Lucifer's Parables

The parables of Jesus comprise a wonderful anthology of wisdom. Usually, he starts them with “The Kingdom of God/Heaven is like …” and then goes on to describe a scenario of how things are.

Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to attempt an anthology of un-wisdom – anti-parables, if you like - that start with “The Kingdom of Hell is like …” and then go on to describe the absurdity how things are.

Here’s my first attempt

The Parable of the Pygmy

The Kingdom of Hell is like the Pygmy who claimed he was a giant. There was some substance to his claim because he was taller than the other pygmies in his tribe, and he had never seen a giant, let alone measured himself against one. When he was told that there might be giants beyond the world he knew, he reacted indignantly. “Are you questioning my vertical superiority?” he demanded. “If there were giants,” he then claimed, “then I am their chief, because I am a giant.”

This is how I see everyone who claims to possess some kind of moral superiority over others, whilst denying God. Sam Harris seems to fit this role.

Extension

The point of this parable is not to argue about who is taller. It’s more about the merits of being tall. In other words, why is being tall a good thing, and how can having it imbue the tall person with authority? If atheism were true, then these qualities and perceptions would be a Darwinian hangover from the time when our hominid ancestors walked the savannah in Africa, and the taller ones were better equipped to see the horizon and thus set a direction for the clan. The result is that tallness qualifies an individual to take authority.

But why apply this to tallness, and not a sense of morality? If atheism were true, the same processes that produced tallness also produced our sense of morality, our other virtues and our intellects. So, if our perceived association of authority with tallness is a Darwinian hiccup, how can we account for our perceived association of truth with morality and why does this give someone who perceives himself as moral the right to define morality? Like the Pygmy's perception of his own tallness, such a person is simply calibrating his moral compass by his own morality.

Harris, and his guild, argue that humans are innately special because of their intellects and morality. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that he is a Berkeley professor with a keen sense of morality. However, if his atheism were true, his intellect and morality would be nothing more than a Darwinian hiccup in much the same way as his tallness (or lack thereof) is. And, what of the humans who are not intellectual, who are not moral? We may not like them (another Darwinian hiccup), but we are essentially the same species, brought into being by the same processes, and destined for the same end. What, then, is the reasonable basis for our claim that we are good and they are bad?

Ultimately, there is none, so we resort to instinct, which naturally tends to confirmation-bias and tells us that we are the good guys, because, hey, we are us, and we keep affirming our own goodness and we have surrounded ourselves with friends and family who tell us that we are good and those that didn't have since been expelled from our clan. Surely it hasn't escaped the Professor of Neuroscience that even our instincts are nothing more than Darwinian hiccups?

So, with that in mind, let’s return to the parable with a post script

Now in the Pygmy’s forest there lived a predatory species of Drop-Bears. The Drop-Bears hung in the trees by their elasticated tails and bungee-jumped down onto their prey below. They were a fine example of evolutionary design because their tails were just the right springiness to get them to within four feet of the ground. Any further, and they would bury their jaws into the ground; any less, and they would miss their prey.

One day, the King Pygmy walked through his forest with his servants, proudly pointing out all he could see because he was taller than they. Unknowingly, he walked below a Drop-Bear that promptly bungee-jumped down from its tree and bit his head clean off. The pygmy-servants, who were only three feet tall (and thus safe from the jaws of the Drop-Bears), ran away in terror, but at least they had their heads.

The Drop-Bears would have rejoiced that night that a Pygmy had developed a smidgen of vertical superiority. But they didn't because the evolutionary process that had equipped them with their fine tails didn't equip them with the intellectual or moral capacity to rejoice.

An oasis in the desolation - real romance

Usually (or so it seems to me) the stuff pumped out from the TV on marriage is a depressing litany of failure and ideological posturing; so much so that I routinely avoid it.

On Friday, I caught myself watching a BBC documentary - Episode 3 of Love and Marriage: A 20th Century Romance - possibly because it featured Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp (she of punk rock, and he of King Crimson). It also featured four other couples I had never heard of.

I was so impressed that, if ever it was up to me, I'd recommend it as part of a marriage preparartion (or reparation?) course. These couples were all different in their own right, but what united them was their experience of the challenges and rewards of a total life-commitment to their husbands and wives within the bond of marriage. It was an inspiration to see the their absolute determination, love and teary-eyed joy in their marriages. It was something they decided to do, something they worked at. They hadn't just fallen into it and passively let it happen. They didn't just go along with it while they could get something out of it. They were absolute about their marriages. They truly embodied love.

After the so-called sexual revolution and current challenges to the most fundamental social institution on earth, will the infamous Gen Y ever 'discover' the joy of marriage? I hope so.

Response to 'The Once and Future Scriptures' - Part 3

INTRODUCTION

Following my responses to Chapters 1 and 2 of “The Once and Future Scriptures – Exploring the Role of the Bible in the Contemporary Church” (OFS), here is my response to Chapter 3, “Wisdom as well as Facts” by Steven Ogden, Principal of St Francis Theological College and an adjunct Lecturer in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University.

Same disclaimers and qualifications as before.

AGENDA

Reading through these essays, the one question that nags at my thoughts is the question of agenda. Why has the Archbishop published this book at this particular time, and what response does he want of the Anglican Church in Queensland?

OFS addresses serious challenges to the Christian community, particularly in the context of its relationship with the Bible, which aligns with the Bible’s own admonition to “…make a defense (apologia/ απολογια) to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence … ” (1 Peter 3:15)

Notably, Peter’s admonition opens with the directive to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”. In other words, the apologia of the Church is spoken from the perspective of faith - not just any faith, but an essentially Christian faith that believes in Christ as Lord.

In my interactions with various religious groups, a persistent meme is the question of who is a Christian. Various solutions are put forward, depending on the proponent’s agenda (usually, the proponent wants to justify his or her claim to be a Christian). In this milieu, and on my reflection of the Bible and the history of the Christian Church, my solution is this; a Christian is someone who worships Jesus Christ.

I mean worship in the broad sense, as in admire, try to emulate, concern one-self with, obsess over. In this sense, people can “worship” political visionaries, football players, music stars or soap opera celebrities; Elvis Presley worshippers build shrines to Elvis Presley in their homes; Margaret Thatcher worshippers devour all books Margaret Thatcher; Apple worshippers despise Microsoft, Google, Samsung or any of the competition (and the competition-worshippers do the same to Apple); and so on.

I also mean it the narrow sense that we hold Jesus higher than everything and everyone else, and offer to him only that which ought to be offered to The One God, after the First and Second of the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:3-6).

In my reading of OFS, my concern is that its relationship with Christ-as-Lord is tenuous, ethereal and possibly antagonistic. Rather than expounding orthodox understandings of Christ-as-Lord, the agenda of OFS is the overt promotion of Progressive Theology, which has (in my understanding of it) distinctively un-Christian trajectories.

The major difference I see between Progressive Theology and Orthodox Christianity is to do with the locus of truth. Orthodox Christians see the locus of truth in the person of Jesus Christ, who, they believe, is the “way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Progressive Theology sees the locus of truth in the experience of the individual, particularly those individuals whose thinking has been shaped by the academy and science. At a personal level, the Christian sees God in Christ, whereas the Progressive looks for God in his or her own soul. Viewed in these terms, Progressive Theology is actually a modern form of Gnosticism, as commentators like Ralph Bowles have observed.  (see Ralph Bowles’ important qualification on the timing of his review at the foot of this blog)

It seems that Progressives regard Christ-as-Lord as incomprehensible dogma because it cannot be empirically proven within the framework of modern science and thought. Even so, Progressive Christians seem to retain some reverence of Christ, though he may be diminished to a Christ-idea that has no basis in “true”, “historic” persons or events.

