion of the dependence of theology on God’s address to humankind. A careful reading of the account of the creation and fall of humanity in Genesis 1–3, and of the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 precedes a discussion of sin and salvation, and so on. Although it is true that my readings of these texts are shaped by what I have learned from the doctrinal tradition, primary authority resides nevertheless with Scripture and so I have tried to demonstrate that in the way the discussion proceeds. Attention to Scripture comes first.

Historical criticism God’s repeated utilization of Scripture to speak afresh to his people means that Scripture’s story is not merely a thing of the past. A merely historical reading of Scripture, therefore, while undoubtedly yielding pertinent information about the circumstances in and through which God has been at work, obscures the essential nature of Scripture as an instrument of God’s self-communicative presence, and imposes inappropriate constraints upon Scripture’s semantic range and upon its communicative power. That is one of the problems currently attending the historical-critical method as commonly used in biblical studies. A second problem is that on account of the historical critic’s commitment to methodological naturalism God cannot be appealed to as an explanation for anything that goes on in the world. The evangelical scholar George Eldon Ladd, writing in support of the historical-critical method, frankly admits that, The critical historian, as historian, cannot talk about God and his acts in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the Parousia; for although such events occur within the history of our world, they have to do not merely with the history of men, but with God in history; and for the historian as historian, the Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.

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subject matter of history … is man. Therefore the historical-critical method has self-imposed limitations which render it incompetent to interpret redemptive history.8

The Bible may be read through a historical-critical lens but reading it with the expectation that we will learn something of the Word and work of God is another matter altogether. At best, and this is far from satisfactory, historical critics operating in accordance with the assumptions of methodological naturalism can deposit their findings about what the Bible says and about what can be believed at the doorstep of the theologians and leave the theologians to make of it what they will. We can be sure, however, given the constraints of the method, that what can be believed will not include anything about God. There are, of course, many Christian scholars who utilize historical-criticism and whose readings of Scripture include profound theological insight, but such insight, I submit, exceeds the limits of what historical criticism, strictly applied, can entertain. Their insight is a fruit of their Christian attentiveness to the viva vox Dei and not something that can be shown to be true within the limits of methodological naturalism. The position set out above by Ladd was the official line among historicalcritics through most of the twentieth century and is still maintained by many, yet the accompanying assumption that methodological naturalism operates in neutral territory that is publicly accessible and free of any dogmatic commitments of its own has long since been discredited. It is commonly recognized now that the renderings of history offered by historians, and indeed by anybody who speaks of the past, are profoundly shaped by the narrator’s own beliefs about what is true and possible in this world. The idea of a neutral, objective, historical enquiry is no longer believable. With this recognition comes the possibility that we might yet develop a historiography that is capable of assenting to the judgements of the biblical writers themselves that God spoke through the prophets, for example, or that God was in Christ, or that God raised Jesus from the dead, and so on. We may yet develop a historiography in

George Eldon Ladd, ‘The Problem of History in Contemporary New Testament Interpretation’, in Frank L. Cross (ed.), Studia Evangelica, vol. 5 (TU 103; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968), 88–100 (99). Cited in Robert L. Webb, ‘The Historical Enterprise and Historical Jesus Research’, in Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb, Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 9–93 (52–3).

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which theological judgements have explanatory power. Such a historiography will look, I suggest, rather like that of the biblical writers themselves who took it upon themselves to bear witness to where God is at work in the world. But, such a historiography will require of us again that prayerful attentiveness to the Spirit’s guidance without which God cannot be known. In the meantime, historical critics working under the constraints of methodological naturalism may shed light for us on the social, cultural, political and other such conditions that obtained at the time of particular events narrated in Scripture or at the time that particular biblical texts emerged. Such information helps us to develop a picture of the terrain within which God has been at work, but that, and how, and to what purpose, God has been involved in our world will have to be discovered by other means, as will any insight into how God’s action in the past may contribute to the redemptive and sanctifying work that God is doing among us now. This appeal for a properly theological historiography has been a recurring theme in my theological work in recent years.9 I have tried to think about what history is in light of the Biblical testimony and have tried to argue that history is both the terrain and the means through which God is bringing about his purpose of bringing all things into harmonious communion with himself.

Prayerful attentiveness An ancient dictum of the church, lex orandi, lex credenda,10 reminds us that understanding of the principles of faith depends upon the practice of prayer. Knowing that the Word of God is not an object at our disposal but something upon which we must prayerfully wait, the theologian approaches Scripture with prayerful attentiveness. The prayer of Hilary of Poitiers in Book One of his De Trinitate may serve as an example here: And therefore we look to Thy support for the first trembling steps of this undertaking, to Thy aid that it may gain strength and prosper. We look to Thee to give See especially my History and Hermeneutics (London: T&T Clark, 2005). This principle of theological understanding is commonly attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine.

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us the fellowship of that Spirit Who guided the Prophets and the Apostles, that we may take their words in the sense in which they spoke and assign its right shade of meaning to every utterance.11

This practice of prayerful attentiveness is frequently commended and displayed in the theological tradition. The theological writings of Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, Anselm, Kierkegaard, to name just a few, often begin with prayer, or are written entirely in the form of a prayer, while the advice given to theologians by Evagrius is frequently quoted: ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian.’12 To speak more personally about this, I have found genuine theological insight always to be a gift. It is not primarily the fruit of my own industry or intelligence but is something received. This has been, repeatedly, my experience of reading Scripture. While I make use of scholarly commentaries, and would not choose to do without them, utilization of such commentaries is not a sufficient condition of theological understanding. Prayerful attentiveness to the Word of God given through Scripture is required. That is because the object with which theology is concerned is precisely the Word and activity of God. This Word and this divine activity can be perceived and spoken of only in virtue of the fact that God speaks to us, calls us into his presence, and gives understanding through his Spirit. Recognition that the thinking done in the light of Scripture’s story is in large measure a matter of receptivity suggests that theological interpretation of Scripture cannot be pursued simply by following some prescribed method of academic inquiry. As J. Todd Billings points out, ‘[i]nterpreting Scripture cannot be reduced to a method or technique, because it is nothing less than a part of our life of participation in Christ through the Spirit, a means by which God nurtures our love of God and neighbor’.13 Accordingly, the Word of God heard through Scripture is not something that I as a theologian can master; it is rather something to which I attempt to submit my own thinking, speaking, and acting. Just because Scripture is an instrument of God’s redemptive and Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, I, 38. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9 (2nd Series; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 50. 12 Evagrius, ‘On Prayer’, in The Philokalia, vol. 1 (trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware; London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 62. 13 J. Todd Billings, The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 195. 11



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sanctifying work in the world, I may speak truly of what Scripture has to say only by consenting in my own life to the redemptive and sanctifying work that God seeks to accomplish through it. Resistance to that work is at the same time resistance to Scripture’s true nature.

Reading in and with the church Karl Barth (using gendered language that we would now wish to avoid) speaks of a primary and a secondary conversation in which the theologian engages. In the first conversation the student … will (like all students who preceded him) have to enquire directly into what the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament have to say to the world, to the community of the present day, and to himself as a member of the community. In the secondary conversation the student must permit himself indirectly to be given the necessary directions and admonitions for the journey toward the answer which he seeks. Such secondary instructions are gained from theologians of the past, the recent past, and from his immediate antecedents—through examination of their biblical exegesis and dogmatics and their historical and practical enquiries.14

I share Barth’s Protestant insistence that all that the church claims to have learned and achieved in the past, ‘must be submitted again and again to God’s care, judgement and disposing’,15 but, as Barth also makes clear, this does not diminish our need for guidance in the reading of Scripture through conversation with those who have gone before us in faith. My reading of Scripture and Scripture’s bearing upon my own theological work is inevitably shaped by the Christian nurture I received as a child, by the sermons I have heard preached, by the theological teachers that I have had, by the communities of faith in which I have participated, and by the obedient responses to Scripture’s story that I have seen enacted. These have a bearing on my reading of Scripture just as does the formal tradition of theological scholarship to which Barth refers. Alongside Barth’s appeal to that tradition, therefore, though not in contradiction of it, we must add Robert Jenson’s Barth, Evangelical Theology, 174. Ibid., 167.

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observation that, ‘what God uses to guide our reading of the Bible is first and foremost the church’s liturgy and devotion and catechesis and homi­letics’.16 I would add as well, that we learn to read Scripture through the church’s obedience in mission for, as liberation theology especially reminds us, a deepened theological understanding of Scripture is often developed through participation in God’s work in the world, among the poor, the outcast, the marginalized. The church’s ‘rule’ and its practices of faith, though considered by much contemporary biblical scholarship as a distorting influence upon the reading of Scripture, are here regarded as a means by which the Spirit guides the church into a fuller understanding of Scripture’s truth. The task of theology, of thinking and speaking in light of Scripture’s story, is a task undertaken with and for the church. From my own perspective this affirmation has two aspects. First, the attention paid to the Word of God by the whole people of God is, under God’s gracious provision, a guide for my own reading of Scripture and for my own theological work. I learn from, and I am guided by, the great cloud of witnesses, including both those who have gone before and those now living. The saints in whose communion with the triune God I share is a community extensive in time and space. It includes those named and unnamed whose lives of faithful discipleship have shaped the church’s witness through which I too have received the gospel, and it includes those in my own time whose attention to Scripture yields understanding of the Word and work of God that confirms, and challenges, and corrects my own. So for example, the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama, through his attentiveness to Scripture, presents a series of theological readings that profoundly challenge the readings that Christians in the West have taken as normative.17 Feminist theologians and liberation theologians, likewise, read Scripture with fresh eyes, call for renewed attention to where God is at work in the world, and so encourage a revision of theologies that have been insufficiently attentive to the full scope of God’s saving work. A more recent example is provided in Bob Ekblad’s account of what has been heard from God as he has read the Bible ‘with the damned’.18 It is a straightforward principle of Paul’s Robert W. Jenson, ‘Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church’, in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds), Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 99–105 (90). 17 See, for example, Kosuke Koyama, No Handle on the Cross: An Asian Meditiation on the Crucified Mind (London: SCM Press, 1976); Waterbuffalo Theology (London: SCM Press, 1974). 18 B. Ekblad, Reading the Bible with the Damned (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). 16



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conception of the body of Christ that we have need of each other. ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”’ (1 Cor. 12.21).

Reading Scripture Given the content of what has been said so far, it is important to show how that content is itself dependent on Scripture. This essay provides scope for only a limited demonstration of that dependence, but I hope that it will be instructive nevertheless. There are numerous occasions in Scripture in which we find Scripture interpreting itself, thereby giving guidance as to how Scripture should be read. One such occasion is Acts 8.26-39 in which the story is told of an Ethiopian eunuch attempting to read Scripture. He had been to Jerusalem to worship – not an incidental detail, as we shall see – and now, on his way home, he sits in his chariot reading from the prophet Isaiah (v. 28). As the story proceeds, we learn that the eunuch is puzzled by what he reads. He does not understand. Meanwhile, an angel of the Lord has instructed Philip – not one of the twelve disciples, but another Philip who is later called ‘the evangelist’ – to go to the road that leads down from Jerusalem to Gaza. Luke offers the explanatory note: ‘This is a wilderness road’ (v. 26), perhaps with reference, as Paul Mumo Kisau points out, to the Isaianic command to prepare a highway for the Lord in the wilderness (Isa. 40.3).19 Kisau is attentive here to the repeating patterns of divine action in history and so prompts consideration of the way God often works in the wilderness, in places of barrenness and deprivation. Philip is obedient to the instruction of the angel, makes his way to the road that leads down from Jerusalem, and so comes upon the Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot. Prompted again, this time by the Spirit, Philip goes over to the chariot and discovers the eunuch reading the words of Isaiah but failing to understand them. ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ Philip asks, to which the eunuch replies, ‘How can I understand unless someone guides Ekblad tells of what has been learned as he has read the Bible with prison, inmates, with gang members, with illegal immigrants and with others who are alienated and marginalized in society. 19 Paul Mumo Kisau, ‘Acts of the Apostles’, in Tokunboh Adeyemo (ed.), Africa Bible Commentary (Nairobi: Word Alive Publishers, 2006), 1323–74 (1340).

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me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of Scripture that he was reading was this: Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth. (vv. 30b–33)

Following the eunuch’s enquiry, ‘about whom does the prophet say this?’ (v. 34), Philip proceeds to proclaim to him the good news about Jesus (v. 37). The story concludes with the eunuch, having recognized the import of Isaiah’s words and their application to the person of Christ, requesting to be baptized. There are several features of this reading of Scripture that I take as guidance for my work as a theologian. The first is the observation that the reading of Scripture is associated with worship. Having come from worshipping in the temple in Jerusalem, the eunuch was disposed to seek further understanding of God through the reading of Scripture. That disposition, nourished through participation in worship, is a necessary condition for theological understanding. In his homily on the passage, Chrysostom twice enjoins his hearers to note the eunuch’s piety, stirred by which, ‘though he did not understand, he read, and then after reading, examines’.20 While the ‘pious’ disposition is a necessary condition for understanding Scripture, it is not a sufficient one. Luke mentions three times that God is involved in this episode as the prompter and guide and orchestrator of Philip’s role. First an angel and then the Spirit instructs Philip about what to do in order that understanding may be attained. It is instructive to note that God involves himself by engaging Philip to tell Scripture’s story. The gift of theological understanding comes, in this instance at least, through a witness that God himself provides. That witness is Philip, one of the saints, who has been appointed to share the good news. Attention to the Word of God in Scripture is not an accomplishment of individual scholars working on their own. Those who would understand Scripture have need of the Spirit’s Chrysostom, ‘Homily XIX’ in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 11 (1st Series Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 120–1.

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guidance and the witness of the saints. The essential content of that witness is ‘the good news of Jesus’ presented by Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch (v. 35). This is also the content of the ‘rule of faith’ that serves as the hermeneutical framework for my reading of Scripture. We may note also in the episode with the Ethiopian eunuch the ‘under­ determined’ nature of Scripture’s meaning. Philip’s application of Isaiah’s words to the person of Jesus extends the meaning of the text beyond that likely to have been envisaged by Isaiah himself. The words of Scripture are here put to a new divine use, extending both our understanding of the divine economy and that economy itself. Finally, let us note the outcome of Philip’s and the eunuch’s shared reading of Scripture. The eunuch’s attentiveness resulted in metanoia, in the trans­ formation of his heart and mind such that he immediately sought to be baptized (vv. 37–38). The act of attending to Scripture with the expectation that we will hear God’s voice is itself an episode in God’s transformative work with his people. As a theologian, I seek to understand Scripture with the expectation that I will be transformed in the process. Theology, I have claimed, is the thinking and the speaking done in the light and in the midst of Scripture’s unfolding story. Caught up myself in the transformative work of God, I pray that by God’s mercy and grace, my thinking and speaking in the light of Scripture may itself be a witness to, and so play a part in, the creative, redemptive, and sanctifying economy of God.

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Explorations in front of the text: A black liberationist reader-response approach to reading the Bible Anthony G. Reddie

The bulk of my scholarly work has sought to combine black liberation theology with Christian education in order to develop a participative and practical approach to the former, in ways that engage with the existential realities of black people. This approach to ‘doing’ black liberation theology, is one that seeks to move beyond largely theorizing, in order that ordinary people can become active agents in a more praxis based approach to building theological discourse from the bottom up.1 Central to this work has been the place of the Bible. My praxis based, interactive approach to undertaking black theology with ordinary black people has sought to utilize the Bible as a resource for constructing liberative God talk that seeks to empower often disenfranchised people.2 My approach to engaging with the Bible has been undertaken from a black liberationist theological perspective. Please note the important semantic difference between my notion of articulating theology and the doing of theology. The latter, for me, represents a more engaged dynamic in which ideas and talk about God are undertaken through a participative framework in which ordinary people are actively involved in the process of theological exploration and articulation. This commitment can be seen in three of my later books. See Anthony G. Reddie, Dramatizing Theologies: A Participative Approach to Black God Talk (London: Equinox 2006); Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Is God Colour Blind? (London: SPCK, 2009). The more ‘traditional’ mode of articulating theology, as witnessed in the works of many systematic and constructive theologians, does not necessarily contain any component to actually engage with people in the development of one’s theological ideas or concerns. 2 Aspects of my participative form of black theology based hermeneutics can be found in Anthony G. Reddie, SCM Core Text: Black Theology (London: SCM, 2012). See also Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie (eds), Black Theology in Britain: A Reader (London and Philadelphia: Acumen, 2007). 1

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In using the nomenclature of black liberation theology,3 what I mean to suggest is that the term ‘black’ comes to represent God’s symbolic and actual solidarity with oppressed people, the majority of whom have been consigned to the marginal spaces of the world solely on the grounds of their very blackness.4 In my work I have used a black theological method as a means of posing a number of political and polemic points about the use and abuse of Holy Scripture and Christian tradition as it collides with contemporary black experience.5 Black theology is committed to challenging the systemic frameworks that assert particular practices and ideas as being normative (normally governed by the powerful), whilst ignoring the claims of those who are marginalized and are powerless, often demonizing the perspectives of the latter as being aberrant or heretical.6

What is black theology? Black theology can be broadly understood as the self conscious attempt to undertake rational and disciplined conversation about God and God’s relationship to black people in the world, looking at the past, the present and imagining the future.7 The God that is at the centre of black theology is one who is largely, although not exclusively, understood in terms of God’s revelation in ‘Jesus Christ’ in light of the historical and contemporary reality of being ‘black’. The understanding I have often used this term alongside that of the shorter nomenclature ‘black theology’. I see the two as synonymous, as black theology was conceived as a theology of liberation. I shall use both terms interchangeably during the course of this essay. 4 See James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986). 5 One of the classic texts that has helped me in this work comes from a great black theologian and Biblical scholar in South Africa. See Itumeleng J. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). Of equal import is Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000). 6 See Kwok Pui-Lan’s excellent text in this regard. Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005). 7 An important aspect of black theology is the extent to which it attends to existential realities of lived experience of black people within history, both in the past and present epochs. This emphasis upon the lived realities of black people is one that seeks to displace notions of theology being ‘distant’ and unresponsive to the needs of ordinary people in this world and is less concerned with metaphysical speculations about salvation in the next. For a helpful discussion on this issue see Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 1–14. 3



