Reading Justin Welby’s biography

I’ve been reading Andrew Atherstone’s “brief biography”:  Archbishop Justin Welby: The Road to Canterbury. It’s better, I suspect, to regard it as a well-researched piece of extended journalism than the kind of biography we might normally expect from an academic church historian.

Read in that light it’s a usefully concise romp through the new archbishop’s life to date, and assembled in a remarkably short space of time. It seems that Welby himself has remained neutral about it, having “allowed” Atherstone to approach friends and colleagues, while not giving any interview himself. The author therefore has to rely much on other people’s interviews, as well as on a wide sampling of Welby’s writings in his parish magazine and later equivalents.

In all sorts of ways Atherstone has done us a service by putting so much together so quickly, and I learnt a lot from it. I’m slightly less sure that he has done Justin Welby a service, except in perhaps two very important respects.

First, Atherstone places a considerable emphasis on Archbishop Welby’s impeccable evangelical pedigree, and continuing commitment to the core basics of that as personal faith in Jesus Christ, adherence to the primacy of the Scriptures, and trust in the sacrifice of the Cross. In that light he also in several places emphasises the new archbishop’s attachment to traditional sexual morality. That pedigree may actually give Welby the chance of a hearing by some of those who are trying hard to exclude others from the church.

The other thing is the emphasis Atherstone gives to at least one aspect of Welby’s ecclesiology: that the church is the place where we have to learn to love those we don’t like and live in peace with those we with whom we disagree violently. That underpins rather a lot of what the archbishop seems to see himself to be about.

That said, I wonder whether Welby may be terribly happy to have so many of his fifteen year old parish magazine articles recycled as though they are a fair reflection of where he stands now. There is not much sense of an intellectual journey in the book, and much more of one in which his CICCU and HTB faith, refined by suffering, is still essentially as it was in the beginning, is now, and (one senses a “please God” here) ever more shall be.

In this book, Welby is shown to appreciate some of the riches of catholic spirituality for himself, and to pick up some key ideas about human flourishing from Roman Catholic social teaching, but there seems to me to be rather more begging to be said about a growth in theological breadth and depth (from other traditions as well as in his own) under the surface of the text. For Atherstone, there is a personal spiritual discipline in Welby choosing to receive Holy Communion every day. I wonder if there isn’t also for Welby something of a rather more catholic ecclesiology in the practice of a daily Eucharist than a sacramental version of a more intense “Jesus and me” experience. I think some of what he says elsewhere about ecclesiology may say there is.

It has to be said that there is little opportunity for more reflective analysis of the archbishop’s story, no doubt driven partly by the timetable for publication. One might wonder (however gifted Justin Welby is, and however much he is providentially called from one role to the next by the Lord), whether being connected by family to the ruling classes of England, and by friendship to the most influential evangelicals of the day might not also have something to do with a meteoric rise.

I think a biographer might also want to tease out the connections between a ministry of reconciliation, a theology of gracious acceptance, and a broken home with an attractive rogue for a father. One day, I hope there might be space and time for a rather more analytic and reflective narrative of how Welby’s life and ministry interrelate.

In part, as hinted above, I suspect some of this may also come down to the author’s own conservative evangelical faith shaping the story in a particular way: it sometimes seems a little hagiographical. Failures, such as the collapse of the International Centre for Reconciliation finances after a short period of stupendous income, or the inability to bring any real change to the relationship between Holy Trinity and Coventry Cathedral, are mentioned but quickly left behind. That may pay tribute to Welby’s resilience, but I’d like to know how he learned from the experiences.

One suspects as well that the biographer does not share his subject’s enthusiasm for the gifts and work of his predecessor in Canterbury. The subtext “Justin is not Rowan” sometimes seems a little too noticeable, and I suspect unhelpful. It was, after all, Rowan’s greatest fans who created some of the greatest fuss when he acted as an archbishop for the whole church. I would hate to see the same process happen again for the new archbishop.

In brief, this is a book well-worth reading, but best regarded as an interim write, in which the author has done a good job of amassing useful information, but perhaps ends up in danger of burdening Welby with too many evangelical and managerial expectations. Every archbishop starts as the answer to the church’s prayers and problems. Few end that way, and this book may simply contribute to the already over-high expectations with which Justin Welby starts his job.