I cannot help but draw parallels with other religious movements (Islam, Mormonism, Universalism etc.) that have similarly tried to co-opt Jesus to their movements on their own terms, but ultimately fail because, to do so, they must ignore what he says about himself. Progressives get round this by saying that Jesus didn’t say those things about himself – they were retrojected onto him after the event by an act of sustained, corporate hero-worship by the primitive Christians.

These movements like Jesus because he is a good man, but they refuse to worship him, which brings me to my definition of what makes a Christian.

So, why is OFS being promoted to the Church by the Archbishop? Is it an apologia to the Church on behalf of its critics, or from the Church on behalf of its advocates? Does the Archbishop wish to dissolve the boundaries/skin of Christianity such that questions to and from no longer have meaning? If so, how can we retain our identity and shape as the body of Christ? If he is simply tossing Synod a bone to chew on, I respectfully suggest that he should listen more closely to Christ’s commandment to Peter to give the Church something more than something to exercise its jaws upon, but to feed it (John 21:15-19).

SUMMARY

Steven Ogden subscribes to Progressive Theology, but he wishes to moderate its extremes to make it less antagonistic to Orthodox Christianity. The moderation Ogden proposes is to make room for the experience of the believing community in evaluating the truthfulness of things such as Holy Scripture.

Ogden uses two passages to explore the relationship between facts and wisdom; the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) and the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1:1-18). Progressives, he says, have been too hasty in dismissing these passages as having no value because they cannot be empirically proven. He argues that these passages can be regarded as having truth in them because they serve a utility function for the community of believers.

Ogden’s essay includes many inflammatory statements. He defers from stating his own position on them (whether he believes them or not), which leaves readers like me with the tricky task of inferring his evaluation of them. It appears to me that he is reluctant to dismiss the Bible as having no value, which is why he recoils from the Progressive extreme that regards it as untrue. However, he has no place for Christian dogma and distances Jesus from the New Testament by aligning with secular (atheist?) critics such as Burton L Mack. Mack and his colleagues subscribe to the notion that the early Church “talked up” the divinity of Christ and attributed much myth to him in a sustained, corporate act of hero-worship.

Ogden’s post-modern stance is illustrated in his description of an argument between two German theologians - Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Karl Rahner (1904-1984) - as “old”. From this perspective, then, the New Testament (circa 48-110) might appear as nothing more than a fossil relic of an unenlightened era that has some usefulness today because it makes believers feel good about themselves.

WHAT HE SAYS AND WHAT I SAY

Ogden

Currently, there is a battle in the public square over the authority of Scripture. My concern with this controversy is that tie and energy are misspent in an unwinnable war. As a result, and in the name of truth, truth has become a casualty. I say “public square” because the debate is more nuanced in the ivory towers of biblical scholarship, than in public jousting, media events and meretricious sound bites. However, to illustrate the character of this polemic, let me make a stark contrast between the antagonists.

In one corner is Christian fundamentalism. In general, fundamentalists can be characterized by a particular view of truth, where truth is universal, absolute, identifiable, and in their possession. In this context, and in circular fashion the Bible is used selectively to support truth claims, which are used in turn to bolster the epistemological authority of the Bible or the ecclesial authority of the Bible teacher. In the other corner, there are exponents of what could broadly be described as progressive biblical scholarship. In general, the progressives can be characterized by a particular view of truth, where the epistemological value of a biblical text is carefully measured on the basis of historical method and corresponding empirical evidence. If a story cannot be empirically substantiated, it is not true. Truth here is context-specific, relative, identifiable and in their possession. (Pages 44-45)
Footnote 2: In Australia, a ‘conservative evangelical’ is not necessarily a fundamentalist. The difference hinges largely on epistemology.

Me

As far as this is an observation of the current “battle” I don’t object.

I baulk at Ogden’s insistence of empirical evidence, because nearly all of the miracles of the NT cannot be demonstrated empirically (how do you demonstrate that Jesus walked on water?). Ogden’s inference is that because these events cannot be replicated by modern science, they cannot be historical.

Sadly, Ogden’s footnote is about the sum of the attention he gives to the “conservative evangelical” position. That’s a major blunder for a work that is intended to address the whole of the Anglican Communion in Queensland.

Ogden quotes Mack on the Incarnation

... the importance of Jesus “as a thinker and teacher can certainly be granted and even greatly enhanced once we allow the thought that Jesus was not a god incarnate, but a real historical person”. (Page 55 from Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament)

Me

Mack misses the implications of the incarnation entirely, which is that the man, Jesus, is and was both fully and wholly God and a fully and wholly a real historical human being. Not, it must be stressed, a super-human or demi-god.

Ogden on the Prologue to the Gospel of John

Nevertheless “the Word” in the text does not relate directly to the Jesus of history. Moreover, the doctrine of the Incarnation itself, even in its earliest forms, cannot be subjected fruitfully to the scrutiny of historiography. Therefore, on epistemological grounds, the prologue can be dismissed as liturgical refinement or theological invention. (page 44)

Me

Ogden’s exegesis is preposterous. How he can read the Prologue and not follow John’s trail from the Divine Logos to the human Jesus is beyond me. His position on the value of the Prologue is as presuppositional and dogmatic as any fundamentalist.

Ogden on Progressive Theology

So I want to make a few modest suggestions as to how the progressive position may prosper. (Page 45)

Ogden on Tillich and Rahner

… For [Tillich], the reality of the ‘Christ-event’ was actualized by faith through human participation; it was not captive to the particulars of historical research. (page 46)

… Rahner accepted the general findings of modern scientific exegesis about the life of Jesus. (Page 47)

… In brief, Tillich and Rahner had a commitment to the importance of history and considered the results of New Testament exegesis important. They had a macro-view of history as God’s medium of self-diclosure. But this raises a problem, in that, while they thought it was important for Christology to be grounded in exegetical findings, they did not feel bound to them. (page 47)

Me

Ogden’s semantics lose me. The best I can make of this is that Ogden generally endorses the positions of Tillich and Rahner, but by not being bound to “exegetical findings”, they are at liberty to create their own imaginary Christs.

Ogden on history

In some theologically conservative circles, the assumption has been made that recourse to history will remedy deficiencies in theological knowledge; that is, if there is a credibility gap (e.g. the resurrection) then a piece of historical evidence might address it (e.g. the empty tomb). In other cases, an over-reliance on history can be seen to undermine the credibility of orthodox beliefs; this is, if history can explain everything, then there is no room for faith (e.g. miracle stories dismissed).

Ogden quoting Richard Rorty

Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot. (page 50 from Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity).

Me

Rorty aligns with my own Model Theory (that I have developed independently) in that the models we use to describe the prototype are always less than the prototype. We might differ on semantics; I think that the prototype is always true (or right), whereas Rorty sees truth as a property that we project onto the prototype.

Ogden on experience

Experience is hard to define. It can be expressed in and shaped by language (page 51).

Me

I agree that words do more than simply convey our thoughts and experiences to others – they actually shape and form those thoughts and experiences. This becomes evident in translation processes, in which a thought expressed in the original language has no equivalent in the translated language. In these cases, word-proxies or approximations are used. Language gives form to experience. I wonder if this is a legitimate extension to the Biblical claims of the agency of the Word in creation (cf Gen 1:3 etc and John 1:1-3).