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of blackness or indeed, of being black, is one that is often seen in terms of suffering, struggle, marginalization and the oppression of black people. Black theology is understood as a branch of the wider family of ‘theologies of liberation’. This title refers to a group of socio-political theologies that seek to re-interpret the central meaning of the God event within history, particularly, in terms of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. They provide a politicized, radical and socially transformative understanding of the Christian faith in light of the lived realities and experiences of the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed.8 Some aspects of classic early Christian thought often perceived God as an abstract and distant being who oversaw the creation God brought into being, but whose agency or activity within history was limited to the active intervention in the person of Jesus. God was not only distant and somewhat remote but God was also neutral. God sanctioned the status quo. So the injustices of slavery were not the concern of God. The roots of black theology can be in the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean, who, through their introduction to Christianity by white slave owners latched onto the inherent liberative aspects of the Bible, particularly, the decisive intervention of God on the side of the oppressed in the Exodus narrative. God demands that Pharaoh ‘let my people go’. So God is neither neutral nor distant. Black theology can be defined as: the radical re-interpretation of the revelation of God in Christ, in light of the struggles and suffering of black existence in order that de-humanized and oppressed black people might see in God the basis for their liberation.9

Black theology begins with the concrete reality of black suffering and oppression in the world – in the past and the present. Black theology has traditionally reflected upon a number of key biblical and theological themes to guide it in its ongoing development. Three of these themes are: 1. The Exodus – God’s decisive entering into history in order to liberate God’s people from the shackles of bondage and slavery in Egypt; For an important recent text that delineates the comparative developments in ‘theologies of liberation’ see Marcella Althaus-Reid, Ivan Patrella and Luis Carlos Susin (eds), Another Possible World (London: SCM, 2007). 9 Jagessar and Reddie (eds), Black Theology in Britain, 1. 8

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2. The life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s supreme agent for the realization of the Kingdom of love, justice, peace and reconciliation; 3. Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit that heralds a new dawn for human identity and communal living in the form of the newly instituted and ordained church of Christ. These themes are all biblical ones and show the importance of the Bible to the theory and practice of black theology. The basic modus operandi of black theology is the belief that the God that is revealed in the Bible is the God of the oppressed. This idea was first developed as an explicit intellectual framework by James H. Cone in his trilogy of early classic books – Black Theology and Black Power,10 A Black Theology of Liberation,11 and God of The Oppressed.12

Black Christianity in Britain and the Bible As a black liberation theologian, my work is immersed within black Christian communities in Britain. The mass migratory movement of black people from the Caribbean in the years following the end of the Second War has often been termed ‘Windrush’.13 The 1945 post-war presence of black people within inner cities in Britain and the churches to be found there is a phenomenon that has been described by a great many sociologists and historians.14 This influx is perceived as commencing with the arrival of 492 Caribbean people at Tilbury dock on the ship the SS Empire Windrush, 22 June 1948. Whilst there has been a Black presence in Britain since the times of the Romans, the birth of Britain’s

See James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Orbis, 1989 [1969]). James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (New York: Orbis, 1990 [1970]). James H. Cone, God of The Oppressed (New York: Orbis, 1999 [1975]) These post-war pioneers ushered in a wave of black migration to Britain from the Caribbean, which (for the most part) forms the basis for black African and Caribbean communities in Britain. For further information on the phenomenon of the ‘Windrush’ see Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain (London: Harpercollins, 1999). 14 Selective literature includes R. B. Davidson, Black British (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); R. A. Easterlin, Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982); Paul Hartman and Charles Hubbard, Immigration and the Mass Media (London: Davis-Poynter, 1974); Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1972); Ken Pryce, Endless Pressure (Bristol: Classical Press, 1979); Winston James and Clive Harris, Migration, Racism and Identity (London: Verso, 1993). 12 13 10 11



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Black communities,15 for the most part, date from the influx of Caribbean migrants in the post-Second World War epoch. This wider, largely Caribbean community is the dialogue partner with whom I have read the Bible in my hermeneutical work. One of the important characteristics of black Christianity in Britain is the centrality of the Bible. This is not to suggest that the Bible is not central to the formulations of other Christian groups or persons, but it a generalized truth, however, that every branch of black Christianity across the world hold Scripture to be the supreme rule of faith and the only means by which one can understand God’s revelation in Christ. This is most certainly the case of black Christianity in Britain. Despite these radical roots in countering racism and black dehumanization, many black majority churches in Britain have remained wedded to a form of nineteenth century white evangelicalism.16 A number of black scholars have demonstrated the extent to which Christianity as a global phenomenon has drunk deeply from the well of Eurocentric philosophical thought at the expense of African or other overarching forms of epistemology.17 Black Christianity has imbibed these overarching Eurocentric, Greek influenced thought forms, often at their expense of their own identity and African forms of epistemology. This adherence to nineteenth century Biblicism has meant that the blandishments of historical-critical Biblical studies have barely failed to penetrate the edifice of the black Christianity across the world. In the case of black Christianity in Britain, one can still point to a propensity to read

See Gretchin Gerzina, Black England: Life before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995). There are three typologies for black majority churches in Britain. The first category and by far the most visible are ‘black-led’ Pentecostal churches. These churches owe their origins to black migrants travelling from the Caribbean in the post- (Second World) War mass movement of the last century. The first churches were offshoots of predominantly White Pentecostal denominations in the Southern States of the US. These churches were first planted in the UK in the early 1950s. For further details see Joe Aldred, Respect: A Caribbean British Contextual Theology (Peterborough: Epworth, 2006). The second strand is black majority churches in white historic denominations. These churches are demographically determined, as their black majority membership has grown out of black migrants moving into inner city, urban contexts, coupled with the white flight of the middle-class. For further details see Mukti Barton, Rejection, Resistance and Resurrection: Speaking Out Against Racism in the Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005). The final strand of black churches in Britain is neo-Pentecostal churches that have grown exponentially over the past thirty or so years, this growth largely attributed by African migration. For further details see Mark Sturge, Look What The Lord Has Done!: An Exploration of Black Christian Faith in Britain (Milton Keynes: Scripture Union, 2005). 17 See Robert E. Hood, Must God Remain Greek?: Afro-Cultures and God-Talk (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). See also Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002). 15 16

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Biblical texts in ‘flat’ and uncontested ways, often asserting that as the ‘Word of God’ the sacred words of ‘Holy Scripture’ should be read as literal truths. For most part, the heart of black Christianity in Britain, for example, is built upon quasi-literalist readings of Scripture, in which Jesus and salvation is conceived solely in terms of John 14.6. Again, I must make the point that this particular approach to reading the Bible is not unique to black people. There are many groups who will not only read the Bible in this way, but will also claim it to be normative of historic Christianity as it has been expressed and propagated over 2,000 years. As I have asserted, hitherto, the phenomenon of black Christianity in Britain has been the focus of my biblically based theological work in Britain and beyond, working across the broader contours of the African diaspora and amongst ethnically diverse communities across the world.18 This adherence to Scripture by black people in Britain is selective like all approaches to reading the Bible. I have placed the last few words in italics because I think it is of crucial import in the context of this discussion. I believe that all faithful reading communities of the Bible across the world are selective, idiosyncratic and contradictory in the way in which they handle this sacred text.

Black experience and the Bible My point of departure when engaging with the Bible is that of black existential experience. My radical or polemical assertion is this: that in all truth, the Bible does not give human faithful communities authority, for the Bible has no authority other than that which the church, as the main faithful interpretative community, has given it. That in effect, we give the Bible authority by means of the presuppositions we hold, which are then read into the Bible, rather than the other way around. That in effect, we give the Bible authority; whilst many argue that the converse is the case! When what we believe to be true is validated by the Bible then biblical authority as understood in terms of literal In my role as co-editor of the ‘Cross Cultural Theologies’ I commissioned an international text that sought to articulate the broad range of black religions and spiritualities that exist across the world. See Dwight N. Hopkins and Marjorie Lewis, Another World is Possible: Spiritualities and Religions of Global Darker Peoples (London and Philadelphia: Acumen, 2009).

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truth is preserved and respected. Conversely, when our own presuppositions are at variance with the biblical witness, we then construct alternative reading strategies to reframe what we believe to be true; these result in the Bible being ‘contextual’ ‘of its time’ and only a guide and not a rule book. Black theology’s belief in the primary of the black experience of suffering is such that the seemingly fundamentalist notions that equate the Bible directly with God’s own self are summarily rejected. The point of departure in my engagement with the Bible as a black theologian is that the realities of black suffering and struggle provide the interpretative framework for how I interpret the scriptures. The underlying theological perspective that shapes my approach to engaging the Bible is one that seeks to utilize black Christian experience as a part of the arsenal of black theology’s method of thinking about God, in light of Black experiences of struggle and marginalization. Black theology, reflecting on the black experience in light of religious themes, has sought to utilize this ongoing dialectic between black people and the Bible.19 In terms of black theology’s theological method, Dwight Hopkins writing about black people in the US, the home of black theology, states: The second building block in the development of a black theology of liberation is a rereading of the Bible from the perspective of the majority of society, those who are poor and working people. Black theology of liberation believes in a relationship between God’s freeing activity in the African American community and that same liberating activity documented in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. In contrast to dominant ideas about theology, which claim to offer impartial thinking or talking about God, black theology sees and experiences the spirit of freedom clearly on the side of the African American poor.20

Black people have sought to utilize their lived experiences and realities of struggle and hardship as a means of reading themselves into Scripture in order to ‘tell a new story’ about the black self to the world and indeed, to one’s very

See Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), African Americans and The Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York and London: Continuum, 2000); Vincent L. Wimbush, The Bible and African Americans: A Brief History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Michael Joseph Brown, Blackening of the Bible: The Aims of African American Biblical Scholarship (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2004); Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth (ed.), Righting Her-Story: Caribbean Women Encounter the Bible Story (Geneva: The World Communion of Reformed Churches, 2011). 20 See Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 23. 19

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self. It is a process of moving from being ‘Nobodies to Somebodies’.21 It should be noted, however, that the Bible is not an innocent text. What I mean by this is that it has the power invested in it by human beings who believe that it can transform and energize human experience. Therefore, given its importance, this makes it incumbent on us not to take it lightly. One cannot ignore the reality that the Bible has been used to justify slavery, colonization, rape and homophobic violence.22 It has been used as a weapon against black people. That is why, black biblical scholars like Randall Bailey and Oral Thomas talk about the need to read against the text.23 Reading against the text is the realization that the construction and develop­ment of Biblical texts represent the active involvement of human beings in context, often writing in light of their material interests, when trying to talk about God’s revelation. Inspired by the scholarship of Bailey, and more recently, Thomas,24 it is my belief that biblical texts are better understood as a sacred ‘Word about God’ rather than ‘The Word of God’. For example, they are not nuggets of God-dictated prose that fell from the heavens in an unadulterated form. With this in mind, it is important, then, that black Theology enables ordinary black people to become increasingly aware of the ideological power of the Bible. It is incumbent that all of us are reminded of the need to engage with it faithfully, but critically. This relationship between black human experience and the Bible represents the central resource for and the basic thrust of black theology.

This term was the theme of one of my earlier books. See Anthony G. Reddie, Nobodies to Somebodies: A Practical Theology for Education and Liberation (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2003). 22 The Bible was a key tool in justifying the enslavement of African people. Two amongst the many texts in this area are See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in NineteenthCentury American Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 23 See Randall C. Bailey, ‘The Danger of Ignoring One’s Own Cultural Bias in Interpreting the Text’, in R. S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 66–90; Randall C. Bailey, ‘But it’s in the Text!: Slavery, the Bible, and the African Diaspora’, in Anthony G. Reddie (ed.), Black Theology, Slavery and Contemporary Christianity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 31–46. See also Oral Thomas, Biblical Resistance Hermeneutics within a Caribbean Context (London: Equinox, 2010). 24 See Oral Thomas, ‘A Resistant Biblical Hermeneutic Within the Caribbean’, Black Theology 6 (2008): 330–42. 21



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Ideological challenges in reading the Bible in dialogue with black experience The tension of reading the Bible in light of lived black human experience is the challenge of holding together dialectical truths. This is the tension of being able to read ‘Biblical truths’ in light of one’s contextual realities. This form of hermeneutical engagement is one that draws on the landmark work of W. E. B. Dubois and his seminal text The Souls of Black Folk.25 Elsewhere, I have argued that Dubois’ notion of ‘double-consciousness’ has proved a very helpful framework for articulating black theological discourse, in which the black self has had very limited options in which to navigate the rough vicissitudes of life.26 In short, black people can read against the text and with it, depending upon how the text aligns itself with the popular imagination of black people from within a wider framework of Diasporan African cultures and the often troubled and stunted humanity residing within such socio-religious settings. My black theology-driven approach to reading the Bible is one that is concerned with enabling black people to develop liberationist and subversive readings of biblical texts in order to promote more holistic and emancipatory forms of human living.27 This black liberative approach is one that starts with the reality of oppression and struggle that has impacted upon black people in history, particularly during the epoch of slavery and later during colonialism and neo-colonialism. This approach is the one that I have largely deployed in my work as a black theologian. Namely, seeking to connect what exists within the biblical text with the material realities of poor, oppressed black people within history that occurs in front of the text, seeking to bring the two into a critical conversation. Central to this type of reading is the connection between the biblical text and one’s experiences of struggle. This relationship represents the central resource for and the basic thrust of black theology. What has been important in this consideration is how the ideas and concerns of Black theology can assist ordinary black people to continue the faithful challenge of seeking to bring their lived experiences into critical W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Press, 1989). Anthony G. Reddie, Dramatizing Theologies: A Participant Approach to Black God-Talk (London: Equinox, 2006), 97–8. 27 A key text in this regard is Hugh R. Page, Jr (ed.), The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures From Africa and The African Diaspora (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010). 25 26

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conversation with sacred narratives.28 I want to continue my assessment of this task by making recourse to a comment I have made in a previous publication regarding black existential experience and our ongoing relationship as people of African descent with the Bible. On that occasion I stated: My belief in the sacredness of the black self is such that the existential realities of black experience sit in dialogue alongside the Biblical text and are not subservient to it. As I have often said to black participants in the workshops and classes I teach, when having to defend my theological method; ‘black experience has an integrity of its own, which is not subservient to the Biblical text. I have no evidence to believe that when the author of any biblical text was writing, they had my reality as a black person in mind as they were doing so.29

The latter statement has been made in light of many of years of struggle and painful reflection for myself and for countless numbers of black people the world over. Many will argue that sacred Scripture is of a wholly different character and category than the text of black experience and black story. Whilst I can appreciate the rationale that gives rise to this form of analysis, I reject it, however, as being one that ultimately seeks to devalue the sanctity and sacred nature of black experience and black story. I cannot countenance any form of analysis that will not accord the very highest level of respect for the black human self. That in effect, black humanity (as in the case for all humanity) is the very summit of God’s creative potential in the world. The dispensability of black life at the hands of white hegemony, which finds expression in the form of the casual dismemberment of black bodies,30 is too recent an experience for us to surrender the potentialities of our God-created self to the fixity of a written text! To suggest that black bodies and the experiences that arise from their material and spiritual engagement with the cultural milieu in which they are housed, are not sacred texts, opens up the possibilities of black non-being through oppression. And whilst I accept that privileging the Bible before black experience does not necessarily imply that one is seeking to dismember the An important text in this regard is Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, Bible Witness in Black Churches (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 29 Anthony G. Reddie, Working Against The Grain: Re-imaging Black Theology in the 21st century (London: Equinox, 2008), 109. 30 See Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). 28



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black self, I would argue that the litany of suffering and oppression for black humanity is such that one needs to exercise extreme caution in moving too quickly to discount the contextuality of black human experience as being of lesser importance than the officially sanctioned fixity and authority of the Biblical text.31 I have been known to state to students and adult lay people in the churches, with whom I have worked in workshop settings; ‘The Bible has nothing to say until we open it and engage with it.’ The Bible itself is a witness to God’s self, but should not be confused with God’s being. God is beyond the Bible. The Bible is not God! The theological concept of the ‘Imago Dei’ confirms the anthropology of black people and argues against the notion that our bodies are not sacred texts on which the divine author, God, has written (and continues to do so) God’s own sacred narrative. Black story, when placed in a dialectical relationship with the Bible, offers opportunities for ordinary black people to re-read the scriptures in order that a black political, theological hermeneutic can emerge. This approach to reimaging black theology allows us to reinterpret the essential meaning of the Christian faith in light of black experience. I know that those who hold a more evangelical perspective on the Christian faith would want to suggest that this method for reading the Bible does not take seriously the God-inspired authorship of the Biblical text. They will point to the often quoted words of 2 Timothy 3.16 that, ‘All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work’ as a proof text for arguing in favour of the transcendent, transhistorical meaning of biblical texts. In this particular theological and biblical schema, the Bible is, for many, beyond criticism and cannot be compared to any other text, literary or human. My belief in the sacredness of the black self is such that the existential realities of black experience sit in dialogue alongside the Biblical text and are not subservient to it. Black story that resides in front of the page not only has integrity of its own, but it reminds us that no community reads the Bible outside of its context and the experiences that shape their interpretive See Bailey, ‘But it’s in the Text!’.

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framework. For example no one reads the Bible in neutral fashion. What happens in front of the page always has a bearing on what is read within the text itself. As an addendum to my previous remarks, I am at pains to add that I am not suggesting that black experience obliterates or rides ‘rough-shod’ over the biblical text. My argument is that black Christian radicalism has invariably found ways of linking black experience to the biblical text in order to affirm the troubled existence of the black self.32 In effect, there is an ongoing dialectical relationship between black experience and the Bible. The impact of this hermeneutical approach and its implications on the exegetical character of Biblical texts can be seen in a brief exploration of Mark’s account of the woman who ‘touched the hem of Jesus’ garment’ (Mk 6.21-34). In this text, my hermeneutical reading is one that sees the woman recontextualized as a black woman, whose experience is one battling institutional sexism and exclusion.33 My hermeneutical engagement with this text sees the focus move from the text itself to the experiences of black women in front of the text. This black and womanist hermeneutical approach to contextualizing the Bible locates the social location of black women as being key to understanding the contemporary meaning of this passage, i.e. to understand the meaning of this text is to realize the contextual realities of being a black woman in the world. The fact is, in the world, they are black (often seen in negative terms), they are also women (in a sexist world, this is also a curse) and they are poor – again another curse. So this approach to reading the Bible attempts to locate within texts liberationist themes that can be used in order to conscientize and bring self esteem and dignity to all oppressed Black peoples. There is a particular concern, of course, for those who are oppressed on the grounds of ‘race’, gender and poverty. So this reading of the text identifies the woman as black and recognizes that Jesus’ engagement with her is a liberative act that transcends and critiques the religio-cultural mores of first century Judea. In reading this passage, little attempt is made to uncover the historicalcritical background to the text (although the prevailing issues of purity codes to which the woman was herself exposed, is no doubt of assistance in See Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion, Black Radicalism (New York: Doubleday, 1973). See Anthony G. Reddie, ‘The Quest for Liberation and Inclusivity’, The Ecumenical Review 64 (2012): 530–45.