Bond and Jesus

Not James, but Helen. Introductions to biblical and theological topics are ten a penny, but good introductory books are much harder to find. I’ll be commending Helen Bond’s The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed both to my students and to interested others as a really good introduction.

Bond covers the ground in an orderly and effective way, beginning with an helpful sketch of how Jesus studies developed, and an outline of the available sources for study. Like most historians, she concludes that the synoptic gospels provide the main sources for any reconstruction.

In the second part of the book she develops what she calls snapshots of Jesus, although each chapter actually offers a reflection on a different aspect of reconstructing the historical Jesus in broadly chronological order, after first having set out a summary of the historical context. She looks at birth narratives (which she finds to be largely theological creations), then at the current state of knowledge of the Galilean context, before beginning her reconstruction proper with John the Baptist.

She goes on to explore in successive chapters the message of Jesus, the healings and exorcisms, the friends and then the enemies of Jesus. An interlude chapter looks at the place and significance of Jerusalem before concluding chapters on the cross and finally the resurrection.

Throughout this journey, she shows herself a thoughtful and informative guide, always insisting on returning to the sources and the most probable facts that a contemporary historian can read out of them. She is sceptical of scholars who either indulge in too doctrinaire a methodology (such as an over-investment on criteria) or who try to select facts to fit a sociological model (eg peasant unrest). Crossan’s reconstruction is the one most often in her cross-hairs, and rightly so. 

She acknowledges the problem of clashing world views in trying to ascertain exactly what healings, exorcisms and powerful deeds Jesus carries out, although is clear that the historian needs to say Jesus was widely believed to be an effective and extraordinarily powerful wonderworker. As she notes, some people will draw the line in different places between the actual deeds Jesus did and the way in which they were magnified in the telling. I would, however, have liked to see more stress for the reader new to these questions on the nature of “miracle” as a post-Enlightenment category alien to the texts.

Unusually for a book on the historical Jesus, she finishes with the resurrection, insisting (I would say quite rightly) that the belief of the early Christians, that is the effects of whatever happened to Jesus after the crucifixion in vision, conviction or actuality need to be treated as historical phenomena in their own right. Without fully stating her own answer to that question, she points out how exceptional the category of resurrection applied to one man in the middle of history actually is.

Inevitably, there are quibbles. No two people’s reconstructions of the historical Jesus are the same. For example, I think the continuing career of the Baptist in the early part of Jesus ministry is one of the few instances when the historian should prefer John to the synoptics. Conversely, when the fourth gospel portrays a split between Jesus and his brothers, I am more inclined to see a later division between the Johannine and Jerusalem churches than a split between Jesus and his blood family. I have a larger disagreement about the Pharisees, but she ably represents a medium position between many conflicting views which is certainly plausible.

There are also two typos I noted which are unfortunate in a beginner’s text. The US  critic who gave far too much credence to the criterion of double dissimilarity was Norman Perrin, not the more recent and contemporary Nicholas. (p17). And Herod the Great’s dates as king are not 37-34 BCE, but 37-4 BCE. (p59).

However, quibbles and typos aside, I have to say this is a very readable and very reliable guide which will indeed help the perplexed and the beginner alike arrive at a fairly sure starting point for further exploration. It is as good a grounding in a controversial subject as I have come across, delivered in a remarkably succinct and lucid package.

I’m not sorry: reviewing the new apologetic

There seem to be as many books by Christians attacking Dawkins and Co as there are by Dawkins and Co attacking Christians. Many of the Christian books (from my limited sampling), however rigorous their argument, tend to lack the verve and sweep-you-along style that Dawkins demonstrates.

Until now, one of the few I’d come across that was a really enjoyable and swashbuckling rather than a dutiful read was Reason, Faith and Revolution by the marxist agnostic / atheist Terry Eagleton.

But it has been displaced in my affections as the book I’d most happily put into the hands of anyone wondering whether Dawkins was right by Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford. (The book also has a blog) This carries the self explanatory subtitle “why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense”.

Spufford openly declares this book is not apologetic: he’s not setting out to defend Christianity’s ideas, and he’s not sorry for being a Christian. Instead he wants to tell us how he experiences and reflects on life, the universe and everything in the light of the Jesus story as well as his own.

Most things that really matter in life: love, laughter, tears and pain don’t reduce to scientific explanations. Well, they do from one angle, but those explanations do no real justice to the experiences as lived, whether endured or enjoyed. And in this relatively short book, I think he succeeds delightfully at making any reader think again (however much or little they know) about what the possibility of God, especially as told in the stories of Jesus, really might bring to life as lived.