See also Matthew 6:22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” This isn’t a statement of the biological function of the eyes, or how to maintain yourself in a healthy physical state. Its more about what we choose to look at or how we look at it, especially our experiences. The language we use to express these experiences actually affects our spiritual, corporate health.

Ogden on the Incarnation

… historical evidence is scarce for major Christological themes (cf the Incarnation). However, there is the experience of the early church as found in Scripture and tradition. This does not mean, however, that just because a disciple, a gospel writer or an early theologian thinks something is true, that it is true. (Page 52)

Me

Yes, but the Christian has already determined that his or her perspective of truth is to be calibrated against the Incarnation. It is what Christian Dogma is all about.

Ogden on epistemological authority

…Further, by experience, I am not talking about the lone (male) heroes of the faith. So, experience may include the ancient authority figures, from Paul to Augustine and beyond, but real epistemological clout comes from contemporary corporate, intersubjective experience. (page 52)

Me

In other words, we tend to trust our immediate experiences. Psychologists would call these the emotional cues on which we base our seemingly “rational” decisions (thus rendering these decisions mostly “irrational” even when we think they are not).

Ogden on certainty

… the quest for certainty is fraught with difficulties and there is always an element of doubt. (page 52).

Me

Does Ogden think that the walk of faith is a quest for certainty? I think of faith as something that informs my decisions in the context of uncertainty. True, we seek certainty, but, being incapable of reaching it, we have to live by faith. Perhaps that is what Ogden means, but he seems to hide his understanding behind his semantics.

Ogden on the expectation of finding a grand narrative

This represents a shift in expectations from the ambitious modern expectation of establishing a comprehensive fail-safe epistemological system (cf. grand narratives) to a cumulative process that canvasses incremental and collaborative increases in knowledge (cf. wisdom).(page 53)

Me

Ogden recoils from the modernist expectation that a grand narrative can be discovered. What happened to God, who is the ultimate grand narrative? To be fair, he is critiquing modern expectations, and recognizes that faith is not the poor substitute for certainty that modernism supposes it is.

Ogden on knowledge

Epistemology is related to the idea of establishing new knowledge, which is true knowledge. If epistemology is narrowly defined in empirical terms, however, then a text like John’s prologue has little or no value. (Page 56)

Me

Isn’t “old” knowledge true as well? Ogden’s semantics lose me here.
Note that Ogden is arguing against extreme Progressive Theology because, presumably, he sees value in John’s prologue that he does not want to lose to it.

Ogden’s conclusions

Consider the bottom line and assume the parable does not come from the lips of Jesus, but emerges from an early church community. So, the parable expresses the shared memory of a faith community. Its placement in the gospel presents the figure of Jesus as a messenger and model for a new way of living. Through the experience of the reign of God, which for them was proclaimed and embodied by the historical Jesus, there is potential for transformation. In other words, it is about new perceptions leading to new experiences. In and by itself, the parable does not constitute a complete or unambiguous truth statement. But this faith community bears witness to the historical Jesus as a source of transformation, because its shared memory has been enshrined in and enlivened by the narrative context. The story is an existential expression of that witness. Presuming we are no longer captive to modernity’s bifurcation of the material and the spiritual, there is wisdom here. Moreover, the elder son’s response not only emphasizes the complexity and ambiguity of human relationships, but it serves to underline the importance of the transformative experience.

John 1:1-18 is a complex example, but like the parable, truth has to do with the wisdom of a particular faith community. This involves the concrete, critical, and corporate reflection on experience, which finds new life in narrative form. Unlike the parable, however, John’s prologue is making a claim about the person of Jesus. Ironically, the fact that the prologue is arguably based on an early hymn, using ancient tropes to interpret the significance of Jesus, serves to underline the wisdom-making process. So where does history come in? Certainly the historical Jesus did not write the prologue and the prologue is not a historical description of Jesus of Nazareth. But this does reflect the wisdom-making processes of a historic faith community, which is grounded in the memory of a historic figure, and given new life in a living narrative tradition.

In many Churches, John’s prologue is read on Christmas Eve during the service of lessons and carols, or on Christmas Day. It is a remarkable corporate experience. It does not prove the doctrine of the Incarnation, but it rings true with the faith community.

In that inspired reading-in-community, the faithful feel, apprehend, even claim that the historical Jesus has contemporary existential significance. In and of itself, the text is not a historical fact. However, that this reading-in-community has power for real people is a fact that deserves to be part of the epistemological equation. This is not the same as saying, because a faith community believes something, it is true. It is saying, however, that just as experience has a role in contemporary liturgy or an early Church hymn, it also has a role in contemporary biblical interpretation. Today, there are many within and without the Church, who want to know the facts. This is important. But we must take the next step and open the doors for wisdom. (Page 58-59)

Me

I contend the assertion that Jesus did not say, or author the parable of the prodigal son. There is no empirical evidence that he did not. Ogden dogmatically asserts that this passage was retrojected onto the Christ-figure by the early Church as a way of providing itself with an identity or self-understanding. His concern is about how this process of projection can retain any sort of value for the contemporary church within the framework of Progressive Theology. I suggest that his difficulties would be resolved by understanding the Church as being a product and custodian of the parable, rather than its producer.

On the Prologue to the Gospel of John, Ogden seems to allow for all possibilities except that it should be believed. The only statement of Ogden’s that I find myself in agreement with is that Jesus did not write it. The Prologue is Dogma, and it has profound implications on how we understand the cosmos. Further, without it, the remainder of the Gospel of John lacks coherence and meaning, and for this reason alone, it deserves better treatment than the Progressives seem willing to give it.

No, the Prologue does not prove the doctrine of the Incarnation by empirical demonstration, but it does assert it as revelation. Remarkably, Ogden does not say how it “rings true for the faith community”; perhaps he thinks it is a beneficial delusion. This appears to me to be his failure to comprehend the idea that it rings true because we accept its truthfulness by faith, and that we have some understanding of the implications of the Incarnation on our present circumstances (whereas Mack does not). Notwithstanding the truth or untruth of the Prologue, it is Christian dogma, which returns me, yet again, to the agenda for publishing OFS.

Ralph Bowles' FB message 2 July 2013

A clarification: Recently I posted links to three articles in my blog, containing a review of a book. I understand from a friend that others have concluded that the timing and matter of these posts was related to our upcoming Diocesan Synod. In fact this is not so. I was asked my opinion of the book/course last year, so I looked into it and wrote a review in January. I have been considering what to do with it for months, and it occurred to me the other week to publish it on my blog, and link it to Twitter and Facebook for the interest of others. This was my decision without consultation with anyone, taken without thinking about Synod at all. Any relation to other issues at Synod is coincidental, or providential, depending on your theology.

Your old men will dream dreams

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten

...

And afterward,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

your old men will dream dreams,

your young men will see visions.

Joel 2:25 and 28

I want to thank Wayne Zcshech for his message at our church tonight, in particular for giving me a fresh perspective on this passage from Joel.

Much of my young adult Christian life was formed in the Charismatic movement of the '80s. We understood Joel's vision in terms of the spiritual gifts, or 'charismata' that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12:7-11, and that they were ordained for the church on the day of Pentecost. Peter opens his appeal to the crowd by quoting this very passage from Joel on that day in Jerusalem.

Wayne's sermon today challenged me to release this passage from the narrow confines of my charismatic experiences. It made me feel small and selfish, but in a good way - I am pre-occupied with my own, small world and my own experiences. I don't doubt that Joel's message relates to the kinds of spiritual gifts that I looked for as a young Christian, but it also relates to a more universal truth - that our ability to dream dreams can die, and that God is the One who re-awakens it.