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deciphering the truth of this text), as the focus rests on black women reading this text. The former, as contextual readers, often overlooked in the world, now become the focus of this hermeneutical engagement. Reading ‘into’ or ‘between’ the text, i.e. using one’s experience to read ‘what is not said’ in the text, is one of the main staple ingredients of a black liberationist approach to reading the Bible. This type of approach is informed by what many scholars call a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, i.e. this means that one reads the Bible in an ideological way, looking with suspicion and thinking critically at how the power relations and structures are in evidence in the text. In the exercise, this was undertaken by the participants asking the questions, ‘Who has power in this story?’ ‘Who is disadvantaged?’ Who benefits or who loses out?’ ‘How is God’s liberative presence displayed in the text?’ These questions and concerns sit at the heart of this form of hermeneutical engagement with the biblical text. In using this approach to black theology as a means of reinterpreting the Christian faith, thereby, creating a liberative agenda for the praxis of black life it is my hope that this schema will resource and enable black people to move beyond passivity to active radicalism.34 The biblical literalism of many black Christians in Britain is one that has been challenged by scholars such as Robert Beckford.35 This form of rigidity in engaging with sacred texts has often had the negative effect of stymieing the liberative praxis of black Christian expression. A black theology approach to reading biblical texts is one that seeks to give rise to a renewed, praxiological perspective on black agency. This black theology approach to re-reading the Bible is one that challenges the a-historical pietism or abstract spiritualization of conservative interpretations of the Christian faith. A black theology, reader-response inspired approach to reading the Bible, speaks to the historical commitment of black people to never settle for anything less than their God-given right to be free.

Robert Beckford, Dread and Pentecostal (London: SPCK, 2000), 144–56. Robert Beckford, God and The Gangs (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2004), 85–6.

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Read – pray – trust. One theologian’s encounters with Scripture Christoph Schwöbel

The invitation to reflect concretely, theologically and personally, on the encounters and interactions with Scripture that have played a formative role in my attempt at doing theology leads to a number of simple, but surprising insights. The Bible is the only book which has accompanied all my remembered life, from early childhood to the present day. It is the only book which I regularly read with others in different settings, from academic seminars to interfaith conversations. It is the only book whose contents have shaped the music that I regularly sing with others, be it from the hymnbook in church or in the choir to which I belong. The images of this book form a large part of my interior picture gallery, enabling me to identify the topics and the ‘language’ of forms in many of the works of art I encounter. It is this book which addresses me time and again through other books, by detecting resonances with the contents and forms of biblical literature. It is the book which I use with many others in situations of worship as Scripture, and which in this way offers ways of understanding the scriptures, beliefs and practices of believers of other religions analogically, by comparison and contrast. It is also the book that I find most enlightening and, at times, most irritating when reflecting on moral orientations. When I have the feeling that the meanings of Scripture are used in ways I believe not to be in accordance with the message and character of the Bible, I find that I respond with a passion that does not take hold of me so quickly in relation to other books and issues. It is Scripture which gives me the words in which I can confess my failings and my sadness, and which gives me words and images to let my soul sing. Engaging theologically with Scripture

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in my profession as a systematic theologian is but one of the many interrelated dimensions in which I find myself engaged by Scripture. One way of clarifying these interrelations for me is to look at the roles Scripture has played during different stages of life’s journey and to think about how they have shaped critically and constructively my way of doing theology.

Listening to the Bible – discussing the Bible Growing up in a Protestant vicarage meant that the Bible was very much part of our daily routines as a family. My first remembered encounter with the Bible is listening to Bible stories literally at my mother’s knee (who was also a theologian and the first married female pastor in our church) and then talking to her about the meaning of these stories. She chose the readings to underline the important feast days of the year. I remember recognizing stories that I already knew from the Children’s Bible being read – now from Luther’s translation – in church. The year had a rhythm, and the biblical stories told the stories behind the themes of church services and family celebrations. The Bible was not the only book that was read aloud in our family. The family custom continued after I had learned to read, especially during the holidays. The Bible stories were the best, since they narrated extraordinary events, how the world came to be, how a serpent talked, how a baby was saved in a wicker basket, and how food from heaven fed a whole people. The ordinary and the extraordinary formed a unity in these stories and that explained the greatness and the sadness of the stories. After I was confirmed at the age of thirteen, I became a Sunday School teacher, and the weekly meetings, reading and interpreting the stories together in preparation for next Sunday, were a fixture in my week. In the church youth group discussions about the Bible formed the most lively part. Square dancing, theatrical performances and volleyball were also on the agenda but the ‘Bible discussion’ was the place where the most important debates took place. Being a teenager in the late 1960s in Frankfurt meant to grow up in the politically heated atmosphere of student revolution. All the themes of the debates in the wider society and the key words from the slogans shouted and chanted at the demonstrations and protest marches resonated with the biblical



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stories, from the sins of the fathers in not admitting their involvement with the Nazi regime to the passionate outcry for peace and justice and the fight against starvation in what was then still called ‘the third world’. An uncle of mine published a collection of extracts from the Bible in a decidedly antiindividualistic and anti-spiritualistic new translation, emphasizing the social and political content of the message of the Old and New Testament.1 The Bible could be the guide-line for making the world readable, offering ways of understanding hope, trust, love, good and evil, betrayal, judgement and forgiveness and it could give a voice to the desire for radical change and the striving for a new world in the morning. My father used to get up a five o’clock in the morning and start his day with copying the ‘daily watchwords’ from the Moravian Text Book in Greek and Hebrew and attempt his own translation, comparing it to the one given in the printed edition, and meditating on these texts from Scripture. Over breakfast the daily watchwords would be read aloud, followed by a short prayer, before we went about our usual business. I have often attempted, but have never achieved, such constancy over a longer period in my reading of the Bible. It has remained patchy, often prompted by things I read or think about, checking references and becoming entangled in the Bible’s narratives and poetry. Even so, the Bible has remained over the years the most personal book for private reading, although I have become more critical of the ‘private reader’ over the years.

Tools and meanings: Historical-critical exegesis and the search for a Biblical theology Studying Protestant theology in the mid-1970s in Germany included an in-depth engagement with the methods of historical-critical exegesis. The course of studies was still organized according to the pattern of ‘from text to preaching,’ with church history and systematic theology somehow forming stages in-between. Since I had already learnt Hebrew, Greek and Latin at school I could start straight away with introductory seminars in New and Old Basisbibel (Einrichtung und Übersetzung Arnulf Zitelmann; Weinheim: Beltz, 1972).

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Testament. Learning to deal with the questions of textual criticism and being initiated in practising source criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism, being introduced to the history of traditions and literary genres felt like acquiring the skills of craftsmanship which distinguished academic theologians from ‘ordinary believers’. However, the interest of my first teachers at the Church College in Bethel in the enterprise of ‘biblical theology’ immediately raised the question of what the tools are for. Are they able not only to illumine the meaning of individual passages but can they also point to connections which open up a wider field of meaning? Their interest concerned the connection between Old Testament creation theologies and the common ways of construing the understanding of world-order in the Ancient Near East, the integration of human wisdom, the experience of the world, focussing on the relationship between deed and consequence, with specifically Christian tenets of faith. This way of approaching the biblical texts involved a critical distancing from the concentration on the theologies of history in the Old Testament (in the foot-steps of Gerhard von Rad) and from a narrow focus on the relationship between kerygma and the understanding of existence (in the wake of Rudolf Bultmann’s theology). It also involved questions like the dating of Old Testament sources such as the Yahwist (J) source in the Pentateuch – ninth century bc or exilic? – and reassessing the relationship between Matthew’s Gospel and the Pauline letters – irreconcilable contrast or variations on the common theme of the ‘righteousness of God’? Many of these questions were integrated into a wider context when I moved to the University of Marburg in my second year. There I was lucky to find teachers who could combine their expertise in historical-critical exegesis with strong systematic interests and philosophical competence, like Otto Kaiser in Old Testament Studies, and a profound awareness of the need to connect historical exegesis with a constructive orientation for pastoral praxis (like Gert Jeremias in New Testament studies). My teacher in Systematic Theology and very soon my Doktorvater, Carl Heinz Ratschow, provided an even more interesting example of connecting the different disciplines of theology and the study of religions. Learning to practise systematic theology under his supervision meant that one had to be prepared for reflection on a dogmatic question to suddenly turn into an exercise in biblical exegesis, only to be complemented by an engagement with the Qur’an or by material from



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one of the ‘baskets’ from the Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism. But not only that, Ratschow was also an inspiring preacher whose sermons illustrated an engagement in humility with the biblical texts. Ratschow’s scholarship was clearly an example that one could be inspired by but which one could not try to emulate. The Bible was placed in the context of the sacred writings of other religious traditions, and its similarities to other religious texts could be approached analogically while its differences also appeared much more pronounced. After I had written my doctoral thesis, on Ratschow’s insistence on a topic in historical theology at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, thereby gaining a new understanding of the debates between historicism and anti-historicism, and a better view of the anti-historicist character of much historical-critical exegesis, my interests shifted to more systematic issues on the boundary between Christian dogmatics and philosophy of religion. Discovering analytic philosophy of religion as an important tool for the systematic theologians and as a somewhat disappointing guide in the search for meaning, my attention focussed on the activity of doing systematic theology, the criteria and the rules of craftsmanship which determine this activity.2 How are the analytic-systematic criteria, internal consistency, external communicability and practical orientation to be reconciled with the historicohermeneutical uses of Scripture, the appeal to tradition and attention to our contemporary situation? Conversations with my friend John Clayton who engaged with religious reasoning in a Wittgensteinian spirit and with Vincent Brümmer from the University of Utrecht, who took me with his group of doctoral students from the Netherlands to conferences in Britain, fuelled an interest in connecting the semantics and the pragmatics of religious language. Translating Vincent Brümmer’s book What are We Doing When We Pray? into German provided an instructive example. What are we doing when we appeal to Scripture in trying to reflect and form a judgement on doctrinal questions? Furthermore, what are the texts or their authors doing when they offer promises, admonitions, narratives or arguments involving God’s relationship Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Doing Systematic Theology’, King’s Theological Review 10 (1987): 51–7; expanded version in German: ‘Doing Systematic Theology – Das Handwerk der Systematischen Theologie’, in Christoph Schwöbel, Gott in Beziehung, Studien zur Dogmatik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002), 1–24.

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with the world in dealing with problems and questions concerning particular issues in the religious and social life of their communities? These questions became important for me in my reading of the Bible. On the one hand, I could appreciate much more than before the way particular points are established by means of particular tools of communication which are shaped by the rich texture of relationships between God, humanity and the world. The nuances of speech act theory seemed to point to the intricate patterns of divine-human interaction and communication in the biblical writings that are important for unfolding the truth claims involved in Christian faith and life. Was it not necessary to expand the traditional tools of historical-critical exegesis to do justice to the multi-facetted forms of communicative action one could find in the Bible? How are these various forms of communicative interaction between God and God’s creatures rooted in a Christian theological account of God’s being? It was this question which provoked a more sustained reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity. At that time analytic philosophy of religion did not have much to say about the doctrine of the Trinity. Theologians of my generation had mainly encountered it in the history of Christian doctrine as one of the products of the interaction between Christian proclamation and Hellenistic philosophy, mainly designed to fulfil a critical function in warding off the various heresies accompanying the formulation of Christian orthodoxy. Now, the ‘trinitarian renaissance’ suggested that quite a number of theologians from many denominational backgrounds gave the doctrine of the Trinity a much more constructive role.3 From being perceived as a problem it presented itself as the promise of a way of talking about God and the world which allowed for the personal particularity of God’s personal being and action while stressing the unity of the divine essence.

Cf. my account of this development in Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Renaissance of Trinitarian Theology: Reasons, Problems and Tasks’, in Christoph Schwöbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today, Essays on Divine Being and Act (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 1–30. Cf. also my reassessment after twenty years in Christoph Schwöbel,‘Where Do We Stand in Trinitarian Theology?: Resources, Revisions, and Reappraisals’, in Christophe Chalamet and Marc Vial (eds), Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 9–71.

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Trinitarian theology: Taking Scripture metaphysically seriously At the time when I was appointed lecturer in systematic theology at King’s College London I had just arrived at recognizing the structural significance of the doctrine of the Trinity for the enterprise of doing Christian theology. Now, in conversations with my friend Colin Gunton and Metropolitan John Zizioulas, these ideas could be developed, tested and modified. How would our understanding of God have to be modified if God reconciles in his being the one and the many, universality and particularity? What does it mean to be human if being human means being called into communion with the triune God? Reading Scripture from this perspective was an invitation to take the particularities of the biblical witnesses seriously – also in a metaphysical sense. This means not to try to adapt the biblical texts to a preconceived metaphysical scheme, be it that of a classical substance metaphysics and its concomitant ontology of participation or that of a ‘modern’ philosophy of subjectivity but to consider how preconceived notions would have to be revised in the light of the biblical witnesses. This requires a shift of emphasis: not to suppose that there is some kind of background metaphysics behind the text but that the surface of the text is metaphysically meaningful. One can see the effects of such an approach to biblical interpretation clearly in the field of Christology. Instead of conceptualizing the Christologies of the Gospels in terms of a doctrine of two natures which necessitates the question which nature is operative at any given point in the narrative or of trying to interpret the relationship between God and Jesus in terms of the presence of God-consciousness in his human self-consciousness, one can try to give the relations which the stories express when God addresses Jesus and Jesus responds to God by calling him ‘Father’ metaphysical weight. The metaphysical import is thus seen in the relations expressed in the form of the narrative and not somehow behind it. The immediate upshot of this is to locate the divinity of Jesus in his relationship to the one he calls ‘Father’, and not in the possession of a divine nature, and the humanity of Jesus in his relationships to other people as they are expressed in the stories.4 If Cf. my attempt to spell out the Christological implications in Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Christology and Trinitarian Thought’, in Schwöbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today, 113–46; and, ‘Christ for

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one tries to develop such an approach further one arrives at an ontology of communicative relations. Martin Luther has conceived the whole of the divine economy as a conversation between God and God’s human creatures, which has its origin in the conversation that God is in the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.5 Such metaphysical revisions raise a lot of problems. An interpretation of the biblical witnesses that takes the divinehuman relationality seriously is difficult to reconcile with an understanding of eternity as timelessness and even more difficult to explain in the framework of an understanding of time as a form of intuition. Therefore, it seems to make sense to work through the metaphysical revisions that seem to be required by taking the biblical witnesses metaphysically seriously. One theologian who has clearly seen the significance of this task and made important suggestions about how it needs to be tackled is Robert Jenson, Colin Gunton’s teacher.6 Reading the great teachers of Christian doctrine from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther as revisionary metaphysicians in this sense, one may consider some of their revisions as metaphysically and/or theologically wrong, some may go too far, others not far enough, but the task is still there and confronts each generation anew.

Scripture: The Bible as a liturgical book Living in another country than I was born in, working and thus reading the Bible in another language than my mother tongue, be it in worship, in Bible studies or for one’s theological research made me acutely aware that the Bible is the basis for all Christian ecumenism. It forms the reference point for doctrinal questions, for ethical orientations, for how we celebrate worship and for the way we organize our communities. Without the Bible the other dimensions of the life of Christian communities, their creeds, their sacramental Us – Yesterday and Today: A Response to The Person of Christ’, in Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae (eds), The Person of Christ (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 182–201. 5 Cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘God as Conversation. Reflections on a Theological Ontology of Communicative Relations’, in J.  Haers and P. de Mey (eds), Theology of Conversation: Towards a Relational Theology (Bibliotheca Ephemeridium theologicarum Lovaniensium 172; Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 43–67. 6 Cf. Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation (Stephen Wright (ed.); Eugene, OR: Cascade 2014).