Some readers will hate it. I’m not quite sure whether conservative Christians who think the US Republican party is a moral beacon, happy-clappy types who think God is mainly interested in providing them with in-town parking facilities, or the smugly superior atheists denouncing superstition will hate it more, but I think you’ve got to love a book that starts out boldly by defining sin as “the human propensity to fuck things up”. 

Spufford writes superbly, with verve, wit and elegance, but more than that there is a sense of searing honesty in the content which is well served by the style. He’s well read, and obviously fiercely clever, but the learning is not put on parade, and you never feel you’re being made to do intellectual gymnastics. You’re just having a conversation with someone who’s had lots of interesting thoughts about things that matter, and talks about them very engagingly.

There’s more swearing in it than most people would expect to find in a book defending Christianity, but then there are more things to swear at in real life than most books defending Christianity like to admit. There’s also more poetry in its prose, with, I think, echoes of Eliot in particular (well, it is published by Faber) than anyone might expect. It is also ribbed through with Christian orthodoxy (for all those who don’t think the only test of orthodoxy is gay-bashing). 

Spufford knows when to be tentative: he leaves the disagreeing reader space to understand differently the experiences that point to transcendent mercy and grace. But he also knows when to be robust: take his dismissals of Lennon’s Imagine –  a “teased and coiffed nylon monument – the My Little Pony of philosophical statements”, or of the fad for early Gnostic texts, whose Jesus “has an inner circle you can be admitted to if you collect enough crisp packets”. Giving people the space to disagree is not the same as saying it doesn’t matter what you believe.

In short, this is a gem of a book, from which, I think, all of us can learn something, but which above all affirms the possibility that with God we can look our own and others human propensity to fuck things up full in the face and still hope and trust, in the words of Spufford’s conclusion, that “far more can be mended than you know.”

The end of it all – reading Sam Norton (part 3)

This is the third (and I think final) post in my conversation with Sam Norton‘s book Let us be Human. The first two parts are here and here.

His seventh chapter focuses on economic justice. A concern for the poor “is not a marginal part of Scripture. Something like 2,000 verses in the Bible refer to poverty” (p90). In his view, the key to the way the prophets in particular deal with issues of poverty and justice is that “what Scripture teaches us to reject, what it is very strongly against, is the idea that some people can get left behind.” (p91) On this basis he contrasts the closing of the coal mines in Britain and France: the former is, he says, much less biblically just.

For him unfettered capitalism can be characterised as the worship of Mammon, and a cancer in society. “We are suffering from an economic cancer, for what is cancer but growth in a part of an organism which takes no regard for the health of the whole? … As the economy is becoming more and more separate from the human concerns which are its base, the economy is becoming more and more distorted and damaging.” (p93) Possibly it is the analogy of cancer that causes him to illustrate this with the tobacco industry, maximising profits for shareholders involved active denial of and dislocation from the health problems for individuals and society.

He continues to work with the language of idolatry to critique culture. (I remain sceptical of the value of the metaphor shorn of any accompanying cultus.) He argues that the desire to control the earth’s fertility is an ongoing idolatry from the worship of Baal to the modification of crops industrialising growth and patenting nature. “The Christian calling is to learn how to garden: to live at peace with creation rather than seeking to exploit it.” (p101) A proper doctrine of creation means that “we are forbidden from extracting from the land the maximum amount that can be gained.” (p97).

He moves on in his next chapter to argue for a particular understanding of apocalyptic. First he follows MacIntyre, quoting at length his parallel between today and the ending of the Roman Empire, and the preservation of civilisation and faith through the monastic communities. “Many of those alive today will live through a collapse of our culture … It is our Christian duty to turn aside from shoring up the existing Imperium and concentrate on constructing local communities which can sustain civility and the intellectual and moral life through the collapse of our culture.” (p105)

Then he takes Tom Wright’s argument that biblical end-of-the-world language is a metaphor for drastic change and overwhelming social upheaval, rather than a literal expectation of a cosmic conflagration bringing the space-time universe to a premature heat-death. He rejects the popular “end of the world” narrative, influenced by a fundamentalist understanding of biblical apocalyptic. He believes this lies behind the readiness of people to tell or believe imminent doom stories which owe much, whether religious or secular to the same framework: God / nature will destroy a wicked world, but those who are righteous and / or prepared will be saved / will survive.