Joel's passage was not even the main text for Wayne's message - in fact, it was so incidental, that I could have easily missed it. Wayne's message was about his experiences of living as a missionary in the Ukraine for twenty years. He explained how this part of the world had been ground into the dust by a succession of dictatorships and war, from Stalin to the Nazi Occupation to the collapse of the Soviet State. Millions died. Then there was Chernobyl. The result, according to Wayne's observations, was an inter-generational malaise in which you did everything you could to survive and the golden rule was never to stand out from the crowd. The only management style known was bullying.

In 1991, Ukraine got its independence. But, as Wayne noted, the Soviet Empire was not designed to be carved up. Recession followed as the old networks, supported by centralized planning, fell apart. It fell particularly hard on Eastern Europe because concepts of innovation and initiative had been tortured out of its people.

They had lost their ability to dream dreams.

So Wayne, an Australian Christian, set about creating a church in a small town 90 km from Kiev. They managed to purchase a building, but the critical issue was that its small congregation was 100% unemployed. How could they even heat the building, or bring food to the church? Wayne set about creating industry - by setting up bio-gas and bio-diesel enterprises, and by growing mushrooms. The latter provided employment for about 35 people until the business failed (Wayne didn't give us the details, but we got the impression that any kind of business would be treated with jealousy, suspicion and never-ending bureaucratic meddling). Wayne was also instrumental in setting up the first Ukranian Cricket ground and training facility (curiously, for the many Moslem Pakistanis who capitalized on the Ukrainian education system).

What I found riveting was not just Wayne's account of his successes and failures, but how he saw the Spirit of God bring life to his adopted town - not just in a kind of euphoric religious experience, but in giving men and women the dignity of meaningful work and a sense of being able to build for a better future. 

As he mentioned this, I remembered Joel. Joel starts with the years the locusts have eaten. His immediate audience is a people who, because of prolonged calamity, oppression and disaster, had lost hope. When it seemed that the only path was a long, weary trudge into oblivion, the Spirit of God awakened in this small community the ability to dream dreams.

(Edit: It's Wayne, not Mark)

Response to 'The Once and Future Scriptures' - Part 2

Introduction

The next windmill in my current Quixotic quest is the Reverend Dr Cathy Thomson’s essay “Scripture as a Normative Source in Theology” for no better reason that that it is Chapter 2.

Same disclaimers and qualifications as last time.

Summary

Thomson’s essay falls into two halves. In the first she explores the question of how we draw meaning from the Biblical scriptures, how we use them to direct (or justify) our behaviour and develops five principles for “ … governing the use of Scripture as normative source of theology” (page 33). In the second she takes her model and applies it to the passages in the New Testament (NT) that claim that Jesus Christ is God.

I found the first half quite illuminating. As far as the second half is concerned, I always enjoy a guided tour through the Christological passages and I nodded in agreement to Thomson’s narrative of the history of these passages. But her inferences, I believe, were wrong. Taken as a whole, the thing that troubles me the most about this essay is the contrast between Thomson’s exuberance in exploring modern communication theory in the first half, and her discombobulation in dealing with the Christological scriptures in the second. In dealing with the former, her language is peppered with certainty and confidence; in the latter she backs away from Trinitarian claims, stating that scripture only ever suggests the full divinity of Christ. That’s not how I read it. I wonder that if the NT authors were to shout their message into Thomson’s ear with a bullhorn, she would resolutely refuse to believe it was anything more than a mere suggestion.

This is the thing I find most troubling about Thomson’s essay. Read back to front, it’s an attack on Trinitarianism, backed up by Thomon’s inferences from communication theory. If this were the case, Thomson wishes to rehabilitate Arianism and Gnosticism to the Church. There are very good reasons why the Church Fathers declared these ideas anathema, and we modern Christians would be wise to listen to them.

Communication and Model Theory

In a strange nexus of developing flood models as a profession and doing Christian apologetics as a hobby, I have developed a theory that I call Model Theory. I mention it here because it aligns with much of what Thomson has to say. It goes something like this

• A model can be a word, an intellectual concept or a toy train set.
• The model is always less than the thing it models (the prototype). If it weren’t, it would be the prototype.
• Given that the model is less than the prototype, the features included in the model are a narrow selection of the features of the prototype.
• The selection process reduces the model to only those features that illustrate or address particular behaviors, questions or concerns. Good models do this well.
• Therefore, you can’t expect a model to answer a question that it was not designed to answer.

This last point is particularly important in asking questions of the Bible. Thomson is right to remind us that the scriptures were written to address particular concerns in a particular culture and at a particular time. We risk much by importing scriptural statements into our own culture and time without understanding the ‘spirit’ in which these statements were written.

I use the word ‘spirit’ deliberately here because it is a word Thomson labors to avoid. To be fair to the academic tone of Thomson’s essay, it’s a word that will solicit a murmur of ‘amens’ in Ekklesia, but it won’t fly in Academia. Yet, that is what Thomson appears to miss. The ‘Spirit’ of the New Testament (as I read it) is something that is preoccupied with the vision of God presented to the authors in the fleshly person of Jesus. They weren’t philosophers hiding in their caves until their own ‘eureka’ moments drove them out; they were confronted with a Jesus who invaded their own humdrum existence, and then spent their time and energy trying to explain it to their friends and neighbors with models that their friends and neighbors could comprehend (e.g. the Temple).

Hence the Bible is the (canonical) Model of the revelation of God in Christ, and hence why it will not answer every question we have about it. Hence we cannot approach the Bible with the expectation that all our questions will be answered; questions such as “give me an explanation of how can the man Jesus be fully God?” Instead, we see God made fully visible in man, asking us who we think He is (Matt 16:15), and we are confronted with the fact that, whatever models we hold in our mind about what it means to be human, or God, they must be re-formed by what we see in Jesus in scripture. That is what ‘canon’ is all about.

This, I think, is what it means to have the Spirit illuminate our reading of scripture, and this is what informs us as we contextualize its message in our present circumstances – in Thomson’s parlance, how the scriptures are normative source in theology.

What she says and what I say – Model Theory

Thomson opens with a discussion on what normativity might mean “One emerging insight is therefore that normativity is usually about the management or control of behavior(s). Within a faith community this might of course, and validly, be referred to as ‘guidance’ rather than control” (Page 27). I agree here, and would add that the NT authors would probably have had no clue about our modern concepts of control. We think of control as pressing a button on a remote and the TV changes channels. In a world before mechanization, this kind of automatic, unthinking response in humans would have seemed incomprehensible. The ancients, of course, did know about ‘command’ (see Matt 8:5-13), but for a command to work, you’ve got to tell someone what to do and they have to think about how to do it. Thomson and I probably agree that the thinking-about-it-part is fundamental, but not understood well enough in Christian circles.

“The source is the word spoken; the spirit hovering over the, as yet, uncreated deep. The source is God, or perhaps it is the point at which the sheer uncreated potential of God meets its own mysterious actualization in creation. It is seedpod at the heartbreaking and glorious moment of generation; it is the welling up of the originating spring, impossible to locate at any point in space, at any moment in time.” (page 27). Thomson waxes poetical (no problem with that, unless she intoxicated with her own insights), but seems to veer towards a gnostic perspective with her assertion that this ‘source’ is impossible to locate – Scriptures teach us that it is located in Jesus (e.g. John 1:18).