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life, their hymns, their liturgies, their ethical orientations and their forms of community organization lack a common reference point which explains both: what they have in common and where they differ. Only if we suppose that the foundation of our shared faith is witnessed paradigmatically in the Bible have we the possibility of trying to express our agreements and disagreements and relate them to the common foundation. However, the foundation of Christian faith is not a book but the dynamic self-presentation of God through the Son in the Holy Spirit to which the Bible witnesses. Christians do not believe in the Bible, but in the Triune God. However, they can only express who they believe in and what they believe by using the language of the Bible as referring to the dynamic foundation of faith in the self-disclosure of the Triune God. If there is a way for Christian churches to recognize one another as members of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church we confess in the creed, we need to trace the way in which we refer to our common foundation of faith through our use of the biblical witnesses. Participating in ecumenical conversations in search for ecumenical communion not only taught me much about the rich diversity of Christian ecclesial life based on a common biblical foundation but also made me acutely aware that I am a Lutheran in sharing particular sensibilities with other churches of the Reformation, and emphasizing some differently than other Reformed churches. First of all, seeing Scripture as the sole authority for all doctrine, as ‘the only rule and norm according to which all doctrine and teachers alike must be appraised and judged’7 implies that all other traditions ‘should be received in no other way and no further than as witnesses to the fashion in which the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles was preserved in post-apostolic times’.8 All the traditions of the church and all theological teachings are in this way strictly seen as interpretations of Scripture. Secondly, the Lutheran sensibility implies giving priority to the literal sense to Scripture, which should be interpreted in terms of the twofold clarity of Scripture. Scripture is clear in that it means what it says, so that apparently opaque passages should be interpreted from the clear passages of Formula Concordiae (1580) Part I: Epitome 1, The Book of Concord. The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Theodore G. Tappert (ed. and trans.); Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 464. 8 Ibid., 465. 7

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Scripture – the external clarity of Scripture. Furthermore, Scripture becomes inwardly clear in our hearts, so that certainty of faith with regard to the truth of the gospel is constituted by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, which does not offer any new inspiration but makes clear and certain for us what is clearly said in Scripture.9 This means that God is both the primordial author and the ultimate interpreter of Scripture making human forms of communication the means of his self-presentation. Thirdly, Scripture should be interpreted with a clear focus on Christ as the definitive form of the self-communication of the Triune God. Fourthly, interpreting Scripture is completed in the proclamation of the gospel. In a way, Scripture is bracketed by the event of humans being addressed by God and the event of humans addressing other humans with the Word of God. These standard Lutheran sensibilities only became clear to me in their full implications when in encounters with Eastern orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church I began to see Scripture as a liturgical book in Christian worship. In worship, Scripture is read as the record of God’s past address to humans which is interpreted and proclaimed in order to become God’s address to humans here and now. In return, the congregation responds by addressing God in the words of Scripture, in reciting the Psalms, and in speaking the Lord’s Prayer. The Bible becomes Scripture in this specific liturgical use as the means of God’s address to us and of our response to God.10 In its liturgical use the past texts of the Bible become the present means of communication, both witnessing to God’s word and allowing for response to God’s address. It is in Christian worship that the conversations between God and humanity which are witnessed in the biblical writings are continued in the present. The transition from proclaiming God’s past address to responding to God here and now, from interpretation to performance is crucial for understanding the specific role of Scripture. It is in its liturgical use that the Bible as Scripture becomes, like the sacraments, one of the means of salvation. Reference to the sacraments is important here. The sacraments can be understood with Augustine’s famous expression as ‘visible words,’ as bodily Cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘God’s Two Hands: Beyond Fundamentalism and Spiritualism’, in Christoph Schwöbel and Anselm K. Min (eds), Word and Spirit: Renewing Christology and Pneumatology in a Globalizing World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 13–27. 10 On the distinction and relation between ‘Bible’ and ‘Scripture’ cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Art. Bible, IV. Dogmatics’, in Hands Dieter Betz et al. (eds.) Religion Past and Present. Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion, vol. 2 (13 vols; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 13–17. 9



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communicative acts in which the presence of Christ, and in Christ, communion with the triune God, is communicated. Scripture when it is proclaimed as the gospel in Christian worship is a ‘bodily’ word, a ‘sacramental’ word, in that it becomes the means of the self-giving of Christ for embodied beings like us. What Christ bequeaths to his disciples at the Last Supper is in this sense nothing less than himself, his own presence in the gifts of bread and wine and in the gift of his word. In this sense one can say that the extension of the Incarnation, the self-communication of the Creator Logos in the created means of communication, is not the church but the celebration of the Eucharist as the celebration of Christ’s presence in visible and bodily words. The use of the Bible as a liturgical book, as Scripture, is therefore the use of Scripture as the means of Christ’s presence. It is a very peculiar metaphysics of presence which is presupposed here. It does not claim immediate access to the ‘now’ but understands the present as mediated through the communicative signs which make the presence of Christ real by reciting his past self-giving as opening up a future that, apart from this self-giving act, is no longer determined by the past, and in this way anticipates the eschaton. I am only slowly beginning to understand the full implications of Luther’s concern for real presence which is as much a feature of Lutheran sacramental theology as of a Lutheran theology of preaching, and of Christian worship. This understanding has grown since, on my return to Germany to accept a chair at the University of Kiel, I became ordained as a Lutheran pastor so that I have, since then, regularly been leading worship. It is the regular use of the Bible as Scripture in worship, after Kiel at Heidelberg, and now in Tübingen, as an ordinary church-goer and at regular intervals as the one presiding at worship which has made this dimension of the use of the Bible central to my theology. It seems to me now that Scripture as an instrument of the selfpresentation of the triune God is fundamental for the other uses of Scripture in biblical interpretation and doctrinal argument. It is the fact that Christian worship, based on the portable temple of Scripture, has continued over the centuries, which accounts for the existence of the canon of the books of the Old and the New Testament and its continued use in the church. I would also claim that the use of the Bible as Scripture in worship is foundational for the exercise of biblical interpretation. What I often found irritating in some versions of historical-critical exegesis was the tacit assumption that the earliest

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form of the text is somehow the most authentic, and arriving at this point the ultimate destination of the critical exercise. One necessary requirement of any form of hermeneutics is the ability to clarify the conditions, which make the art of interpretation possible. We have the biblical texts only because subsequent generations after the first generation in which the texts came into being have discovered in them truth and meaning for their lives and so have communicated, conserved, transmitted, arranged them and used them in acts of worship and the forms of instruction that are meant to initiate in the practice of worship. It is the use of the biblical writings as Scripture in worship, their role for being in conversation with God and with one another which has been the medium of the tradition of the biblical writings until the present day. This means that the first stratum of the tradition is not the ultimate destination of the exercise of interpretation but the starting point of a tradition that has brought the texts to us and so offers the possibility of a historical-critical investigation of the texts. Viewed from this perspective, the ‘pre-critical’ use of the texts is in an important sense the condition for the possibility of the critical engagement with the text. Theologically, it seems to me that the movement of going back to the earliest strata must be balanced by a counter movement, going forward from there, through history, until the ultimate meaning of the texts is realized in the kingdom of God.

Refractions and illuminations: The Bible in the world of cultures The Bible is not the possession of the church. It has found new forms of expression in the various idioms of culture, not only in sacred art but also in music, literature and art that is no longer related to the context of the church. The biblical words acquire new dimensions of meaning when they are expressed in paintings and sculpture and set to music. This history of reception in the world of cultures is part of the effective history of the Bible in other media of expression. They sometimes disclose dimensions of truth that go beyond verbal communication but have nevertheless a communicative impact. Singing in the choir, ‘[f]or all flesh is as grass and all the glory of men as the flower of grass’ (1 Pet. 1.24) in the Brahms Requiem touches



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dimensions of our bodily existence where we are made aware of our mortality through the resonances of the music with the words. The promise, ‘[b]ut the word of the Lord endures forever’ (1 Pet. 1.25) acquires a new quality in its musical expression, as does the prophetic expectation that, ‘[t]he ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads’ (Isa 35.10). The resonances the biblical words acquire in musical settings and their effect on our affections is theologically relevant. As much as I would defend as a systematic theologian the necessity of a pro­positional form of Christian doctrine, I have to acknowledge – not least from my own experience – that there are other and immensely powerful media for the communication of biblical truth. In Germany probably more people are familiar with the nativity story in Luke’s Gospel through the music and words of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio than from reading the Bible. In engaging with culture, theology may leave the cultural space of the church but it does not leave the sphere of influence of the Bible. For the world of literature Northrop Frye was surely right that the images and narratives of the Bible form the ‘great code’ of Western literature.11 What is it that only these images can say that cannot be replaced by other images? And what does that tell us for our engagement with biblical texts? Sometimes the refractions of biblical forms of expression in other literary media point to extensions and transformations in meaning due to the change in the medium of communication. This may lead us to appreciate certain dimensions of the biblical texts in a new way. Who can engage with Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers without being led to a new appreciation of the fact that the Bible is a deeply ironic book, ‘[y]e thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good’ (Gen. 50.20).12 One needs the Bible in order to understand the world of culture, and one also needs the refractions of the biblical images in culture to make the overly familiar unfamiliar again and so disclose new and sometimes irritating dimensions of meaning. Does that only apply to the humanities, to the arts and to literary culture? Is there also a promising interrelationship between the Bible and the sciences? This would not seem to consist in versions of creationism that turn the biblical Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Orlando, FL: Harvest Books, 2002 [1981]). Cf. Christoph Schwöbel, Die Religion des Zauberers. Theologisches in den großen Romanen Thomas Manns (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).

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story of creation into an axiomatic account of the world’s coming into being. Rather, the biblical idea that the world is created by God’s word so that everything that exists carries an inherent meaning, the idea behind the correlations of reading the book of Scripture and reading the book of culture, seems to have acquired a new significance in the sciences. It seems that modern science has made progress in those areas where it did not interpret the world of nature as a mechanism governed by the dumb forces of mass and acceleration, which is meaningless unless we give it meaning, but as a structured process of the transmission of information in the mutuality of encoding and decoding, especially in living systems. Far from the absurdities of creation science, a view that integrates existence and meaning, which we find on every page of the Bible, and which was powerfully expressed by Luther’s view that everything that exists belongs to the ‘vocabulary of God’s word’, by means of which the creator addresses his human creatures, seems to offer promising perspectives even in the natural sciences.13

Reading with the eyes of the other: Exploring scripture in conversation with other faiths In my academic teaching I have regularly conducted seminars at Tübingen with my colleagues, the New Testament scholar Hans-Joachim Eckstein and the Old Testament Scholar Bernd Janowski. This is not only a productive enterprise in interdisciplinary biblical exegesis. It also makes the systematic theologian aware how much of the development of Christian doctrine and of the philosophy of religion only becomes transparent, once one reads it as an engagement with the biblical literature. Can one fully understand Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion or Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation without taking note of the constant interaction of philosophical reflection with the literature of the Bible? More recently, I have become aware that one cannot really understand the history of Christian theology, especially in medieval times, if one does Cf. Christoph Schwöbel,‘The Religion of Nature and the Nature of Religion: Theological Perspectives on the Ambiguities of Understanding Nature and Religion’, in Dirk Evers, Michael Fuller, Antje Jackelen and Taede Smedes (eds), Is Religion Natural? (London: Continuum, 2012), 147–70.

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not understand it as a constant interaction between Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers, all referring to their sacred texts and exploring their meaning, in order to question, dispute and confirm the teaching of the others. Do we have to rewrite the history of Christian thought as the record of a continuing critical and constructive conversation between Christian, Muslim and Jewish believers, which offers a counter-point to the often violent and shameful history of the repression of the other’s religion?14 On the basis of our respective involvement with the ‘Building Bridges Seminars’, conversations between Christian and Muslim scholars, established by the Archbishop of Canterbury after 9/11 and now organized by Georgetown University, my colleague Lejla Demiri from the newly established Centre for Islamic Theology and I have started to conduct a regular seminar for Christian and Muslim theology students, interpreting texts from the Bible and the Qur’an. We try to follow the practice of ‘scriptural reasoning,’15 adapted to the academic environment of Tübingen University, without any programmatic commitment to ‘post-critical’ or ‘post-liberal’ stances. On the contrary, the participants are invited to bring all their skills in interpreting biblical or qur’anic texts to the table. They are only required to explain how they influence their personal reading of the texts, and how they relate to the text we read together. There is no search for consensus or agreement. The respect of the identity of the other, and that means the respect for difference, shapes the conversations about the text. However, the way this identity is mediated in our dealing with the texts and ultimately rooted in our relationship to God, how this identity is shaped by our understanding of God, as it is expressed in the texts we read together, is a constant focus of attention. Of course, one cannot read with the eyes of another. One can only approach this by listening to the others as they read and explain their scriptures, by listening to their reading and so conducting one’s own reading in conversation with their reading of the texts. Our reading is consciously theological, in trying to understand through the texts more about God’s relationship to humanity and Cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Denkender Glaube. Strukturmomente des christlichen Glaubens und die Praxis christlicher Theologie im Gespräch mit islamischer Theologie’, in Mohammad Gharaibeh, Esnaf Begic, Hansjörg Schmid and Christian Ströbele (eds), Zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft: Theologie in Christentum und Islam (Regensburg: Pustet, 2015), 69–95. 15 Cf. David F. Ford and C. C. Pecknold (eds), The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 14

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the world, and this liberates from the effort of defending one’s religion against the other and liberates for a common exploration of our destiny before God. In view of the otherness of God which is time and again expressed in the texts as God’s ability to relate to humans with unconditional mercy, the otherness of our respective religions becomes one that can be tolerated, respected and enjoyed as an enrichment of the mutual hospitality in scriptural exploration. By being expressly theological, the conversations on the biblical and qur’anic texts have important political implications. It quickly exposes the respective fundamentalisms of both our religions as phenomena of displaced foundations. Where in a Christian context the inerrancy of the biblical text itself is posited as the first fundamental article of faith it displaces the triune God and God’s revelation as the foundation of Christian faith. Such a displacement can only be criticised religiously and can only be cured theologically, by deeper insight into the constitution of Christian faith. Similarly, where isolated verses of the Qur’an are used to justify violence against others, in most cases violence against other Muslims, we have a similar phenomenon of displaced foundations. The first act of violence is committed against the integrity of the Qur’an and the way in which the Qur’an as a structured whole, not simply as a text, but as a text to be performed in recitation, communicates God’s word to humanity. A theological reading of the Qur’an, which respects its status in the revelation of God, effectively divests apparently religiously motivated violence, based on fundamentalist readings of sacred Scripture, of its religious justification. This points to the responsibility of theologians, both Christian and Muslim, for nurturing a culture of the uses of Scripture, a responsibility which, in a Christian context, accepts God’s self-disclosure as ‘a God merciful and gracious’ (Exod. 34.6) and believes in Christ as God’s mercy incarnate, and, in a Muslim context, holds fast to the message of the Qur’an, ‘It is the Lord of Mercy who taught the Qur’an’ (S 55, 1-2.).

Promise and trust: Beyond reading When I survey the encounters with Scripture, which I have tried to describe, I wonder whether there is a common element in these different encounters. What is it that motivates the transition from reading Scripture in the context



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of theological reflection to using Scripture in the context of worship, from listening to the address of God communicated in human voices by interpreting Scripture to speaking to God in prayer in congregational worship, in the confidence of faith to do so in the presence of the triune God? What has become clearer over the years is that the pluralistic library of the Bible has its unity not in an underlying unity of human nature that provides continuity in the rich diversity of texts and their views of the relationship of God, the world and humanity. The unity in all its diversity is a referential unity. It consists in the reference the texts make to God as the point of reference of the rich tapestry of narratives, theological reflections, instructions, poetry and wisdom. The particular form of this unity then depends on the character of God who is the unitary reference-point in the diversity of the biblical texts. However, this unitary reference-point should not be understood as a monolithic unity which is simply the logical opposite of the plurality of the world. Just like Hegel defined bad infinity as that infinity which excludes the finite so we should regard a unity that excludes plurality as bad unity. If God is not to be defined by his opposition to the world this unity must be the differentiated unity in which God, God’s Word and God’s Spirit in their relationship form the unity-in-plurality which makes the conversation that God is eternal. What then is the character of this God? I believe that Luther got it right, when he wrote that God has never acted in any other way in relation to his human creatures than through the word of promise, and that therefore we can only respond to God by trusting his promises: in faith.16 Robert Jenson has observed that whereas the law, as we understand it in ordinary contexts, has the logical structure ‘if … then’, making the consequence dependent on antecedent conditions, a promise has the logical structure ‘because … therefore’, opening up a future that is exclusively grounded in the character of the promiser.17 What does God promise? Again, Luther is a challenging guide to this question. According to his interpretation of Exodus 3.17 where God introduces himself by giving his name as ‘I am who I am’, or ‘I shall be who I shall be’, God promises nothing less than himself. God is the only being who The detailed references to Luther are provided in Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Promise and Trust: Lutheran Identity in a Multicultural Society’, in Carl-Henric Grenholm and Göran Gunner (eds), Justification in a Post-Christian Society (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 15–35. 17 Cf. Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), 8. 16

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truly has essence, Luther concludes, since he is the only one who is his own future. Therefore our future will depend on finding the ground of our being in God’s future by trusting his promises.18 When God promises himself, this promise creates the space in which his creation has a future. ‘Because I am … you shall be’ is the promise for creation. This clearly changes the nature of the law, because what humans are called to be and are challenged to do, is no longer bound to conditions which we have to fulfil. The condition for what we are called to do, consists exclusively in what God has promised to do and has done in fulfilling his promise. Torah is therefore the guidance that God offers on the foundation of what he has promised and done in fulfilling his promise. Exodus 20.2-3 puts it succinctly: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.’ Torah therefore is the commandment for retaining the freedom that has been granted by God liberating Israel from the house of slavery. By trust in the God who fulfils his promises Israel can follow the guidance of Torah. The Bible offers in the rich plurality of its texts the interactions of a promising God and of human creatures called to trust God’s promise and follow God’s guidance. The story is also a story of maintained and renewed promises by God and misplaced trust by God’s human creatures who because of their misplaced trust become misguided. Promise and trust can only be maintained in a continuing conversation where God addresses his human creatures again and again, even after they have failed to place their trust in God alone. The culmination of the story in the New Testament is God addressing humans in Jesus Christ, God’s Word incarnate, the creator communicating in a human form of communication. Jesus is both God’s promise incarnate (Jn 1.14), and the only human who can be called the ‘pioneer and perfecter of our faith’ (Heb. 12.2). In him, in his death on the cross, God has taken the failure of his human creatures to trust in God’s promise upon himself, and in his resurrection he has opened his promise to all who trust in God’s promise by trusting in Jesus, God’s promise incarnate. It is God himself in his Spirit who creates the freedom in which we can trust in God by taking part in Jesus’ relationship to the God he calls Father. In trust we can enter into conversation Cf. WA 16, 49, 1–12.

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with God, knowing that nothing can separate us from the fulfilment of God’s promise in God’s love (Rom. 8.39). It is this conversation, the exchange between a promising God and his creatures who are called to respond in trust, which defines the story of creation, and it is in telling this conversation in all its variations, from God’s first word to God’s final word that the Bible is the book of the world. It is the book of God’s promises and the book of human faith, the book of divinehuman conversation. We enter into this conversation when we turn from interpreting the Bible, from reading about God’s promise, to proclaiming God’s promise and from reading about human trust to placing our trust in God, and addressing God in response to his address – in thanksgiving, praise, petition and lamentation. The use of the Bible in worship is our entrance into the conversation with the triune God. Is there a final word of God? According to the Bible not in the sense that God will make a last utterance and will then forever be silent. The Bible’s message is that God has already spoken his final word in Jesus, and what this last word says, is that the conversation will continue forever – beyond reading. Again Luther has a fitting expression for it: ‘The person of the talking God and the Word signify that we are such creatures with whom God wants to talk in eternity and in an immortal way.’19

‘Persona dei loquentis et verbum significant nos tales creaturas esse, cum quibus velit loqui Deus usque in aeternum et immortaliter.’ WA 43, 481, 34–35.