He sees this as badly and mistakenly dualistic between righteous and wicked, heaven and earth, now and the future, and believes that Jesus subverts this dualism. Jesus goes to sinners not the righteous; as God incarnate, he overcomes the split between heaven and earth; and his stories reveal a realised eschatology, living now as if the future is upon us. For Sam, in a vivid parable of driving a bus along a winding cliff road, realised eschatology means “ We have to pay very close attention to each moment in time because the judgement could be just around the corner.” (p110)

Christians are not apocalyticists: Christians preach the goodness of God and his benign love to humankind and creation. “We do not have to save the world, but we do have to live in the belief that it has been saved.” (p114). The church goes on doing the things that matter, nurturing wisdom, building communities to transmit it, knowing that the collapse of civilisation (which he sees as inevitable) is not the last word, but just a phase we’re going through.

Finally in a concluding chapter he takes the church to task for not doing what it’s supposed to. The church, he says, needs to confess its culpability in failing to teach the wisdom of Christ or share the vision of Christ which is true humanism. The “task of the religious teacher … is about changing the shape of the lived out faith in order that life itself is fruitful.” (p118) He sees a number of what he labels (again) as idolatries afflicting the church. The idolatry of control, attempting to protect the faith and the faithful by controlling them, appears to be a particularly Roman Catholic vice. This gets the blame for both the Great Schism and the Reformation, plus many a little split in many other denominations. Protestant churches (in particular) get it in the neck for the idolatry of private judgement: “especially in the United States, … ego and individual choice have been confused with the call of conscience. … I am going to club together with the like minded and we are going to have another church.” (pp120-1).

Then he turns to characterise some more traditional heresies or idolatries in the modern church: Donatism and the pure Church, Gnosticism and the turn from embodied living to the world of ideas, Docetism and the unlikeness of Christ. With these he also lumps dispensationalism – “ the very definition of a ‘doctrine of men’” (p123), and the rather vaguer turning of church into entertainment, and its harder-edged sibling the prosperity gospel. Both share the idea that God / church exists to do something for me. Then as mirror images of the reaction to modern scientism, he dismisses fundamentalism and liberalism, yoked together in symbiotic opposition, and to season this whole confection of heresies, he rejects the current obsession with sex and sexuality as the defining edge of the gospel.

Influenced by Hauerwas and others, he then holds up Amish and Mennonite examples of a counter-cultural practice of living the faith which is actually expected to make a difference to cultural structures. Describing the Amish as having “a healthy and ecologically balanced attitude to science and technology” (126) may not entirely convince those who see them as a rather quaint cultural anachronism that has failed to engage the modern world, far less critique it.

Running through this rollicking romp around the contemporary Church and the heresies which distress her, is a central conviction which revisits all his earlier arguments on real wisdom and the true social eucharistic body. He insists that “the practice, the actual living out of Christian faith, comes before proclamation … [it] … is what gives the words their weight” (129).

Again, I hope that is an accurate précis of an argument that sometimes feels a little breathless. I’m not at all sure how much of Sam’s analysis I accept, and I’m still pondering that. One of the problems is that it is a Western analysis. It would be hard to call the flourishing of the early Byzantine court and culture a Dark Ages following the sack of Rome. It would be equally hard to dismiss the way in which learning, preserved in significant ways by as much by Christian as Muslim (and in the early years more so) scribes, teachers and thinkers in the Caliphate, led to a flourishing of Arabic philosophy and science, with much greater continuity in classical civilisation than much early medieval Western thinking.

I am not myself persuaded by the collapsing civilisation model (and even less so by Wright’s idea that biblical apocalyptic is a metaphor for social, cultural and human upheaval). The model of Dark Ages, Middle Ages and then, according to taste and temporal location, Renaissance, Reformation or Enlightenment (all of which blend into feed a heady modern myth of superiority which Sam does a great deal to critique and undermine) does not satisfy me as a historical analysis. Good and bad are always intertwined, cultural trends are always waxing and waning. It is why, in the end, the Amish do not appeal to me as a model of counter-cultural community. The monasteries were not counter-cultural in the same way. They stand, it seems to me, much more in their culture even while offering some different models of living within it. That is why Charlemagne sends for Alcuin, in a way Obama wouldn’t send for an Amish advisor.