“… it is necessary to recognize (with some regret) that the written word can never be purely ‘source’ by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. This is because it is always an attempted representation of something that precedes it, whether in thought, imagination or in reality.” See Model Theory above.

“… the biblical interpretative exercise enterprise has been led into a condition both of greater freedom and greater complexity. The first is disinclined to uncover ‘truth(s)’. The second makes the assertion of truth claims increasingly more difficult.” (page 30) Thomson veers into post-modernism, but seems to anticipate an counter-post-modern reaction by adding “The postmodern theologian does not claim that Scripture contains no truth, but that the vagaries of recollection, writing, reading, and dissemination render it impossible to make absolute truth claims out of the text. On a more positive note, the contemporary theologian is likely to consider it appropriate to look to Scripture to learn about the derivation of faith historically, the apprehension of faith personally, and the mystery that seems to undergird these processes.” Do I care about what Post-Modern Theologians think? Given that Post-Modernism ultimately fractures truth into personal experiential constructs, I don’t see anything within it that compels me to comprehend or acknowledges anyone’s experiential constructs but my own.

Thomson’s hermeneutical principles are listed on Pages 33 to 34. On face value, I don’t find much to object to here. Thomson is right to recoil from the use of the Bible to justify coercive religion, but something more muscular is needed that her implied plea for us all to be nice to each other. My bigger concern is that she uses her hermeneutical principles to seed doubt in the Trinitarian understanding of the Christological Scriptures.

What she says and what I say – The Christology of the New Testament

I have transcribed the entire section of Thomson’s essay below. My main reason for doing so is my agreement to Thomson’s narrative on the history of these scriptures, which is remarkable because we sit at very different ends of the theological spectrum. When you see opponents corroborate the facts, you know you’ve got good history. However, I disagree with Thomson’s inferences and the agenda for which she uses them.

How does Thomson know that the texts were “… no less enigmatic or elusive, inconsistent or ambiguous, than we find them to be today”? Why does she even think “we” find them in this state? I find a remarkable, unambiguous consistency in these texts. Did the early Christians think like me, or her? I suggest that neither of us knows for sure, and these kinds of generalizations and categorizations about what passed through the minds of the first Christians are unhelpful speculation.

Why does Thomson back away from the high Christological claims of the New Testament? “The writers of the New … seemed to claim for him redemptive significance suggestive of qualities understood to be characteristic of the divine.”? The message of the Divinity of Jesus is not an adjunct to the message of the New Testament; it is its whole reason for being. Why couch these statements in uncertainty, with qualifiers such as “seemed to claim” or “suggest”?

What is Thomson’s point with “It is also clear that the earliest texts which could be interpreted as pointing to the divinity of Jesus were probably drawing from liturgical material that would have been in use well before the gospels were written, and centuries before the divinity of Jesus was asserted in doctrinal statements such as those produced by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.”? On the one hand, she acknowledges that statements relating to the Divinity of Jesus were in circulation before the writing of the New Testament, and on the other she can’t join the dots between the NT and the Nicene Creed. I suggest that her difficulties would be resolved if she embraced the idea that the ideological leadership of the Christian Church has always understood that Jesus was Divine, but it’s ways of promoting and defending the idea have been expressed in different ways, according to the circumstances at the time.

Incidentally, I find the use of CE instead of AD intensely annoying in Christian publications. If Christ were God, then this is the Year of Our Lord. Diluting it to “Common Era” might mollify the humanists, but I am not a humanist and I fail to see why I should toe their line.

Why does Thomson say “There is ambiguity in all of these texts, which makes it difficult to ‘ground’ biblically any Chistological claim of divinity.”? I suggest that the root of Thomson’s difficulties is her persistence in squaring these Christological scriptures up against her Model of what Divinity is. If her Model is faulty, and its faults are apparent in her failure to get the right answers to her questions from it, then it’s her Model that needs to change.

Thomson finds more difficulties in the titles, or descriptions used by Jesus and those around him, particularly “Christ” and “Son of Man”. She would benefit from some Model Theory here; these titles are themselves models that convey part, but not all, of what Jesus is. True, “Christ” simply means “anointed one” and it is roughly equivalent to “authorized representative”. Also “Son of Man” is simply equivalent to “human being”. When applied to the Christ of Scripture, however, these models may be expanded to “one who is authorized by God to implement the policies and practices and modus operandi of the Kingdom of Heaven” and “one who has inherited all that it means to be truly human and thus has the right to represent all human beings to the heavenly realm”. To the extent that Thomson criticizes a narrow interpretation of these terms, I agree. However, she falls on her own sword by reducing, not enlarging, how these models are applied to Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.

Thomson revisits the conflict between Arius and Athanasius (here is my brief account). She avoids taking sides in this essay (leading me to think that she’s a tyre-kicking fence-sitter in this regard), but oddly, she appeals to Nietzsche for the final word on the matter. “The ignominious ‘will to power’ later articulated by the philosopher Nietzsche displayed the full force of its ire in a history of exclusion and belittlement meted out by both sides.” (page 40). I suggest that had Arius been less dogmatic and egotistical in his claims, the machinations of the fourth century might have been mitigated and Neitzsche might not have been so offended by them.

What is the basis for Thomson’s clarity, and why does she contest it in “Clearly a series of early liturgical affirmations at once uplifting and ambiguous, and a set of different titles for Jesus that were inconsistent, and again ambiguous, could hardly by themselves lead to the formation of the well-worked metaphysical formulae that took on the status of Christological doctrine in the fourth century.” I suggest that the creeds resulting from Nicea are better understood as a narrative on the Christological texts – they are Models that are designed to address a question that Thomson believes is unanswered, the relationship between Jesus and the Father.

“It is also indisputable that the formation of these definitive doctrines about the person of Christ were as much dependent on the philosophical milieu of the day within which an Aristotelian system of metaphysics (characterized by concepts of essence/substance) was dominant.” (page 40) So, the creeds used the words and models available at the time to respond to an appreciable challenge to the Christian Gospel. We should use whatever words or models are available to us to do the same. The answer, I suggest, is not to discard the Nicean formulations because they are tainted by Aristotelean language, but to understand those concepts in order to uncover the meaning intended by their authors.

“The discussion also demonstrates that in the development of early Christology Scripture has not provided an unambiguous or self-referential system.” (Page 41) Or so Thomson would like us to think.

Finally, Thomson fails to differentiate between description and explanation. Where it is concerned with the Divine, the Bible has much of the former and little of the latter. I think this in itself is illuminating; if we had a God that we could fully explain (that could be fully represented in our conceptual models), he would be less than us, and hence he could not be God. Further, we might reflect on why God made it so. I beleive it is because we creatures were created to behold Him. We might be able to communicate some of that vision in words, but we will never be able to fully explain it.

Extract from Thomson's Essay on the Christological Scriptures, pages 35 to 40

In order to validate these principles, one presupposition must be in place. This is that Scripture is not a self-regulating system characterized by inner consistency, or self-interpretative possibility. Even at times in the history of Christianity when the interpretative freedoms claimed above were not imagined, theologians always looked outside of the text to make sense of the import of the text. And the texts themselves were considered no less enigmatic or elusive, inconsistent or ambiguous, than we find them to be today. If we examine some of the textual material central to the Christological discourses within the early Church, this becomes clear.

It is demonstrable that Church teaching about the person of Christ did not emerge in an uncomplicated way out of the biblical study of the early Church. Scripture suggested that Jesus was a devout follower of the God of Judaism, but not only that. The writers of the New Testament through the telling of stories about his life, and though theological treatises such as those contained in the letters of Paul seemed to claim for him redemptive significance suggestive of qualities understood to be characteristic of the divine.