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How I read the Bible Graham Ward

Beginnings I’m fifteen and living with my grandmother because my mother is permanently invalided (Huntingdon’s Chorea – though we didn’t know it at the time). My father is no longer around. In a lucid moment my mother asks me to go upstairs into my grandmother’s bedroom and bring down the large family Bible. Maybe she senses she will die soon, but she doesn’t tell me that. She wants to write her name into the great Victorian tome that sits on a chestof-drawers. It’s the first time I have seen her try to write for many years. The handwriting skids and slides … I’m seventeen and studying for my A levels. I have three brothers who also live with my grandmother, as well as my mother, and a great uncle who has been living with his sister since his earliest years. The house is cold. There is no central heating. It’s also noisy. The only way I can study is by working through the night. I sleep from the moment I get home from school until around eleven. Then I eat and work. It’s winter and the only room in the house heated at night is the bathroom. To stop the pipes from freezing there’s a paraffin heater nestled next to the toilet. I’m sitting on the toilet next to the heater, heady with the fumes, finishing my first reading of the Gospel of Mark … Somewhere between fifteen and seventeen I made a decision to become a Christian or I became aware that I did believe in Jesus as the Christ. I don’t know which. I have come to understand that my faith in Christ rests entirely on Christ’s faith in me – but I’m jumping ahead here. Not that Jesus had been entirely absent in my life earlier; or at least in my imagination (we were not

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a church-going family). He had been there as a sort of imaginary companion for a boy who liked silence and being on his own. But there was a different commitment now, and that commitment involved reading the Bible and developing a genuine relationship (though there’s still a lot of imagination and projection involved) based on understanding the life and work of Jesus, the Christ. He was now, for me, the Christ – God. The relationship was nurtured, and disciplined, by belonging to a house-church in Manchester. I went at first because Christian friends I found at school also went. It offered a new way of being church. The local Anglican parish was run down and the people who attended its services seemed permanently tired. The house-church drummed into all of us the one essential: a daily ‘quiet time’ focused on reading the Bible. I can honestly say I have read every single word, numerous times over and in various English versions, ploughing with a Herculean will through Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In a dedicated practice for over thirteen years I began at Genesis and went through to Revelation and then began again. If, after that time, my habits of reading Scripture changed that was because I had left the house-church and taken up the Anglican lectionary. What was I doing when I read and prayed throughout that ‘quiet time’? I was not a theologian at that time. I didn’t know what a theologian was and had had no aspirations in that direction. I imitated the practices of the elders of the house-church and imbibed their self-understanding about what they were doing. Reading the Scriptures and praying, though, have always remained for me inseparable practices. In those practices I was both bringing my life before God in all its daily details and experiences, and listening for the voice of God through whatever passage I was reading. The passage didn’t matter in some sense; what was paramount was being ‘spoken to’. And a lot of the time the Scriptures didn’t say anything and occasionally they did. A lot of time it wasn’t absolutely necessary that I was ‘spoken to’; life trundled on and the reading/ praying was, after all, a discipline. There were times when I didn’t want to be ‘spoken to’ and yet a conviction came: that I was mistaken, that I was in the wrong, that I had wronged someone else. But there were times when it was vital I was ‘spoken to’: becoming sexually attracted to someone, getting engaged, changing career, the birth of my children, when one of my brothers was diagnosed with Huntingdon’s etc. And then I knew I had to ‘wait for the word in season’.



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I’ve put ‘spoken to’ in inverted commas because I didn’t hear God literally speak. Many of us speak to ourselves and sometimes for me, when praying, this internal communication would be illuminated and I experienced an assurance, a sense of significance, a way ahead etc. But often it was the Bible that articulated this being ‘spoken to’. A verse I had read might come to me and stay with me insistently. Or I might be reading when the words came alive in a way that felt as though a claim was being made that I should hear or they were articulating my own petition and desire. One of the reasons I was drawn to Karl Barth’s second preface to his Epistle to the Romans was the honesty with which he discusses wanting to find the voice of Paul the Apostle, to let Paul speak to us in his reading. There are a thousand hermeneutical questions to be raised about such a stance to reading Romans. Barth was aware of many of them. I only really became aware of them as I began my first degree in English literature at Cambridge (renowned for its concern with ‘practical criticism’ in literary studies). But unless the Scriptures can speak to us in some way, unless we can hear the Word of God in and through them, then they would only be of historical and literary significance.

Exegesis Having a love of languages and being trained in literary studies provided me with a ‘disciplined’ approach to Scripture, and I will develop what I mean by ‘disciplined’ shortly. I was introduced at Cambridge – this was the late 1970s and the heyday of French critical theory – to hermeneutics. I realized my world was full of ‘signifiers’ – from Mill on the Floss to adverts for chewinggum, from the clothes on my back and the films I watched, to the circulation of traffic. In fact, I failed my first driving test for having not read a sign – a one way street sign. I came to understand that the need for interpretation was everywhere and the use of signifiers was as political and manipulative, as it was aesthetic and pleasing. A text for literary students in the late seventies became a playground of intellectual possibilities. You could bend it this way and that: make Cordelia a villain, Fanon a racist, and Omo detergent into a messianic promise. What all this did to the reading of Scripture was make it difficult, very difficult. Collections of signs that could not be accurately dated, given

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an identified authorship, provided with a cultural and historical provenance, and possibly composed of fragments from the ruins of other lost texts were an orgasmic gift – jouissance – to the structurally and post-structurally trained. I was a Christian. That did make an important difference when it came to approaching the Bible. But I was also aware that the Scriptures could become and had become a ‘nose of wax’ in any number of antagonistic and denominational battles: Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, Orthodox were just the peaks in a great terrain of sectarianism. I grew up in a Manchester divided territorially between Catholics and Protestants. We even supported different football teams. I was warned as a child not to play with the Scottish lad down the road because he went to St. Boniface’s. Even though my own father was a Catholic! Probably because he was a Catholic! The first time I read John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners I was riveted by a portrayal of my own situation: God speaking to me through the Bible – charismatic house-church trained – was one small step from paranoia. And here Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans did not help at all: I was addressed by the Word; my faith was demanded; God’s sovereign dixit was my command. I was certainly no saint, but the not-so-implicit narrator of Barth’s commentary was turning me into a hardened criminal. And I knew hardened criminals. Even today if you tell the police of Manchester and Salford your last name is Ward they will ask which gang-land tribe you belong to – the Middleton Wards or the Broughton Wards. My family roots were with the Middleton Wards. So I learned to be ‘disciplined’ in my reading of Scriptures. Slowly. And my literary studies, and eventually my acquaintance with Greek and Hebrew, were all part of that discipline. They enabled me to stop viewing the Scriptures as an assault by an abusive super-ego. They were God’s Word. I held to that. That’s what made them holy – God spoke and through Christ and the Spirit God’s speaking took on distinctive, historical, and materially located forms through the church and those prophets and apostles, inspired by Christ and the Spirit to write what they wrote. By the providential grace of God we have them in the way we have them. So, in a sense, reading the Scriptures is easy – just a matter of being led by the Spirit into understanding what God is saying. And, in another sense, that makes them very, very difficult. Difficult not because there any number of variants of the Greek text, no originals, layers of editing, redaction, pseudonymity, and all the problems of translation. No – these are



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not the main source of difficulty in interpreting Scripture. The fundamental difficulty is our entrustment to the Spirit, the work of discernment that we can often short-circuit because we can read and so we think we understand them. We don’t treat the text as holy. Or we start to and then end up reading it like a Sunday Supplement. The fundamental difficulty lies with us. Call that sin if you like, but we need to put that word under a forensic light because it is not a matter of wrongdoing (the common conception of sin), but of a disposition that radically affects our ability to feel, think, imagine and do. We have to understand sin as related to what Melanchthon, in his Loci communes (1521), recognized as affectus. A certain affectus, and the habitus within which it is learnt and lived, makes us unable to hear, to trust; unable to allow ourselves to listen deeply. Listen, that is, not to His Master’s Voice. We’re not docile dogs sitting before a megaphone. The Scriptures are a gift. They are God’s great communicative gift. They are given. All of God is given in them as all of God is given in everything created. The difficulty is: can we receive the gift? A gift, that is, to which God has accommodated his communicative relations such that we might receive it. Just as we have been created as the creatures we are with the capacities we have that we might respond to the voice, the call, that God as creator has written into creation. Creation is a love song. It’s not even a matter of how do we receive the gift of this song. There’s no method here, no technique for receiving. It is just a matter of our entrusting ourselves to what is given. That ‘just a matter of ’ involves a lifetime of relearning and being led (discipleship). There’s the difficulty. Can we receive? Can we respond? Can we forestall our grasping appropriations, our understandings, our interpretations, our instrumentalizations, and allow God’s Word to be spoken, formed and grow within us? What makes the Scriptures ‘holy’ (set apart) is that it is addressed to us in the name of: He who is the name above and before all names, the name in whom the possibility of all naming resides. No other writings have that status, that authority to reveal the name from whom all naming flows: the words that proceed from the mouth of God by which we live (Mt. 4.4); the communication that utters to us things which have been kept secret from the foundations of the world (Mt. 13.35). These holy writings cannot be understood outside of faith – because faith is the entrustment and reception that

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enables them to be life to us, redemptive, transformative life. Nothing of God, nothing of redemptive transformation, is possible outside that reception that we are all invited to give space to.

How I use Scripture It follows from how I have characterized Scripture above that, if I say that my theological work begins and ends with Scripture, then I intend that to be understood not in terms of starting out from exegesis (though I engage in exegesis) but as working within what John Webster has recently termed ‘the domain of the Word’:1 the realm (en Christō) circumscribed by those divine self-communicative relations of love. I have used exegesis of Scripture pericopae as part of more extended theological studies – the ‘Carmen Christi’ on the Letter to the Philippians in my essay ‘Kenosis: Death, Discourse and Resurrection’,2 the woman with the hemorrhages as a way of thinking reception and response to grace,3 and the scene between Pontius Pilot and Jesus to open a conversation about the politics of the Kingdom,4 for example. On occasion I have been Scripturally more ambitious – the examination of a whole book (the Gospel of Mark in my essay ‘Christology and Mimesis’5) or an entire letter (the Letter of St. James6). But even these more developed expositions are part of theological arguments issuing from a reasoning orientated by Scripture. They are not commentaries, though I drew upon the scholarly commentaries of others. I point to these explorations now because in my aim to bring together systematic and philosophical theology (I think any divorce between them is deeply erroneous and detrimental to theology more generally), the Bible has played an important part, particularly with respect to the more dogmatic emphases. We cannot do systematic theology as if we John Webster, The Domain of the Word (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). In David Moss with Lucy Gardiner, Ben Quash and Graham Ward (eds), Balthasar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). 3 In Christ and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 4 In The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Press, 2009). 5 In Christ and Culture. 6 ‘Kenosis, Poiesis and Genesis: or the Theological Aesthetics of Suffering’, in Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (eds), Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 165–75. 1 2



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were outside the system. There is only a system at all because of the operative theo-logic within which all created things are situated. The ‘Prologue’ to Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechetical Oration is instructive. He is addressing those teaching the faith to candidates seeking admission to the Christian church, to those he calls the ‘presiding ministers [proestēkosi] of the mystery of godliness [mustērou tēs eusebeias]’. And he tells them that they ‘have need of a system [logos anagkaios] in their instructions in order that the Church may be replenished by the accession of such as should be saved [an plēthunoito tē prosthēkē tōn sōdzomenōn ē ekklēsia]’. The standard translation is clumsy, especially the ‘replenished by the accession,’ when the Greek is simply ‘the church of those being saved by the assistance’ of the proestēkosi – those who have a ministerial care ‘through the teaching of the word of the Faith [pistou logou] being brought home to the hearing of unbelievers [apistōn]’.7 But what is interesting is that they translate ‘logos’ (the subject of the sentence) as ‘system’. The anagkaios is a characteristic of the logos. So it is not the ‘presiding ministers’ who ‘have need of ’, as the translation here suggests. Rather, it is the logos that ‘constrains’ or ‘compels’ and in that sense is ‘necessary’. The catechesis [katēchēseōs] in the opening clause of the original Greek text is a genitive belonging to the compelling Logos itself.8 So what does all this mean? Fundamentally, that the ‘system’ is not an abstract set of propositions set out by the ministers who preside and to which allegiance is given by those taught. It is, first of all, intrinsic to the Word itself as the Logos; the Word of faith that teaches. The system is the constraining and necessary logic of the Logos. It is co-relative to both a social and institutional practice (teaching) and an operation (being saved). It is implicated in ‘the mystery of godliness’ or the hidden working of piety. Its aim is salvation through conversion. And it is a teaching belonging to the ‘word of faith’, the Logos who is believed in – Christ who is the way, the truth and the life of that faith. The ‘system’ is a pedagogy issuing from Christ as the Logos for the divine sanctification of those who accept it. The basis for there being a ‘system’ at all, Gregory of Nyssa, ‘The Great Catechism’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, vol. 5 (trans. William More and Henry Austen Wilson; Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds); Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 473. 8 See Oratio Catechetica in Gregorii Nysseni Opera Dogmatica Minora, Pars IV (Ekkehardus Mühlenberg (ed.); Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 5. 7

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for Gregory, is explained in Chapter 1 of the same Catechism: God has his Logos. The logic of the system is then a manifestation of the Logos possessed by the trinitarian God. It is Christological through and through, and pneumatological in its operation. It does not stand as an independent set of human prescriptions. It is engaged in a dynamic. If the faith taught is the faith ‘of the Logos’ then the Logos must be manifest in and through the logic of the system. Furthermore, it is from this constraining logic that a ‘method of instruction [tēs didaskalias tropos]’ issues, which Gregory goes on to suggest needs to be adapted to catechumens with different religious backgrounds (Jews, Greeks, Manichees, Gnostics etc.). The ‘system’ isn’t a system then in the way we have come to use and understand that term. It is flexible and adaptive. Doing theology is impossible outside of a receptive faith and a participation within those divine communicative relations. Those relations do not guarantee its veracity – for we who engage in such theological work are in the process of being redeemed; we are not without sin. We remain defined and formed by an affectus and a habitus that is a work in progress; a pedagogy and a providence. Let me give an example. In Cities of God (2001), there is a chapter on the displaced body of Jesus Christ. The chapter was a reworking of an essay I had written and published earlier. Discussion that arose from a disquiet with the use of the word ‘displace’ following the publication of the essay determined the nature of the reworking. It was not the right word. I had been too influenced at the time of the earlier writing by some thoughts on reading Michel de Certeau’s essay ‘How is Christian Theology Possible Today’ and his book The Mystic Fable. Looking back, even though I reworked the notion of ‘displacement’ I didn’t entirely drop it. And I should have done. I needed a more adequate theology of the Ascension, which could only come from a deeper and more perceptive exegesis of that event. For the body of Christ was not displaced – that is far too negative a word and suggested a distinction between the places from which and to which Christ ascended. There is no such distinction; all occurs with Christ in God (Col. 3.3). Christ’s ascension figures an expansion of all notions of place and space. When I returned to thinking through the body of Christ in The Politics of Discipleship (2009), in and through an extended exegesis of Paul’s depiction in 1 Corinthians, I turned from examining the historical to examining the ecclesial body. And my understanding of Christ’s embodiment was revised.



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To return to where I began: I approach the Scriptures to hear of Christ – where the genitive is both objective and subjective. I do not have anything grand like a method. All texts communicate, but not all texts speak of Christ. When I read the Scriptures I want to listen, and attempt to listen deeply. Hugh of St. Victor, schooled in the mediaeval lectio divina tradition, saw how fundamental it was that Christians are immersed in the Scriptures, and called this meditatio. But, for Hugh, mediatio has not of the mystique associated with the word ‘meditation’ since the introduction of Yogic and Buddhist techniques of meditation into the West that, at least to me, aim at self-transcendence and forgetting. Mediation now has the sense of getting beyond text or materiality itself. That is not what either Hugh or I understand by mediatio. The text is to unfold its materiality, not to transcend it. I don’t read the Scripture to enter a silent absence – though I am aware that contemplatio (that was a stage entered into through meditatio) draws us into the apophatic, a not-knowing. More of that anon. Meditatio is a cognitive enterprise – thinking about, reflecting upon. It’s the first level of response, but it engages the imagination. Imagination is not fantasy or, as Coleridge recognized, fancy. It is not whimsical, arbitrary meanderings and escapist. It’s part of deep listening. For me that means being in touch with the original language of the Scriptural text, its grammar, rhetoric and literary genre, though my Hebrew is much weaker than my Greek (which actually explains why I draw less upon the Hebrew bible). The commentaries I use relate more to philological issues rather than constructions of historical context or editorial redactions. I’m interested in the way the Scripture speaks today as an ecclesial bed-rock, though reception history is richly informative for the way in which it has spoken in the past. It’s all part of the tradition. But my literary training has made me aware that with ‘classic texts’ there is so much commentary and criticism no one can possibly do justice to it AND read the text itself. So, as I might approach giving a reading of King Lear or (in True Religion) Romeo and Juliet, I seek to draw out my own reception and response to the words on the page and their arrangement. In literature, there is a recognition of good, better and best readings being calibrated by inclusion. That is, how much of the text the reading is able to illuminate and include. Poor readings are superficial readings, and readings that suppress or deliberately miss out important details. That’s where deep listening comes in: they recognize ambivalence and types of literary ambiguity (William

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Empson). Deep listening hears when a definite article is absent; it hears when a colloquialism (like ‘Fear not’ as part of a greeting) is being used with nuance (because ‘fear’ is a theme reiterated throughout the text); deep listening ‘feels’ the difference between a dative locative use of en (in) when it is employed with respect not to a place but Christ; deep listening registers the difference between verbal moods and tenses. Sometimes I think I use secondary commentary because I want to show I’ve consulted the experts and justify, in some sense, my response to the text. If so that says more about my own insecurities than my reading. I don’t want to just quote the ‘experts’ in order to prove what I am saying is really there. Commentaries can be useful, as some literary criticism can be useful, for the further insights they bring – that footnotes can acknowledge. Though not all insights are useful for the theology being expounded. But it says much about a theologian’s confidence in the academy when he or she feels unskilled or unable to engage in biblical reasoning. Mediatio is quite simply biblical reasoning and we have a theological mandate for such reasoning because Christ is the Logos and we are en Christō. This is where I think preaching helps. As someone who is called upon regularly to preach and refer to the lectionary readings in that preaching, then one cannot allow any institutional deskilling by the academy to silence, intimidate or prevent the necessary exposition of the Scripture that preaching requires. Interpretation then may draw insights from commentaries, but my own tools tend to be a Liddell and Scott lexicon (for Greek), a theological dictionary (Kittel’s invaluable ten volumes for the New Testament), and a concordance. The ‘experts’ I do consult are mainly friends and colleagues in the academy, and, again, I am mainly drawing upon their knowledge of the language rather than wading into the troubled waters of historical reconstructions of context and textual dissemination. My academic interpretative work mainly stops on mediatio because my readings of Scripture are part of a theological argument, or a theological exposition. Contemplatio is more closely associated with prayer or occasions when I am invited to ‘lead’ contemplative worship (on a retreat, perhaps, or addresses during Lent). There’s no hard and fast distinction, as I see the study of theology as a form of prayer. The theological exposition has to be rooted then in contemplation and its aim is doxological, which begins for me with Scripture. But contemplation is a beholding. It is more directly an act



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of worship and the consummation of faith as entrustment. Nicholas of Cusa puts it succinctly as embracing ‘incomprehensible things incomprehensibly in learned ignorance (docta ignorantia),’9 where the Latin docta is related to doctrina as a verbal noun – the art of making something understood. This is not the pursuit of a certain type of mystical out-of-the-body experiences. Contemplatio is profoundly corporeal and pre-reflective. Whereas mediatio is reflective. It is not an experience that is necessarily registered. Experiences of peace, say, or being in the presence of God, do not necessarily follow and to want, and even more try and will, an experience of God is not entrustment; such desires have to be abandoned in contemplatio. But if mediatio is faith seeking understanding (and that seeking drives theological exposition), then contemplatio draws us towards the limits of creaturely understanding and into a letting be that is the creaturely attunement with the will and operations of the triune God. We recognize we live the Trinity. However difficult and ambiguous Hegel is I am attracted to his vision of our being enfolded within the life of the Trinity; the vision is orthodox even if some of the theological and philosophical reflections that issue from that vision are at times heterodox. My sense is that Hegel’s theological errors arise in his abandonment of his earlier dependence on Scriptural reflection. It is potentially one of the pitfalls of philosophical theology. The regulae fidei, which are distillations of Scriptural reasoning, still govern any enfolding of our life within Trinitarian life, but we are treating here the metaphysical, an ontology from which Scripture itself issued as prophetic and apostolic inspiration – Christ focused, Spirit led and therefore Christomorphic. With contemplatio there are intimations of the way our lives are hidden with Christ in God. With both meditatio and contemplatio there is a listening for the call, the voice of the Lord governing creation (Ps. 27); a response to what is given, endlessly, and communicated, endlessly, of God’s love, mercy, judgement, forgiveness and acceptance. It is this giveness and communication of which Scripture speaks and about which the writers of Scripture attest, yesterday as today. We live by this speaking, as Jesus said (Mt. 4.4).

Letter to Cardinal Julian concluding his work de Docta Iganorantia.

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The fullness of Scripture in the Christian life Angus Paddison

Scripture in the web of Christian faith The chapters in Theologians on Scripture represent a snapshot into some prominent academic theologians’ perspectives on how, where and with whom Scripture has been, and continues to be, read profitably in the different, but related, parts of their lives. Theologians’ accounts of Scripture and its reading are always webbed within a set of working assumptions about the nature of the church, God’s relationship to history and our experience, the significance and authority of the multi-faceted phenomenon that is [the] ‘Christian tradition’, and the contribution and validity of non-theological disciplines and insights to Christian understanding. A theologian’s adherence to Scripture in the context of this wider set of assumptions is linked to the status of Scripture, not as the goal of Christian belief, but rather a companion on the way to knowing Jesus. Scripture is a servant of Jesus’ revelation (Jn 5.39), it is not the end-point of discipleship, but a means through which Christians may come to a transformative encounter with Scripture’s target.1 Thus, Christoph Schwöbel indicatively attests in his contribution, the Bible has been for many of the contributors in this volume a constant companion. Living with the Bible, to use an image of co-habitation effectively deployed by Leander Keck some years ago end echoed by Robin Gill in his contribution,2 does not mean being blind to the dark corners of the text, but it is to be aware of how such B. A. Gerrish, Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 23. Leander Keck, ‘The Premodern Bible in the Postmodern World’, Interpretation 50 (1996): 130–41.

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texts operate in a wider ecology, and it is to recognize that wrestling and contestation are ingredient to the Christian tradition. (See Timothy Gorringe’s contribution for a similar emphasis on wrestling as being part of the Christian tradition.) To commit to living with the biblical texts implies a certain element of trust, love and endurance. It need not imply that the text or its history of interpretation can go unchallenged or untested. It is worth pushing the implications of Schwöbel’s image of the Bible as ‘companion’ a little further. Etymologically, we share bread with companions. The resonances here between Bible as companion and the classic pairing of Word and Sacrament are evident, a liturgical bond that is paradigmatically forged in the Lukan account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (a text not surprisingly cited by more than one contributor to this volume). In this account, the risen Jesus, ‘all the [Hebrew] scriptures’ (Lk. 24.27),3 a meal with Jesus as host, the plenitude of the gospel (‘were not our hearts burning within us?’, Lk. 24.32), and the shape of discipleship lived on the way are all webbed. Jesus is known when fellowship, hospitality, and Scripture come into searing contact. In the Emmaus account two vital pairings are reinforced. First, a pairing is made between Jesus as companion and the scriptures. With Jesus, and in his risen presence, the disciples come to understand the Hebrew Scriptures. Second, there is a pairing between Jesus’ Scripture-centred account of his life and his hospitable breaking of the bread through which the disciples come to see him as Lord. Only with the breaking of the bread is Jesus’ earlier exposition of the scriptures on the road to Emmaus understood. As Stephen Pickard notes on the fusion between Word and Sacrament, ‘[t]he Lord of the word who burns in the heart is the same Lord seen in the breaking of the bread … The eyes were only opened when both word and sacrament coalesced.’4 From the genesis of the Christian faith Scripture is webbed, bound inseparably to knowing Jesus, to discipleship, and to the life that disciples live We leave to one side the intriguing implication of the Emmaus account (and indeed the entirety of the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament), namely that the authority of the Old Testament is greater than the New Testament because the Old Testament is reciprocally related to the understanding of Jesus and his life, while the New Testament serves only to attest to this inseparable relationship. See Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Second Thought about Inspiration’, Pro Ecclesia 13 (2004): 393–8. It is clear that the Emmaus story can protect us from the crypto-Marcionism that Timothy Gorringe identifies in the practice of Anglican churches. See also the opening section of Mike Higton’s contribution for some important observations about the place of the Old Testament. 4 Stephen Pickard, In-Between God (Hindmarsh: ATF Theology, 2011), 259. 3



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together in Eucharistic communion.5 We should not be surprised therefore to find that the lived faith (expressed in different registers) of the individual theologians comes out so strongly in their contributions. It was stated in the Introduction to this volume that edited collections are at risk of being impoverished theologically by decisions to gather together likeminded voices. Whilst understandable if one wishes to advance an agenda or deepen a conversation within a discrete field of study such editorial decisions can curtail the conversational, disputatious nature of the Christian faith. Disputation in theological understanding is not a good in itself of course, but only in so far as it serves the plumbing of truth.6 To gather together largely like-minded voices risks forgetting that theology is comprised of different moods – dogmatic, practical and political – all rooting for our attention as perspectives on the gospel’s plenitude. The conscious editorial decision behind this book is to gather together a range of theological voices and styles centred on a common point of reference, as a form of reminding us that how theology is faithfully practised is sharply contested and consequently we should be wary of implying theology is less irenic than it is this side of the kingdom. The variety of theologies on offer in Scripture, the combination of stirring and repulsive texts, and the different voices in theology impress upon us that theology as a tradition is a historically extended argument that is, for now, unresolvable (see Timothy Gorringe’s appeal to Alasdair MacIntyre in his chapter). There can be no short-circuiting the sheer work of theology. Accordingly, any agreement that all accounts of Scripture are webbed in a host of neighbouring convictions is only the start of the matter. If the manner in which Scripture is lived with is ruled by the logic and shape of Christian faith, as it surely must be, then establishing what this logic and shape is is the on-going work of theology. In this concluding chapter I wish to explore something of the logic that can help shape theological engagement with Scripture. I shall do this by ranging across some of the common themes that have emerged through the contributions, pushing at the points of dissonance that have emerged as well See too, Andreas Andreopoulos’ reflections on Emmaus and its significance in his contribution to this volume. Andreopoulos’ essay is its own meditation on the ‘webbed’ status of Scripture in the Christian faith. 6 Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters (London: Continuum, 2005), 201. 5

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as the points of convergence. The themes shall be probed using a literary device recently deployed by Stanley Hauerwas. In his The Work of Theology Hauerwas prefaces each of his thirteen essays with ‘How’, for example ‘How the Holy Spirit Works’, or ‘How to Think Theologically about Rights’. The result is a manual to doing theology, Hauerwas-style.7 In imitation of this, I shall structure these concluding reflections by making proposals in relation to the following issues that arise directly from the contributions: how should we think theologically about the Bible; how should we preach theologically; how should we draw upon Christian tradition; how should we relate experience to the Bible theologically? It will be plain that each of these questions – precisely in a bid to understand the ministry of Scripture – requires us to traverse wide theological terrain.

How should we think theologically about the Bible? In order to sketch a response to how we should think theologically about the Bible, we need to break down this question into two sub-questions: how should we conceive the connection between the church’s reading of Scripture and academic theological work? And where do we locate the boundaries of theological reading of the Bible? It is a feature of the majority of the contributors to this volume that they speak of the Bible’s personal significance in the context of belonging to the church as a community of faith. Tom Greggs’ contribution is a strong example of this. So too, many of the contributors speak of the importance of preaching as a discipline to which they are bound. Such placing of the Bible by the contributors serves to reinforce that it is first and foremost a book of faith before it is an object of academic pursuits, theological or otherwise.8 Scripture’s intended end, Stephen Holmes crisply states, is not dogmatic system. Scripture is a servant of the divine intent that we enter into a transformative relationship. Most basically, therefore, preaching as a specific Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015). By ‘academic theology’ I intend to refer to theological outputs produced by professionally trained theologians, intended primarily for other professionally trained theologians. By ‘ordinary theology’ I refer to theologies rooted in people that belong to churches, but who have received no formal, academic training in theology, and/or who have no official teaching role in the life of their churches.

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practice is a correlate of the conviction that Scripture can only be accessed as the Word of God when we participate in what Graham Ward terms a set of ‘divine communicative relations’. More on this later. For now, it is worth dwelling on the observation that when a systematic theologian (whose role it is to articulate a sense of the whole) speaks of their responsibility as preacher before particular congregations we are handed a tantalizing clue of where we should begin thinking theologically about the Bible. Academic theologians are part of the lives of Christian communities, communities whose practices resist being packaged into neat, sequestered categories. Academic and ordinary theologies (embodied in academic and ordinary theologians) are not waiting to be put together – they already overlap. This leads to the thesis I wish to unpack here: ordinary and academic theologies are co-constitutive.9 Such a thesis requires us to investigate: how should we conceive the connection between the church’s reading of Scripture and academic theological work,10 namely ordered reflection on the logic of Christian faith?11 The vocation of theological interpretation of Scripture is to render an account of the text (what this text is), how this text is to be read in a manner appropriate to its nature (its interpretation by readers/hearers), and what this text is communicating (what it talks about, or its subject-matter), each of these in relation to the agency of God. As an academic movement theological interpretation has as one of its primary ends the bridging of the divide between systematic theology and biblical studies, any presumption on the part of the latter discipline that it enjoys a monopoly on attention to the biblical text being thus challenged. As well as seeking to bring together systematic theology and biblical studies, theological interpretation also endeavours to understand how the church’s practices (what it does as an outworking of its faith, of which academic theology is just one example) relate to scriptural reading Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, Ethnographic Theology: An Inquiry into the Production of Theological Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 20. Such a position is also in line with Anthony G. Reddie’s opening statements in his essay. 10 By speaking of the ‘actual’ church I intend to refer to concrete churches, the churches that as theo­logians we worship in, rather than the abstract ‘church’ we are tempted to write about in detachment from those actual churches we know and of which we are part. 11 David Starling, ‘Not a Wisdom of This Age: Theology and the Future of the Post-Christendom Church’, in Trevor Cairney and David Starling (eds), Theology and the Future: Evangelical Assertions and Explorations (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 81–97 (82), offers this definition of systematic theology, ‘an ordered, rationally coherent account of the nature and interrelationships and purposes of God and his creatures, with comprehensive scope and enduring validity’. 9

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(such reading being one practice of the church among many).12 Making these connections is no easy matter. Stephen Holmes is disarmingly candid when he speaks of two spheres which hitherto he has not been able to connect satisfactorily – the sphere of his pastoral work with the Bible and the sphere of his work as a systematic and historical theologian. How are we to connect, with theological integrity, the dizzying range of what Holmes calls ‘Christian ecclesial existence’ with the work of academic or systematic theology? The term ‘systematic theology’ can confuse. It can make it sound that its business is to impose order in a manner inappropriate to a Christian faith that is often diverse to the point of hybrid and to texts that look to be somewhat disorderly rather than orderly.13 As Stephen Holmes reinforces, the angularity of Scripture is a constant warning to all theologies of the risks of imposing order too hastily. Scripture is not a natural ally of theological systems ordered to the point that the strangeness or awkwardness of the texts is excluded. The ‘messiness’ of the texts (the fact that they do not always seem to cohere easily, or that they do not appear to be morally perspicuous) is bound up with the contingency and vulnerability of God’s revelation. Stephen Holmes makes the significant statement that we must presume that God could have revealed God’s self in perfectly ordered texts, and so we are obliged to view with theological seriousness the shape in which God does choose to reveal God’s self. In a contribution that partially rhymes with some of the implications of Holmes’ contribution, Timothy Gorringe (through Ched Myers) beckons attention away from idealist theological hermeneutics and towards practically focused readings committed to justice and action (Lisa Isherwood and Anthony Reddie too say something similar). Justice-orientated readings work with the grain of the text, not against. These rebukes to a theology that is inappropriately ordered, idealist, or detached from the lived experience of Christian people and the injustices they suffer deserve extension, precisely so that we might further our understanding of theological interpretation. In an equivalent manner to the attention we need to pay to the Bible’s angularity so the church as a reading community must not be flattened. We should be wary of talk of ‘the church’ in abstraction from churches and See, for example, my Scripture: A Very Theological Proposal (London: T&T Clark International, 2009). See the treatment of this challenge in Anthony C. Thiselton, Systematic Theology (London: SPCK, 2015), 1–6.

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Christian people that actually read the text. In Nicholas Healy’s redolent image there is a type of theology that can take on the form of a ‘blueprint’,14 a mode of practising theology whose helicopter-like hovering above the ground of reality hampers its ability to relate doctrine (the articulation of the Christian faith in a manner that is continuous with tradition, yet not the mere repetition of formulae) either to the actual church, or to the text, or to the ways in which the text is read by disciples. Practical theology, as might be expected, remains suspicious of the abstract manner in which much systematic theology can go about its work. In words that resonate with some of the strains of Zoë Bennett’s emphases in her contribution Bonnie Miller-McLemore imprecates that, ‘[t]heories are models or maps. But with maps, one risks mistaking the “model of reality” (e.g. theological doctrine) for the “reality of the model”.’15 Heeding Miller-McLemore’s warning, those who endeavour to think theologically about Scripture should be mindful that doctrines of Scripture are not mistaken for what the church actually does with Scripture, through its implicit theology. Although no systematic theologian would wish to say that their work is self-sufficient (certainly not those who have contributed to this collection), the practice of the discipline can suggest otherwise, which is its own form of implicit theology. When theological work evades the complex business of relating academic theologies to theologies at work in the practices of the church the temptation is strong to imagine academic theology as a policing or regulatory exercise (usually spotted by abstract talk of ‘the church’).16 What then can attention to the life of the Bible in the church and discipleship offer to theological interpretation? The health of academic theology depends upon a lively and meaningful interchange with the faith of the church, church being understood as the people of God, and faith being accessed via attention to the ‘ “ordinary” way in which beliefs, values and customs circulate through common practices’,17 practices which web the reading of Scripture. It is vital therefore that if academic theology wishes to be alert to the importance Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 15 Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, ‘Five Misunderstandings about Practical Theology’, International Journal of Practical Theology 16 (2012): 5–26 (12). 16 A trait detectable in Darren Sarisky, ‘A Prolegomenon to an Account of Theological Interpretation of Scripture’, in R. David Nelson, Darren Sarisky and Justin Stratis (eds), Theological Theology: Essays in Honour of John Webster (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 247–66. 17 Stephen Pickard, Seeking the Church: An Introduction to Ecclesiology (London: SCM, 2012), 171. 14

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of Scripture, and scriptural reading, it develops its exchange with the context in which biblical reading is most operative, the actual church. Such attention is an implication of the theological truism that faith in Scripture is a profoundly ecclesial affair. The argument I am developing here clearly resonates with Mike Higton’s contribution, for whom systematic theology is a series of forging connections, one such connection being with ‘the lives of ordinary Christians around the world, because those lives are themselves a form of commentary’. The connections ordinary Christians make in the course of their lives are, Mike Higton notes, a form of systematic theology. Likewise, as Oliver Davies notes the relationship between academic theology and the church is asymmetrical in a very specific way, ‘Saints do not need to have studied theology, but theologians do need to study and listen to the saints.’ The kind of attention involved here requires more than an appeal to authorized liturgy in which Scripture is contained (where Holmes seems ultimately to rest). A broader, more ecumenical attention and investigation into the webbed nature of the Bible in the lives of disciples is required. This is ethnographic attention precisely as a form of theological attention. Such attention will engender in systematic theologians the importance of humility in the pursuit of theological reasoning. It is important to ensure that such a correction of systematic theology is not heard as a call for disbanding the work of academic systematic theology. (Indeed, as Mike Higton attests, just such connection making is precisely what systematic theology should be in the business of doing.) In order for there to be connections between academic systematic theology and the practices of the church accessed through practical theology both parties need to have distinct identities. As a matter of logic inter-disciplinary exercises require there to be distinct disciplines if interchange is to happen. There is a proper place for both the particular and the universal (systematic) approach. Just as there is a role for systematic reflection on the particular, precisely so that a sense of the whole can be gained, so in order to offer such a systematic reflection there needs to be genuine contact on the part of systematic theologians (as theological readers of Scripture) with particular churches as particular reading communities.18 The two – the particular and the systematic – need each other. What In order for this contact to be meaningful theologians will need to develop their conversation with descriptive accounts of lay belief and practice that originate through social-scientific research. Such descriptive accounts speak in a different register to much prescriptive theology, but nonetheless are

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the one lacks in abundance the other can offer. As Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, in a discussion of Kathryn Tanner, articulates the matter, ‘while everyday theology’s concretion suffers from a loss of broad, systematic, and historical perspective, academic theology’s broad, systematic, and historical perspective suffers from a lack of concretion. Each thus has the potential to share with the other what it lacks out of its own abundance.’19 It is by attention to particularities that the idealism that stalks theological inter­pretation as theology removed from actual churches will be avoided. Ingredient to understanding theologically the life of the Bible in the life of the church is a commitment to overcoming the dualism between theory and application with which we often work (and which essays in this collection are variously resisting). Christians always work with a theory of the text in action and in practice. Theory is not an abstraction waiting to be applied. Rather, practices already reveal metaphysical commitments.20 A theological ethnography of Scripture in the life of the church is imperative for theological interpretation for a sense of what Scripture is, how it is to be read faithfully, and what it is about, cannot be discovered in isolation from patient attention to what the church does, in all its diversity, with Scripture. Such practices are neither awaiting regulatory attention from systematic theologians, nor are they mere source material for post hoc theological reflection. Rather, interchange with the practices of the church are an indispensable route through which academic theologians will discover what it means to interpret theologically.21 Theological interpretation, I argue, needs to strengthen its connections with the practices of ordinary readers and risk the implications of what will follow, for the theology that follows will be less a vital resource. See, for example, Jerome P. Baggett, Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). One of the lessons we learn from grounded research is the need to be careful not to romanticize ‘ordinary’ readers and the extent of their biblical literacy. Baggett, Sense of the Faithful, 250 (n. 72), quotes a statistic that fewer than one-third of American Roman Catholics could name all four Gospels. Such statistics may well be read as an argument for renewed interchange between the pew and the academy! The reflections of Andreas Andreopoulos, in this volume, on declining biblical literacy are also relevant. Adopting a slightly different tone from some of the contributors in this volume, what I am arguing here is for less emphasis on a ‘transmission’ role for academic theological interpretation, and more emphasis on a co-constitutive role for ordinary and academic theological interpretation. 19 Wigg-Stevenson, Ethnographic Theology, 29. 20 See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘On the Very Idea of a Theological System: An Essay in Aid of Triangulating Scripture, Church and World’, in A. T. B. McGowan (ed.), Always Reforming: Explorations in Systematic Theology (Leicester: Apollos, 2006), 125–82 (174–5). 21 See, in a similar vein, Wigg-Stevenson, Ethnographic Theology, 46.