This biblical process however was not a neat chronological one within which can be traced a gradual evolution of ideas starting with the identity of Jesus as God’s Son, and ending up with doctrinal statements about his divinity. Nor is there a chronological movement from narrative elements describing Jesus’ life to proclamatory material making sense of the narratives. It is clear that the gospels contain confessional elements reflecting the faith of the communities out of which they emerged. It is also clear that the earliest texts which could be interpreted as pointing to the divinity of Jesus were probably drawing from liturgical material that would have been in use well before the gospels were written, and centuries before the divinity of Jesus was asserted in doctrinal statements such as those produced by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

Examples of liturgical texts of this sort follow. The first is the Psalm cited in Heb 1:8-9, which recognizes Jesus as the Son of God and suggests a special status for him:

But of the Son, he (God) says:

‘Your throne O God is [or, God is your throne] for ever and ever,

And the righteous scepter is the scepter of your kingdom.

You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness

Therefore God, your God, has anointed you

With the oil of gladness beyond your companions.’

Jesus’ status as son of God the Father is further reinforced in the hymn in John 1:14

‘And the Word became flesh

And lived among us

And we have seen his glory

The glory as of a Father’s only son,

Full of grace and truth’

In the baptismal formula of Matt 28:19, Jesus is represented as co-equal with God. This is evident long before there is any doctrine associating him with the metaphysics of ‘substance’ relating to notions of divinity, or suggestive of a Trinitarian concept of the godhead; ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.'

Another text thought to have originated as liturgical material is Col 1:15-20

‘He is the image of the invisible God

The first born of all creation

For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created

Things visible and invisible

Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers

All things have been created through him and for him

He himself is before all things

And in him all things hold together

He is the head of the body

The church

He is the beginning

The first born from the dead

So that he might come to have first place in everything.

For in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell

And through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things

Whether on earth or in heaven

By making peace through the blood of his cross.

In terms of determining the nature of Christ the first two of these tests are intriguing but ambiguous, attributing ‘sonship’ to Jesus, but not necessarily divinity. The third is suggestive of a Jesus co-equal with the Father and the Spirit, which may be read to imply divinity, but could be understood in the sense of a son and spirit derived from/by God, but sharing divinity. The Colossians text displays a heightened rhetoric which describes Jesus as having every possible divine attribute; he is the image of God, Creator of the World, head of the ekkelesia, occupying first place in everything, in whom God was pleased to dwell, but he is not portrayed explicitly as divine. There is ambiguity in all of these texts, which makes it difficult to ‘ground’ biblically any Chistological claim of divinity.

More ambiguity surrounds the names that were used of Jesus and by Jesus of himself as the New Testament documents bear witness. Jesus was the Messiah, in Greek Christos, or “the Christ’. This means, literally, “the anointed one”. The promised Messiah was the one who could come to release Israel from oppression and rule them in peace as their king. In the gospels, Peter recognized Jesus as the Messiah (as well as Son); ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God” (Matt 16:16). Martha also recognized this identity of Jesus: “Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who was expected to come into the world” (John 11:27). Yet Jesus never used this terminology when referring to himself. In the Markan account of Jesus’ trial however when the high priest asks of him, “Are you the Messiah?” Jesus enigmantically says, “I am,” and then goes on to employ a different title again – the “Son of Man”, which requires its own explication.

Jesus also never referred to himself as God’s Son, and always answered ambiguously when others called him this. However a passage from Matthew’s Gospel does seem to suggest the thought of himself as God’s Son; “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father , and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt 11:27). Also interesting is Jesus’ use of the title “Abba” which points to a sense that Jesus had that he was ‘son of God’ in a special, if undefined, way.

The acknowledgement that “Jesus is Lord” (kyrios) is one of the earliest Christian confessions of faith. It had powerful theological associations, because it was used “to translate the Tetragrammatron, the four Hebrew characters (YHWH) used to represent the sacred name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures.” The most significant occurrence of the use of the word “Lord” to designate Jesus is found in Phil 2:9-11, a passage which is very early – probably pre-Pauline – yet which has a developed sense of possibility that Jesus might have divine attributes.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

And gave him the name that is above every name

So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend

In heaven and on earth and under the earth

And every tongue should confess

That Jesus Christ is Lord

To the glory of God the Father

Here the early Christian writer takes a Hebrew Bible declaration (Isa 45:23) that every knee will bow to the Lord God, and transfers it to the Lord Jesus Christ, which again suggests the divinity of Jesus without claiming it explicitly.

The term “Son of Man” is possibly the most difficult of the titles of Jesus to interpret, because the scholarship that examines it is not conclusive. Apart from a few exceptions, Jesus is the one who uses this title in the New Testament: seventy times in the Synoptic Gospels and twelve in the Gospel of John. In two palces the titles are used by others (Acts 7:56; John 12:34). Jesus never claims to be “Son of Man”, but there are times when the gospels seem to portray him as referring to himself when he uses it (Matt 8:20; Mark 8:31). On the other hand the term “Son of Man” in common usage in Jesus’ day often implied simply the sense of “I”. It is possible that Jesus used this title in this rather mundane way, and the early church invested it with apocalyptic meaning.

Theologians of the early Church – searching within the above range of vital liturgical New Testament texts suggestive of Jesus’ divinity – might themselves be convicted of that claim, but their theological task was not assisted by the essential inconsistency and ambiguity of the texts themselves. And the history of the first few centuries of the Christian Church tells us that despite the plethora of such reverential texts, the issue of whether or not Jesus was divine was hugely controversial. Arian [sic] and his followers disputed the divinity of Jesus; Athanasius averred it. These men were contemporaries, respected leaders of the Church, and theologians of the same city of Alexandria. They were familiar with the same philosophical thought-forms and they use the same Scriptures to form the basis of their theological views. Demonstrably, then, the truth of Jesus’ divinity was not derived from scriptural material in an uncomplicated manner, as though it lay, a clear theological concept, a glittering jewel, merely to be mined, extracted, from the text. It was deliberated upon, thought about and prayed (and fought) over for centuries. The ignominious ‘will to power’ later articulated by the philosopher Nietzsche displayed the full force of its ire in a history of exclusion and belittlement meted out by both sides.

If the Scriptures serve as a normative source for theology, it is clear that they have not been applied exclusively in doctrinal development. Clearly a series of early liturgical affirmations at once uplifting and ambiguous, and a set of different titles for Jesus that were inconsistent, and again ambiguous, could hardly by themselves lead to the formation of the well-worked metaphysical formulae that took on the status of Christological doctrine in the fourth century. This is, namely, that Jesus was “one in essence/substance” (consubstantial/homoousios) with the Father, and not “of similar substance” (homoiousious). And that Jesus was one person with two natures, human and divine so that a distinction within Christ was placed squarely on the level of nature while the unity resided fully in the sphere of the person. Clearly this Christology emerged out of more than a dispassionate appraisal of the relevant scriptural texts. The process involved interpretation of the text that would have engaged what I have referred to above as “matrices of meaning and perceived possibility” as these existed for individual theologians and their immediate faith communities. It is also indisputable that the formation of these definitive doctrines about the person of Christ were as much dependent on the philosophical milieu of the day within which an Aristotelian system of metaphysics (characterized by concepts of essence/substance) was dominant.

The BBC, the Jeer Crowd and my loss of faith temporarily averted

Did the BBC website pull an article today?