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ordered, more disordered, less exclusive in its attention,22 and alert to the variety of readers. The second task we must ask as part of the task of understanding the Bible theologically is to ask: Where do we locate the boundaries of theological reading of the Bible? At least three of our contributors offer an important clue for beginning to answer this question. Whereas theological interpretation as dominantly practised has placed a heavy accent on the coherence of the church’s internal practices as the primary context for reading the Bible,23 Christoph Schwöbel emphasizes the Bible’s role in worlds and cultures outside the ecclesial sphere. In a supporting manner, Oliver Davies invites us to remember that theological accounts of the Bible rely upon a healthy attention to the doctrine of creation in at least equal measure to attention to the church. So too, Timothy Gorringe makes the case for the Bible as a secular book, and just so as a book of theological significance. When all the essays in this collection are read together one consistent tension that emerges is between the ecclesial habitat of Scripture and a Word that needs to be read in a larger ideological context and so wrestled with, perhaps even ‘given back’ (the position of Lisa Isherwood). The emphasis of Murray Rae on receptiveness to the text and Antony G. Reddie’s accent on critical conversation with the text read very differently, to give just one example. We could locate this tension theologically by appeal to the asymmetry Amy Plantinga Pauw identifies between the life of the Spirit and the life of the church, the life of the former being the very condition of possibility for the latter: While life-giving readings of Scripture are bound to the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is not bound to Scripture: according to Christian understanding, God’s Spirit is richly poured out over the whole creation. No area or dimension of created life is utterly bereft of the Spirit’s presence, and no one community or tradition can claim a monopoly on the Spirit.24 I have in mind here the repeated calls of John Webster, in his theological accounts of Scripture, for an exclusive attention to Scripture and theological sources. 23 This is doubtless related to theological interpretation being influenced by postliberal theology. See Medi Ann Volpe, Rethinking Christian Identity: Doctrine and Discipleship (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Chichester; Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 20–1. 24 Amy Plantinga Pauw, ‘The Holy Spirit and Scripture’, in David H. Jenson (ed.), The Lord and Giver of Life: Perspectives on Constructive Pneumatology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 25–39 (28). 22



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The Holy Spirit is not bound to respecting the boundaries of the church as we have erected them. Such is the enduring value of ideological interpretation, in helping to destabilize some of the walls the church has erected around its reading of the text. The Spirit speaks from outside the church as well as within it. As is often the case in theological work, we must resist falling into a binary temptation. We must be willing to imagine the boundaries of the church’s life (the primary location of the Bible’s reading) as being porous to the Spirit’s interruption. Yet, in return, there must be resistance to dissolving the mutual accountability inherent within a church community willing to test one another’s reading and in which readers are accountable to one another. An appeal to the Spirit must not lead to spiritual individualism, to the loss of a role for the church wholesale. Somehow, language needs to be found to speak of the church in a way that maintains the value of a people called into life together by God, yet does not exclude the insights that come from ideological interpretation. The same Spirit who is bound to the Word (Murray Rae’s emphases are helpful in this regard) invites Christian engagement with the world, a world in which both the church and the Bible are located. Christian engagement takes place on the boundaries of the church’s life, boundaries that are as wide as God’s concern for his created order and his purposes for it through the Spirit (Rom. 8.21). As with the church, so with the Bible, ‘blurred boundaries’ between the text,25 the life of the church, and society are not to be conceded with a sense of weary resignation but recognized as working with the grain of the Christian economy. We can, I hope, begin to discern some of the close connections between the two questions set at the launch of this section: How should we conceive the connection between the church’s reading of Scripture and academic theological work? Where do we locate the boundaries of theological reading of the Bible? Dismissal of practical concerns about how the Bible might relate to the interwoven lives of those who read the text as an authority, risk encouraging theological reductionism,26 a by-passing of thinking theologically about the everyday complexity of biblical reading, the ways in which ordinary Pickard, Seeking the Church, 30. Paul D. Murray, ‘Searching the Living Truth of the Church in Practice: on the Transformative Task of Systematic Ecclesiology’, Modern Theology 30 (2014): 251–81 (251).

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believers ‘bring together a fidelity to a particular text and still regard the whole world as a text which has been brought into being by God’.27 In many accounts of theological interpretation the church is presumed to be a culture distinct from the culture in which it is embedded.28 Yet, the presumption that ‘church’ and ‘culture’ are constants around which to construct theological understanding neglects the already ‘complex interplay of overlapping cultures’ alive in the church.29 In his recent work on Wisdom literature and theology Paul Fiddes helpfully promotes a reading of the boundaried nature of the canon, and by extension the church, in a cosmopolitan rather than defensive register. A canon, Fiddes reminds us, rightfully draws attention to these texts and not others, imposing an obligation on those who subscribe to this canon to attend to the particularity of just these texts. But this invitation need not be to the exclusion of attention to other texts: The notion of canon obliges us, not only to explore the material so marked off, but to bring it into conjunction with other territories. It is as if all writings are near neighbours, all lie on the immediate side of the further boundary, and their proximity cannot be ignored.30

Such an understanding of the boundaries of the canon, and how they may be places of encounter, resonates deeply with the inter-faith concerns of Mike Higton, Tom Greggs and Christoph Schwöbel. To bring the Bible into contact with neighbouring territories relies upon a theological understanding of the Bible and the Christian life as extensive and plurivocal, an outlook that has good claim to be ‘biblical’.31 The boundaries of our attention as theological interpreters of Scripture are defined by the extent to which we see the Christian life as moving between the pole of intense concentration (its capacity to be shaped by specific Christian practices and by these texts) and the poll of ec-centricity (its capacity to be shaped by its dynamic interaction Paul Fiddes, Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 324. One example being Richard S. Briggs, ‘ “These are the days of Elijah”: The Hermeneutical Move from “Applying the Text” to “Living in Its World” ’, Journal of Theological Interpretation 8 (2014): 157–74. 29 Nicholas M. Healy, ‘What is Systematic Theology?’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (2009): 24–39 (33). This interplay is a truism for sociological accounts of lived faith, and one that theologians must wrestle with theologically, that is with reference to the economy of God. 30 Paul S. Fiddes, ‘Concept, Image and Story in Systematic Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (2009): 3–23 (16–17). 31 Vanhoozer, ‘On the Very Idea of a Theological System’, 180.

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with the world in which the Christian life is necessarily located).32 George Newlands speaks of the Christian life being in essence ‘exocentric’, by which he means to refer to a calling out of the world for the sake of being sent back into that world in service.33 Attention to this dynamic is essential to understanding the Bible theologically.

How should we preach theologically? A good number of the contributors speak of the responsibility of preaching as marking the text’s concentrated relationship to these people, at this time, in this place. Thus Holmes, Schwöbel, Greggs, Ward and Gill emphasize the role of preaching in their companionship with the Bible and so draw attention to a practice whose faithful repetition risks masking its complexity. Christians are those who take the time to read the same text, year in, year out, and who set aside men and women to place the text of our angular lives alongside the Word that speaks out from an angular text. Thinking more determinedly about the role of preaching theologically, within the ecology of the Christian life, is therefore a promising place to begin bridging what George Newlands terms ‘a yawning gap between serious academic theology and faith communities’,34 drawing us more deeply into the inquiry that lies behind this entire concluding essay: what makes an interpretation of Scripture ‘theological’? That the church preaches (by which I mean that it sets aside men and women to preach to it) is a correlate of its theological convictions about Scripture as authority, and so canon. Reading aloud Paul’s letters in 2016 and then prayerfully hoping to hear a proclamation based upon this text relies upon a conviction that when reading a letter of Paul the church is not reading someone else’s mail. Richard Briggs writes that the preacher, engaging with an epistle from Paul, is ‘trying to hear how God speaks today by understanding the sense(s) in which Paul’s address to the Corinthians is Daniel Hardy, Finding the Church: The Dynamic Truth of Anglicanism (London: SCM, 2001) is acknowledged here as an influence. 33 George Newlands, Spirit of Liberality: Collected Essays (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 33. 34 Newlands, Spirit of Liberality, 1. 32

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(and not just was) part of the Christian canon’.35 As Graham Ward attests in his contribution to this volume preaching flows from the conviction that Scripture is a communicative text – God wills to be heard through this text. That the Bible speaks is bound to its vitality, the fact that it is a living text (through the Spirit) with the capacity to be heard afresh in boundless new contexts. The energy of preaching is therefore bound to the energy of Scripture (Rom. 10.13; 2 Tim. 3–4.2). Scripture wills to be preached. As Christoph Schwöbel suggests in his contribution Scripture’s proclamation is an echo of the God who is irrepressibly conversational, speaking to us through his actions, of which his revelation in the person of the Son is the climax (Heb. 1.1-2). Scripture communicates because it is a servant of the one who is risen, Jesus. It is Jesus’ condition as alive, known to us through the Spirit, that draws Paul as author of Ephesians, the text that he wrote, the Christians in Ephesus, and Christians today, into the same reality. Stephen Pickard’s account of Ephesians – ‘[a] letter addressed to a local community [pointing] to the universal Church set within a cosmic framework and grounded in the infinite lordship of Jesus’36 – is the exact, same starting point of the Christian preacher today. Yet, this emphasis on Scripture’s perspicuity needs moderation. That the reading of Scripture is followed by the act of preaching reinforces that the Word has to be mediated. (A related point appears to be made by Tom Greggs, when he places an emphasis on God’s Word to us.) Preaching is the medium which attempts to relate the Word in that time to our time. The Word is neither exactly coincident with what Paul intended in that time and in that place for these people, nor is the text an oracle, to be applied without mediation in our context (there could be some tension here with Stephen Holmes’ statement that as a preacher his work is ‘the application of piecemeal truths’). The economy in which preaching operates is therefore of a piece with the God who has determined to speak in the flesh of a Jew from first-century Palestine and who has enlisted these texts as enduring testimonies to this event. Christian knowledge of God is vulnerable to time. The preacher is part of a mystery central to the Christian confession: only God can reveal God’s Richard S. Briggs, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics and Practical Theology: Method and Truth in Context’, Anglican Theological Review 97 (2015): 201–18 (206). Pickard, Seeking the Church, 121.

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self, but God can only reveal God’s self in ‘our space and time’.37 It follows from this that we must be wary of theological accounts of preaching that emphasize the communicative presence of God to an extent that leaves slender the act of interpreting Scripture in context.38 Theological accounts of preaching are at risk of the same kind of Docetism that stalks accounts of Jesus or the church.39 Tom Greggs writes presciently of the Spirit as fixing preaching as an event that happens in and through our time and contexts. Preaching also relies upon a healthy ecology being maintained between official, ordinary, and professional-academic theologies. The distinction of, yet relation between, these three modes of theology is helpfully set out by Nicholas M. Healy.40 Each of these three modes is impoverished when imagined in isolation from one another and Healy argues it is the role of academic theology to mediate between the complexity of ordinary theologies and official theologies. Academic theology is plainly a second-order activity whose office is to serve the faith of the church and its activity of proclamation. (Tom Greggs states strikingly that his convictions as preacher ‘govern’ his approach to the Bible as a theologian.) Preaching is an instance of official theology rooted in the church. The preacher is one who has been recognized by the church as having authority to preach back to it. The role of official theology, in Healy’s account, is to offer an ‘ideal account of how to think about Christianity, which it expects will be accepted without critical discussion’.41 Official theology – be it the high level creed that binds a community or the regular preaching of the minister – withers or takes root by the extent to which it is embedded in the faith of the church, church not as institution, but as the people of God. Ordinary theology, in distinction from official theology, is the reflection on faith carried out by those who count themselves as part of the people of God, but who lack professional theological training. This is not to say that ordinary theology is unsophisticated. As I stated above, with more agility on offer in some academic theologies ordinary theologies can offer a negotiation between Oliver Davies, Theology of Transformation. Faith, Freedom and the Christian Act (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99. 38 For an example, see Michael Allen, “In Your Light Do We See Light”: The Self-Revealing God and the Future of Theology’, in T. Cairney and D. Starling (eds), Theology and the Future (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 13–26 (15–20). 39 See, with particular focus on ecclesiology, this concern in Pickard, Seeking the Church. 40 Healy, ‘What is Systematic Theology?’. 41 Healy, ‘What is Systematic Theology?’, 27. 37

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faith and the world that is strikingly sophisticated and ‘systematic’. The key difference between official and ordinary theologies is the difference in responsibilities: ordinary theologians do not speak on behalf of the community. In order to preach with theological authority the preacher needs to be conversant with ordinary ways of reading the Bible, that is have an understanding how the authoritative sermon-event relates to the inter­pretations at work in the congregation. For this the preacher who presumes to speak as a representative of the church must be attentive, for authoritative preaching arises out of ‘good listening’.42 Christoph Schwöbel’s image of ‘conversation’ is suggestive here. Were it not for prayer the preacher is faced with a seemingly impossible task. Through one voice she must embody the conversation that is God’s mode of communication with us, and the conversations circulating in the church. Clearly, this is much more than preaching as application. Equally, it is more than a trickle-down approach to academic theology as Tom Greggs seems to endorse at points in his essay. This is preaching with (as opposed to preaching to), a mode of speaking that has good claim to be biblical.43 Preaching as a mode of conversation requires the preacher to take time and to listen. Which is to say (with gratitude to Bonhoeffer) that thinking theologically about preaching begins and ends with silence.

How should we draw upon Christian tradition? All the contributors to this volume enjoy some form of relationship to Christian tradition (it could hardly be otherwise). But the shape of this relationship is far from uniform. Thus, the liberationist approach of Lisa Isherwood and Anthony Reddie is somewhat contrasting, for example, in relation to the receptive approach taken by Murray Rae and Tom Greggs, or the ecclesio-centric approach adopted by Andreas Andreopoulos. These different ways in which tradition is related to tell us as much about the current state of play in theology than they do about the texts or practices themselves Rowan Williams, ‘The Sermon’, in Stephen Conway (ed.), Living the Eucharist: Affirming Catholicism and the Liturgy (London: DLT, 2001), 44–55 (48). 43 See Robert Sokolowski, ‘God’s Word and Human Speech’, Nova et Vetera 11 (2013): 187–210 (189). Sokolowski refers to Abraham and Jonah as instances of God speaking with people in the Bible. One could also reference Job and, most significantly, Jesus (not least in Gethsemane). 42



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that have been handed down.44 This divergence of approach is also a register of a theological debate that is itself part of the history of the church, namely, how should we draw upon Christian tradition? Theologians alert to the ideology both of the texts and the church’s history of engagement with the texts keep permanently on the table questions to which all theologians need to be accountable. With whom does one engage from within the church’s tradition? Why these voices, and not others? How do we ensure that language that refers to God has integrity, namely that in attempting to speak of that which it pertains to speak about it contains no ‘agenda’?45 Against what criteria are the different voices from the church’s past to be tested? A common (Reformed) answer to this last question is articulated by Michael Allen and R. Scott Swain when they write, ‘Holy Scripture provides the supreme and sufficient foundation to which theological tradition is accountable and by which theological tradition is measured’.46 Yet this position does not adequately take account of Scripture’s own involvement in tradition, its active participation in what Timothy Gorringe terms ‘the history of a long argument’. What ideologically alert theology teaches us is that our attention to both Scripture and subsequent tradition needs to be responsive to the exclusionary habits of the Christian faith for such habits have been (and continue to be) part of the identity of Christian tradition.47 Theologies silent on this responsibility are therefore wanting. There is a proper place, when drawing on tradition, for reception to be characterized by repentance. Such repentance arises out of the recognition that the church is ‘a flawed and often profoundly unimpressive historical reality’.48 It is a self-evident truth often neglected that being receptive to tradition need not mean being accepting of everything that tradition has produced.49 See Volpe, Rethinking Christian Identity, 111 n.14. Rowan Williams, ‘Theological Integrity’, New Blackfriars 72 (1991): 140–51. 46 Michael Allen and R. Scott Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 42. 47 I am indebted to Volpe, Rethinking Christian Identity, 79. 48 Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1995), 229. Cited in Christian Scharen, Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God’s Work in the World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 14. By ‘committed’ my intention is to suggest that all theologians are in agreement that the church is peccable. See, for example, Allen and Swain, Reformed Catholicity, 111–12. However, not all theologians follow the implications of this universal affirmation by tracing it through to how they work. 49 For an example of a theologian missing an opportunity to make this point see Michael Allen, ‘ “In Your Light Do We See Light”: The Self-Revealing God and the Future of Theology’, in Trevor 44 45

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How should we relate experience to the Bible theologically? The category of experience runs throughout various essays in this collection, most prominently from the pen of contributors whose research focus has been liberation theology. For Lisa Isherwood it is the authority of women’s experiences that is brought to the text to ‘test’ it. The nuances of Isherwood’s statement that women are to ‘consider the potential within the text for liberation within their lives and the lives of those within the reading community’ (emphasis added) are worth noticing. The text is not, in Isherwood’s vision, lost sight of, but rather placed in a con-text that cries out for emancipation. The text’s vision of a ‘flourishing world’ must be embodied, Isherwood expands, in ‘all that lives’. Once the authority of particular reading communities is recognized they can be freed to find themselves in the biblical literature. Here the theological error is not the re-casting of or rejecting parts of Scripture, and so risking being badged as heterodox, but ignoring the authority of women’s experience and so losing the opportunity to participate in justice-making. Orthopraxy is prioritized ahead of orthodoxy. Although Isherwood refers to no specific communities, her reading approach represents a particular version of the approach I made a case for above. Here, actual reading communities have the opportunity to shape theological interpretation. Likewise, Anthony G. Reddie, in his contribution, accords the experience of black people a high authority in a context in which the Bible has a presumed ‘centrality’. For Bennett too experience has a central role, but this is not to be understood in isolation from the biblical text. Indeed, the texts themselves are experiencesoaked. Bennett tries to strike a balance between the ‘tyranny’ of experience and the ‘tyranny’ of the text. The role accorded to experience in these contributions merits both theological attention and scrutiny. Attention is merited because Isherwood, Reddie, and Bennett are surely right that the lived experience of the Christian life in its ambiguity and disorder cannot be disregarded by those who dare to practice theology, systematic or otherwise.50 But theological scrutiny is also merited because how we speak of experience and its authority in relation to Cairney and David Starling (eds), Theology and the Future: Evangelical Assertions and Explorations (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 13–26 (20–6). Pickard, In-Between God, 68.