Earlier today, I read an article on the BBC website about (I think) the US State Department's report on religious persecution worldwide. The banner headline was "Persecution of Jews and Muslims on the Rise".

The problem is that I can't check it because I can't find the article. Did the BBC pull it?

If the BBC did pull it, it might be because it was bad reporting. The persecution of people of any (or no) religious persuasion is alarming enough, but if you leave out the Christians, you leave out a large, or even a majority, of the story of religious persecution world-wide.

The body of the BBC article cited several cases, including one of a Christian girl with mental difficulties who faced the death penalty in Pakistan because of her alleged apostasy. Whereas the body of the article acknowledged the persecution faced by Christians around the world, the banner headline did not. So, what was the BBC trying to say? The persecution of religious Jews and Muslims is unacceptable, but it's OK to bully Christians because we western Europeans are riddled with white post-Christian guilt?

Another reason could be that the article’s comment thread became an echo-box for the Jeer-Crowd of Angry Atheists. Their tone can only be described in terms of the bullies blaming their victims. Yes, we've brought this on our own heads because we're stupid bigots who have an imaginary friend in the great flying spaghetti monster. No other narratives tolerated here, thank you.

Enough, I thought. I have lost faith in the BBC’s capacity to report on religion with any semblance of balance, and it had shamelessly played to the gallery. I was about to vent on an angry blog, when I found the article had apparently vanished.

Now, if you visit the BBC website, you'll find an entirely different article - How Religions Change Their Mind. For the record, I find the tenor of this article quite engaging, and I might even give Karen Armstrong's comments my qualified agreement.

I can't post a comment, though, and neither can you. Maybe the BBC has had enough of the Atheist Jeer-Crowd hijacking its threads. On one hand, I'm glad, but I'm also mightily ticked off that their lack of civility has, again, denied me a voice.

Response to 'The Once and Future Scriptures' - Part 1

Introduction

The Once and Future Scriptures – Exploring the Role of the Bible in the Contemporary Church (OFS) is a collection of essays recently circulated to the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane in a public consultation initiative. It invites Anglicans in Queensland to submit their responses, so here is mine. I have prepared this response with the assumption that the reader has access to OFS; if you, dear reader, don’t, you may find this post difficult to follow.

OFS raises a legitimate concern; how should we, as a Christian community, regard the Bible? It’s an important concern to address in an age and a culture which increasingly considers the Bible to be “bollocks” (as a sweet young person put it to me this week). To the Christian, however, the question is akin to asking “how should I love my wife?” The danger is that it can easily be truncated to “should I love my wife?” In preparing this response, I have operated under the presumption that the questions raised in OFS are inclined more to the former than the latter.

As my time is limited I don’t know how far I’ll get in responding to the whole collection by the time allowed for receiving responses. My response is necessarily selective, but I hope to cover the important ground. If I have misrepresented any of the views and opinions expressed in OFS, and there is an appreciable risk that I have, I unreservedly apologize and ask for correction from those who might know better.

Essay 1 - The ‘Problem’ of the Bible

By Gregory C. Jenks

Summary

My reaction to this essay starts with a cautious, qualified agreement with much that Jenks has to say. He is alarmed that many Christians have claimed far more of the Bible than they should. In defending the “inspiration’ of the Bible, they have marooned themselves in a rising tide of academic criticism. In other words, they have set themselves up as cannon-fodder for the counter-claims of an unbelieving generation and, in doing so have pushed the Bible out to the lunatic fringe of modern, enlightened, respectable society. I agree, to the extent that certain streams of fundamentalism refuse to enter into the dialog between vision and observation (the dialog between religion and science, if you like), and that they actually ignore the content of the ancient texts that they seek to defend.

However, Jenks promulgates his own fundamentalism. To him, there appears to be no legitimate alternative to his own humanistic, post-enlightenment reading of the Bible. Not wishing to jettison the Bible altogether, he ties himself in knots over his church’s claim that it could possibly be ‘inspired of God’, and suggests that we consider it not as an expression of divine authority, but as a mortally wounded peer that deserves our pity, not our obedience. Worryingly, Jenks calls us to uncritically accept Biblical criticism, while developing a natural skepticism to whatever the Bible says about itself. Whereas I can agree with his impulse to seriously address Biblical criticism, his position is as imbalanced as the fundamentalists he despises.

Jenks is what I would call a pre-Johannite. He is thoroughly knowledgeable on matters of religion, but appears unable to discern the contours of God in the fog. He appears to me to be in the position of the believers who first heard John’s Gospel. They, no doubt, were thoroughly experienced and learned in religion; even being fully conversant with the sacred writings that now make up the majority of our modern Bible. Yet John was able to open his Gospel by telling them that “No one has ever seen God …” (John 1:18), which was an audacious claim to make to a people who lived and breathed scripture and religion. John’s Good News, though, was that the contours of God could be seen in the fog in the tangible form of Jesus Christ "... but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known". All the stories, psalms, oracles and teachings up to this point came to their culmination and full expression in this one, unique, human individual. This, I think, is what Jenks misses. Without it, we Christians have nothing more to offer than a revelation of our own souls. With it, we have the canonical revelation of God, which, by divine appointment, is also the revelation of the canonical man.

What he says and what I say

“… Christianity was born with the Bible in the cradle …” (page 8). The picture I get from this remark is that the careless midwife accidentally dropped something into the crib – the inference being that the Bible is a mere adjunct to the Christian church. My reaction is that the Bible is the product of the Church, but the Church is also the product of the Bible. Whilst it has variously expanded and contracted it’s formal writings and expressions, the Bible remains the Church’s raison d’etre. Without the Bible the Church is no longer the Church, it might be something, but that something is something that is not a Church.
“There seems to have been no debate within earliest Christianity about the content, form, or authority of the Scriptures inherited from Judaism” (page 9). Whereas I don’t take issue with this statement on face value (it appears that the scriptures were commonly accepted until Marcion in AD 140, as Jenks notes), Jenks appears to miss the way in which the New Testament Authors mined the scriptures as they formulated and explained their perception of Jesus to each other. Perhaps the question was not so much one of canonicity, but where they could find the narratives they needed to communicate the meaning of their encounters with the Son of God.

“In the Western Church, the Bible was reinvented as a tool for shaping the life of the Church and the pious individual at the time of the Reformation” (page 11). Jenks offers no evaluation of this as either a move in the right direction or not. Just prior to the Reformation, European commoners were separated from the Bible by literacy and language, but that was not always the case. The Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek speakers of the ancient world had access to the scriptures, and they used them for shaping the life of the believing community and believing individuals. It was an imbalance of access that the Reformation sought to correct.

“Since the Reformation, grassroots Christian views of the Bible have become increasingly exaggerated and naïve, claiming far too much for the Bible. In this uncritical attachment to the Bible (known as ‘Biblicism’) the Christian Scriptures are defended as uniquely authoritative, inerrant, infallible, historically correct, self-sufficient, internally consistent, self-evident in their meaning and universally applicable” (page 11). Jenks names his bogey-man – it is the fundamentalist who stridently believes the Bible. In so far as many of these fundamentalists actually stridently believe their strident beliefs, contrary to the Bible, I agree, but Jenks appears more than eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

“While ascendant religion tends to cling to power and protect its privileges, prophetic religion operates from the margins of respectability…” (page 12). Thus Jenks muses on the similarities of his own guild with ancient Biblical prophetic traditions. He even talks of the academics emerging from their isolation to engage in this conversation. I find these comparisons somewhat ironic, given that the traditional prophets, whilst emerging from their own wildernesses to deliver a disturbing rebuke to respectable society, moved in an entirely different direction to that of Jenks.