50



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other loci of God’s activity needs to be carefully considered. When Reddie apparently merges talk of authority into talk of the community (‘the Bible has no authority other than that which the church, as the main faithful interpretative community, has given it’) a concern that the Bible’s potential to speak against a corrupt church has been prematurely cashed in would surely not be unmerited. Who is going to protect the church from the ideological risks of insularism? Tim Gorringe (not at all unsympathetic to the importance of context) speaks of the Bible’s important, proven role in speaking against a myopic church unable to see beyond its own experience and immediate context. In order to avoid what Bennett helpfully calls a tyranny of experience it is therefore crucial to ensure that the category of ‘experience’ is not allowed to wander too far from a broader (systematic) theological account of the Christian life. For Stephen Pickard, the roots of such a theological account of experience lie in pneumatology.51 For Richard Briggs, it is vital to appreciate that talk of experience is nested within a wider set of convictions about the role of Scripture, God, and the church. Thus, ‘we evaluate our readings of Holy Scripture against a whole network of theological judgements and perspectives that are our attempts to do justice to the truth of life and lived experience understood in the light of God in Christ known in and through scripture’.52 A theological account of experience related to the Bible will keep in genuine interplay the particular experience of particular readers (understood through the Spirit), the biblical text (which cannot be understood apart from questions of God’s saving purposes), and that sense of ‘the whole’ systematic theology attempts to articulate. On the one hand, this is to insist that experience is a valid, indeed indispensable, theological category. On the other hand, this is to also insist that there is a need to bring the category of experience into a wide conversation, through which its authority can be established.

Pickard, In-Between God, 68. Briggs, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics and Practical Theology’, 214.

51 52

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218 Bibliography Gill, Robin (ed.), Faith in Christ: Christian Claims in a Changing Culture (Mowbray: Oxford, 1978). Gill, Robin (ed.), Health Care and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Gill, Robin (ed.), Reflecting Theologically on AIDS (London: SCM, 2007). Gill, Robin (ed.), Theology in a Social Context: Sociological Theology, Vol. 1 (2 vols; Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Gill, Robin (ed.), A Textbook of Christian Ethics (London: T&T Clark, 4th edn 2014). Glover, Jonathan, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). Gorringe, Timothy J., A Theology of the Built Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Gorringe, Timothy J., Capital and the Kingdom (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994). Gorringe, Timothy J., Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Gorringe, Timothy J., God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Gorringe, Timothy J., Redeeming Time: Atonement Through Education (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986). Gorringe, Timothy J., The Common Good and the Global Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Graham, Elaine, Heather Walton and Francis Ward, Theological Reflections: Methods (London: SCM, 2005). Grant, Robert and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (Philadephia: Fortress, 1984). Greggs, Tom, ‘A Strangely Warmed Heart in a Strange and Complex World: On Assurance and Generous Hope’, in Julie Gittoes, Brutus Green and James Heard (eds), Generous Ecclesiology: Church, World and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 2013), 120–39. Greggs, Tom, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Greggs, Tom, ‘Being a Wise Apprentice to the Communion of Modern Saints: On the Need for Conversation with a Plurality of Theological Interlocutors’, in Rachel Muers, Simeon Zahl and Tom Greggs (eds), The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013), 21–34. Greggs, Tom, ‘Inter-Faith Pedagogy for Muslims and Christians: Scriptural Reasoning and Christian and Muslim Youth Work’, Discourse 9 (2010): 201–26.

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222 Bibliography Koyama, Kosuke, No Handle on the Cross: An Asian Meditation on the Crucified Mind (London: SCM Press, 1976). Koyama, Kosuke, Waterbuffalo Theology (London: SCM Press, 1974). Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (trans. Thomas Gora; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Kynes, Will, ‘Intertextuality: Method and Theory in Job and Psalm 119’, in Katherine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce (eds), Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in honour of John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 201–13. Ladd, George Eldon, ‘The Problem of History in Contemporary New Testament Interpretation’, in Frank L. Cross (ed.), Studia Evangelica, Vol. 5 (TU 103; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968), 88–100. Laland, Kevin N., Tobias Uller, Marcus W. Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, John Odling-Smee, ‘The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Its Structure, Assumptions and Predictions’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 282: 20151019. Lartey, Emmanuel Y., ‘Practical Theology as a Theological Form’, in David Willows and John Swinton (eds), Spiritual Dimensions of Pastoral Care: Practical Theology in a Multidisciplinary Context (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2000), 72–80. Laurent, Vitalien (ed.) Les Mémoires du grand ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438–1439) (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), 1971). Leach, Jane, ‘Pastoral Theology as Attention’, Contact: Practical Theology and Pastoral Care 153 (2007): 19–32. Legaspi, Michael, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies; (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Levering, Matthew, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel through Church and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014). Lincoln, Andrew T. and Angus Paddison (eds), Christology and Scripture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: T&T Clark, 2007). Lings, K. Renato, Love Lost in Translation. Homosexuality and the Bible (Bloomington: Trafford Publishing, 2013). Louth, Andrew, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996). Lovin, Robin, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr in Contemporary Scholarship’, Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 489–505. Luther, Martin, ‘On the Councils and the Church’, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 41 (ed. Eric W. Gritsch; trans. Charles M. Jacobs; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 9–178. Lyall, David, ‘Pastoral Action and Theological Reflection’, in David Willows and John

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Index of Authors Adams, Robert 57 Aetius 116–17 Aldred, Joe 151 Alexander, Christopher 77 Alinsky, Saul 72–3 Allen, Michael 114, 207, 209 Allison, Dale C. 63 Ambrose 140 Andreopoulos, Andreas 22 Anselm 140 Aquinas, Thomas 2, 41, 168 Athanasius 85 Augustine 140, 168, 169 Augustine, Daniela 50 Ayres, Lewis 115 Baggett, Jereme P. 201 Bailey, Randall S. 154, 157 Baker-Fletcher, Garth Kasimu 156 Barth, Karl 2, 24, 30-31, 64, 67–73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85, 86, 88, 134–5, 141, 183–4 Barthes, Roland 108 Barton, Mukti 151 Beckford, Robert 159 Behr, John 14 Bennett, Zoë 25, 26, 30, 32, 34 Berry, Wendell 71, 76 Billings, J. Todd 140 Blake, William 33, 71, 73 Blocher, Henri 112 Blowers, P. M. 112 Boff, Clodovis 29, 70 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 88 Braaten, Carl E. 1 Breck, John 14 Briggs, Richard 30, 204, 205–6, 211 Brown, Michael Joseph 153 Brueggemann, Walter 77 Brümmer, Vincent 165 Bultmann, Rudolf 14, 164

Bunyan, John 184 Byron, Gay L. 151 Caesarea, Basil of 117–18 Cahill, Lisa Sowle 55, 57 Calvin, John 2, 85, 107 Cartledge, Mark 26 Certeau, Michel de 188 Chrysostom 12, 144 Clark Wire, Antoinette 125 Clark, Andy 47 Clayton, John 165 Coakley, Sarah 83 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 189 Cone, James H. 148, 150 Cusa, Nicholas of 191 Daly, Herman 76 Daly, Mary 119 Daniélou, Jean 116 Dante Alighieri 41, 89 Davidson, R. B. 150 Davies, Oliver 51, 207 Davies, W. D. 63 Derrida, Jacques 108 Descartes, René 41 Dodd, C. H. 73 Doignan, Jean 115 Drury, John 35 Dube, Musa W. 148 Dubois W. E. B. 155 Dunbar, Robin 44 Easterlin, R. A. 150 Eckstein, Hans-Joachim 174 Edwards, Jonathan 105 Ekblad, Bob 142 Ellul, Jacques 77 Empson, William 189–90 Eunomius 117 Evagrius 140

232

Index of Authors

Evans, C. F. 63, 66 Evans, C. Stephen 56–9, 61-2

Hubbard, Charles 150 Husserl, Edmund 41–2

Farley, Edward 28 Feldman, M. W. 43 Fiddes, Paul 204 Flegg, Columba 18 Ford, David 6, 84, 91, 175 Forster, Michael N. 42 Fowl, Stephen 2, 136 Frege, G. 41–2 Freire, Paulo 75 Frye, Northrop 173 Fuentes, Agustín 44

Irenaeus 19 Isherwood, Lisa 128, 129, 131

Gallese, Vittorio 47 Gavrilyuk, Paul 112 George, Henry 76 Gerrish, B. A. 3, 193 Gerzina, Gretchin 151 Gill, Robin 53, 64 Glover, Jonathan 60 Gorringe, Timothy 75–7 Gottwald, Norman 76 Graham, Elaine 28 Grant, Robert 29 Greggs, Tom 81–91 Gunton, Colin 167–8 Hägglund, B. 112 Hahn, Scott 18 Hardy, Daniel 91, 205 Hare, John 55, 59 Harris, Clive 150 Hartman, Paul 150 Hauerwas, Stanley 6, 196 Hays, Richard 83 Haynes, Stephen R. 154 Hayter, Mary 26 Healy, Nicholas M. 3, 199, 204, 207 Hegel, G. W. F. 41–2, 174, 177, 191 Helm, Paul 3 Higton, Mike 102–4 Hiscock, Peter 45 Hodge, Charles 109, 111 Holmes, Stephen 106, 115 Hood, Robert E. 151 Hooker, Morna 63 Hopkins, Dwight N. 148, 152, 153

Jagessar, Michael N. 147, 149 James, Winston 150 Janz, Paul 37 Jenson, Robert, W. 1, 110, 112, 141–2, 168, 177, 194 Jeremias, Gert 164 Johnson, Elizabeth 131 Johnson, Sylvester 154 Jovanovic, Zdravko 112 Kaiser, Otto 164 Kannengiesser, Charles 115 Kara, Helen 29 Karavidopoulos, John 14 Karfíková, Lenka 116 Keck, Leander 193 Kelsey, David 4, 29, 39, 72 Kesich, Veselin 14 Kierkegaard, Søren 56, 140 Kisau, Paul Mumo 143 Kittell, Gerhard 190 Kolb, David 28 Koshul, Basit 91 Koyama, Kosuke 142 Kristeva, Julia 42, 108 Kynes, Will 108 Ladd, George Eldon 137–8 Laland, K. N. 43 Lartey, Edmund 30 Le Nain, Louis 78 Leach, Jane 28 Legaspi, Michael 3 Lehman, Paul 71 Levering, Matthew 110 Lewis, C. S. 24 Lewis, Marjorie 152 Lings, K. Renato 131 Locke, John 3, 41 Louth, Andrew 21 Lovin, Robin 54 Luther, Martin 85, 168, 174, 177–9 Lyall, David 28



Index of Authors

MacIntyre, Alasdair 55, 72-3, 195 McCabe, Herbert 195 McKay, Niall 108 Mann, Thomas 173 Markus, R. A. 39 Martin, R. P. 74 Martyr, Justin 16 Marx, Karl 42, 71 Melanchthon 185 Meyer, G. F. 45 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie 199 Möltmann, Jürgen 33 Moore, Andrew 2 Mosala, Itumeleng J. 148 Muers, Rachel 102–3 Murphy, Mark C. 56–9, 61–2 Murray, Paul D. 203 Myers, Ched 70–1, 198 Nelson, R. David 4 Newlands, George 205 Nyssa, Gregory of 187–8 Ochs, Peter 91 Odling-Smee, F. J. 43 Osborn, Eric 112 Paddison, Angus 2, 198 Page, Hugh R. 155 Pattison, Stephen 29, 35 Pauw, Amy Plantinga 202 Pecknold, C. C. 175 Phillips, Mike 150 Phillips, Trevor 150 Pickard, Stephen 3, 4, 194, 199, 203, 206, 207, 210–11 Pinker, Stephen 60, 61 Pinn, Anthony B. 156 Poitiers, Hilaire de 115–17, 140 Pope, Stephen 57 Pryce, Ken 150 Pugh, Jeffrey 90 Pui-Lan, Kwok 148 Rad, Gerhard von 164 Rae, Murray 136, 137, 139 Ratschow, Carl Heinz 164–5 Reddie, Anthony G. 147, 149, 154, 155, 156, 158

233

Rowland, Christopher 25, 34 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 120, 121, 123 Ruskin, John 32-5 Russell, Letty 126-7 Sarisky, Darren 4, 199 Schön, Donald 28 Schussler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth 124, 125-8, 129 Schwöbel, Christoph 1, 165–8, 170, 173, 174, 175, 177 Scobie, Edward 150 Scruton, Roger 59 Sedmak, Clemens 27 Sheerattan-Bisnauth, Patricia 153 Singer, Peter 59 Sokolowski, Robert 208 St Victor, Hugh of 189 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 123 Starling, David 197 Steiner, George 23 Stone, Ken 126, 129 Stratis, Justin 4 Stylianopoulos, Theodore 141 Sturge, Mark 151 Suzuki, Kenta 46 Swain, R. Scott 114, 209 Sykes, Stephen 26 Syropoulos, Sylvester 12 Tanner, Kathryn 3, 201 Taubes, Jacob 75-6 Taylor, Charles 41, 55 Thiselton, Anthony 198 Thomas, Oral 154 Tolkien, J. R. R. 23–4 Tomasello, Michael 44 Townes, Emilie 124 Tracy, David W. 29 Trembelas, Panagiotis 14 Trible, Phyllis 123–4, 129 Uomini, N. T. 45 Vanhoozer, Kevin J. 3, 201, 204 Vasileiadis, Petros 14 Veerkamp, Ton 74–5 Verhey, Alan 58 Volpe, Medi Ann 202, 209

234 Walton, Heather 28 Ward, Francis 28 Ward, Graham 1, 186 Warfield, David B. B. 29 Webster, John 110, 186 Weedman, Mark 115 Weiss, Johannes 26 Wesley, John 79 Wickham, L. R. 116, 117 Wildung Harrison, Beverley 26 Wilmore, Gayraud S. 158

Index of Authors Wielenga, Bas 74 Wigg-Stevenson, Natalie 201 Wildung Harrison, Beverley 26 Williams, Dolores 124 Williams, Rowan 208, 209 Wimbush, Vincent L. 153 Young, Frances 113 Zizioulas, John 167

Index of Biblical References Old Testament Genesis 1–3 137 1.31 120 12 137 50.20 173 Exodus 3.14 37 3.17 177 28.17-20 17 34.6 176 2 Kings 2.23-24 63 Job 28 63 Psalms 39 19 9 20 9 27 191 50 9 62 9 87 9 102 9 119.105 79 142 9 Proverbs 3.6 12 Song (or Cant.) 2.8 13 Isaiah 6.3 17 35.10 173 40.3 143

45.23 128 Jeremiah 31 75 Apocrypha or Deutero-Canonical Books Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 24.3-7 128 New Testament Matthew 4.4 185, 191 8.10 55 9.10-13 121 9.18-22 121 10.37-38 121 11.25-27 128 12.46-50 121 13.35 185 15.28 55 25 88 27.6 33 28.19-20 94 Mark 2.23-28 121 3.20-25 69 6.21-34 158 7.24-30 124 7.29 55 16.7 94 Luke 7.9 55 7.35 127 8.19-21 121 10.33 55 13.34 127 15 137 17.16 55 24 2, 16, 19

236 24.27 15, 94, 194 24.30-32 16 24.32 194 John 1.1-18 9 1.14 178 3.16 24 4.10 121 4.14 13 5.39 193 6.35 16 8.4-11 121 10.27 135 10.30 115 14.6 152 14.28 115 16.13 126 20.30 94 Acts 1.8 94 2.32-3 49 8.26-39 143 8.28 143 8.30b-33 144 8.31 15 8.32-26 136 8.34 144 8.35 145 8.37 144 8.37-38 145 Romans 8.21 203 8.38-39 89 8.39 179 10.13 206 1 Corinthians 2.2 97

Index of Biblical References 11.23-6 49 12.4-6 131 12.21 143 14 72 15.22 89 2 Corinthians 3.3 50, 51 12.4 22 Phillippians 2 115 2.1-11 63 2.5 74, 75 2.6 74 2.6-11 128 Colossians 3.3 188 2 Timothy 2.15 11 3-4.2 206 3.16 95, 157 Hebrews 1.1-2 206 4.12 92 12.2 178 1 Peter 1.24 172 1.25 173 Revelation 4 17 4.1 17 4.3 17 4.4 17 4.8 17 5.3 19