“As a result of our increased knowledge of the ancient past, the historical character of the Bible has been seriously compromised” (page 13). Jenks makes no qualifications here, not even to the historical narratives in the Bible that are well attested in extra-Biblical archaeology and other extant sources. I know that’s not always the case, particularly with much of the Biblical historical narrative prior to and 7th Century BC, but Jenks appears to regard the Bible as a homogeneous block such that he even questions those more ‘recent’ passages that can be demonstrated to be historically reliable.

“At the same time as the historicity of the Bible has been challenged, we have been able to gain a much more accurate understanding of the cultural and social dynamics of the ancient communities who first created and used those texts.” (page 13) Jenks assumes he knows who these communities were, which is a difficult position to hold when you challenge all knowledge on authorship. I don’t object to finding a good fit to a particular community and agenda, but unless you acknowledge your own uncertainties (and there are many) you end up building dogma on supposition.

“Not only are the events represented in the Bible more often fictional than historical, but the texts themselves have an uncertain pedigree as well as a confused history of copying and transmission. Moses did not write the Pentateuch, and David did not write the Psalms.” (page 13). Dogma and conjecture. Unfashionable as it is to say so in the current academic climate of scepticism, it is possible that Moses and David made their contributions to these works, though Jenks does not appear to be interested.

“Critical investigation of the world behind the biblical texts has established beyond reasonable doubt that the origins of the Bible were very different than Christians like to imagine.” (page 14). Which Christians is Jenks thinking of? What does he mean by 'beyond reasonable doubt' if it not an uncritical acceptance of Biblical criticism. Jenks appears to be intoxicated with this own authority in this area.

“More confrontational still, what of the unacceptable values and immoral practices encoded in the text? Even if God did not command the ethnic cleansing of ancient Palestine, the Bible seems to have been written and approved by people who liked to imagine that God did. These sacred texts are increasingly recognized as artefacts created by persons with particular cultural and religious agendas in the ancient world, and the modern reader can find herself an intruder in an unfamiliar landscape when exploring the world of the text.” Jenks allows his modern agenda to judge the directives described in the historical narratives of the Bible. He does not allow for the possibility that these directives were actually given and carried out in desperate times, but that the grace of our Lord Jesus means that we no longer have to repeat them. He does not allow theology to inform his perspective, which is remarkable because he identifies himself as a person of faith.

“To remain significant, and especially to continue as a site for divine-human encounter, the Bible may need to be read contrary to its literal and historical significance.” In other words, Jenks holds it up as an object lesson in how not to do stuff.

“We note the abuse of creation implicit in many biblical texts and much Christian theology …” If it weren’t for these Biblical texts and Christian theology, we might not even have a concept of creation, much less a theology for how we relate to it and to its creator. Where there has been an abuse of creation by us Christians, we have the Bible to correct us.

“The mono-cultural assumptions of the Bible seem radically incompatible with the realities of life in the twenty-first century” Has Jenks never read about the crowd of every tribe and tongue and people and nation in Rev 5:9 and Rev 7:9, or how Christ is reconciling all of creation to himself in Col 1:20. The New Testament is remarkably vocal in its opposition to mono-culturalism. Jenks appears to dismiss these Biblical voices from formulating his understanding of the Bible.

“The more we know about the Bible, the worlds from which it derives, and the dynamics of reading any text in our own time and place, the less the Bible is able to live up to our expectations. For its own sake as much as for ours, the role of the Bible needs to be reimagined.” (page 17). It appears that Jenks hopes to save us from our reliance on the Bible as an authoritative voice that informs our expectations.

“The value of our religious traditions will not be their assumed superiority of the traditions of other religious communities. Nor will we make the mistake of thinking that the validity of our tradition is derived from either its historicity or the capacity of earlier generations to express themselves in ways that we moderns find cogent or convincing. Rather, the value of our tradition – and ultimately of the Bible itself – will be generated by the capacity of Christianity to facilitate human transformation and ecological justice; taking us beyond ourselves for the sake of the larger web of life at whose centre we find God” (page 19). Here is Jenks’ version of the Great Commission. I have two responses;

Firstly, I don’t object to initiatives that seek human transformation (hopefully, for the better) or ecological justice. However, these honorable goals regularly degenerate into fads, only to be replaced by the next agenda. My concern here is that by re-centering the mission of the Church on the felt need of the time, it will find itself forever chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It is better, in my view, to centre on Christ’s commission, but to contextualize it to meet the needs of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Only then can the church properly address human transformation, ecological justice or whatever other challenges arise, secure in the knowledge that we have a strong home-base from which we can face the new challenges that we have yet to face.

Secondly, the ‘place’ we find God is not in some metaphorical web of life, but in the person of Christ Jesus. We find Christ in the scriptures and in our experience, but we calibrate our understanding of Christ by the Christ we see in scripture. Our traditions, including and especially the Bible, do their best to point us in this direction. They are better than other traditions because other traditions point us in other directions. It’s what the Christian canon is all about.

“The God celebrated and proclaimed by this kind of Christianity will draw us beyond the Christian Scriptures, but we shall never leave them behind.” What arrogance to think that we can somehow ascend higher than the canonical revelation of God in the Bible. No student is greater than his teacher (Matt 10:24).

“Not only will we need to learn how to read the Bible differently, we shall need to rewrite so much of our creeds and liturgies.” Thus turning our backs on all that historical Christianity offers. We shall, for all intent and purposes, dishonour our fathers and mothers.

“As ancient oriental literature, the Bible comes to us from times and places that are profoundly foreign to us, and will forever remain strange; even when we delude ourselves into imagining that we are comprehending and practicing ‘biblical values’” (page 18) To me, it seems obvious to overcome this perceived difficulty by educating Christians in reading the Bible within its own frame of reference, or to put some work into understanding what it says. Jenks seems eager to capitulate to modernism like an over-indulgent parent capitulating to a truculent child at the first sign of a confrontation.

“Instead of rehearsing the mighty acts of God in times past, we shall focus on discerning the wisdom of God for the present times.” (page 19). Who defines this present wisdom? Presumably, Jenks himself and those made in his image.

In his closing arguments, Jenks squirms over the Anglican Church’s Constitutional claims that the (Biblical) scriptures are “given by the inspiration of God” (Articles of Religion, 6). Like a lawyer trying to impute meaning into a statement that was never the intention of its author, he challenges (page 22) the question put to candidates for ordination in the Australian Prayer Book, “Do you wholeheartedly accept the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testament, as given by the Spirit to convey in many and varied ways the revelation of God which is fulfilled in our Lord Jesus Christ?” [AAPB 786] To Jenks, the "many and varied ways" of the Prayer Book could be reconstructed to include the outright rejection of any and all faith in the reliability of the Bible.

Conclusion

In understanding the relationship between the Bible and the Church, I suggest a different paradigm than Jenks'; we are the witness of the word. We are shaped by it, and we give it finite, tangible form and dimension as we express it to the world. We don’t just carry it around; we live it and we let it live in us. Jenks seems to grasp some of this in his consideration of the "world within the text", but he baulks at suggestions of its authority.

In response to Jenk's apparent willingness to elevate other religous traditions to that of the Bible, I look to what I call the Canonical Man. The Canonical Man is the one against whom we measure up, and He is Jesus Christ, our God. It is axiomatic that all our canonical scriptures and traditions point to Him, and that gives us the criteria that we can use to address issues of canonicity and authority.

Yes, Mr Jenks, it is all about Jesus.