This is a book well-worth reading which has constantly provoked thought, even if sometimes in disagreement. I stand fully with Sam in the idea that we need to be thinking how church life needs to be in order to embody the practical wisdom of living eucharistically, of being stewards of a good but damaged creation God is saving. But in the end, perhaps I see the weeds and the wheat as much as an intellectual and cultural parable as a moral one, and I can’t quite bring myself, even as a metaphor for “a collapsing culture” to think in such dramatically apocalyptic imagery.

Time-travel and the trial of Jesus: can you help me find this short story?

Enough years ago to make my recollection extremely hazy and vague, I came across a short story in a collection. In this story, time-travel had become a popular option for study, research and holidays. Everyone engaged in such travel was well coached in the customs of the time and place they were visiting, given as much history as was known, and told how much they had to fit in with what had happened, rather than interfering with the time-stream.

The hero of the story wants to see for himself the events of Holy Week. He goes back to the time of Jesus’ trial – immersed in the known detail of the gospels and first-century historians so that he won’t make any mistakes.

He hears Pilate ask the crowd what should be done with Jesus. Knowing the script, he shouts with many others “Crucify him.” Around him some others look on stunned, saddened and aghast. He cries again with many others in the crowd: “Crucify him”, and then events play out as the gospels narrate.

Slowly, he realises that all those crying “Crucify” were, like him, travellers from the future, following the gospels’ script, whatever their faith, anxious not to upset this most crucial bit of history. But the locals, those Jews indigenous to the time-stream, are the quiet, the sad, the horrified.

Going back, determined not to change history, the time-travellers are the ones who made the history they visit what it was. Left to themselves, the Jewish people of the first century would never have had Jesus crucified.

That story is I think, a particularly provocative and subtle use of the SF staple of a temporal paradox. But I can’t remember what it’s called, who wrote it, or where I read it. Or even, indeed, if in my memory I have somewhat re-written it into something else.

But if you think you might know where I can find it, please leave a comment below.

Book Note: Craig Evans’ Jesus and his World

I’ve been reading Craig Evans’ Jesus and his World: the archaeological evidence. I shall confess up front that I wanted to like this more than I did.

On the positive side, this provides a very useful treatment of a good range of archaeological evidence touching on the world of Second Temple Judaism within which Jesus moved, and out of which the gospel tradition was shaped. Evans clearly knows the evidence, material and literary, and is able to summarise and correlate it informatively within a concise and accessible format. If he states something as a fact, you can be sure it is well sourced.

Chapters of the book cover Sepphoris (my photo shows an old Roman road there with cart tracks visible) and the religious milieu of Galilee; evidence for early synagogues; literacy in the first century; the priestly establishment and Temple practice; and finally burial traditions (along with a look at some of the controversial ossuaries). All these are useful subjects, and it’s good to have a compendium of the material relating to all of them between the covers of such a concise introduction,

I find myself, however, with more reservations than I expected. In stating facts, for example, he relays the consensus that literacy rates were “somewhere between 5 and 10 percent (and that most of the literate were male) with perhaps somewhat higher rates among the Jewish people.” He goes on to say “I do not dispute this conclusion.” (p66) However, he embeds this statement in a maximising discussion of the evidence for literacy which leaves the reader with a clear impression that really he thinks this is a terribly conservative estimate, even if he cannot prove it, especially as regards Jesus and his closest followers. He may be right to argue that case, but should be more overt about what he is doing. His argument is weakened by failing to emphasise any distinction between reading literacy and writing literacy.

Going back a step, I note the introduction dwells on how the strongest forms of OT minimalism were refuted by mention of the house of David in the Tel Dan inscription, and how the Qumran Scrolls demonstrated Jewish antecedents for using “Son of God” messianically against those who had claimed it a Greek concept. By selecting some cases where archaeology has successfully challenged dogmatic theories, and not those where it questions biblical narrative (Jericho, anyone?) it tends to set the book up as belonging to an “archaeology confirms the Bible” genre. That is not actually fair to all of what Evans writes later, nor to the complexity of the material.

The book does, further, maintain something of an apologetic feel. The chapter on the Jewishness of Galilee, for example, against earlier ideas of “Galilee of he Gentiles” presents a clear summary of the evidence, well marshalled to demonstrate the case. However, Evans spends far too much time deploying his case in refutation of Crossan’s preference for a Cynic peasant Jesus, implausible to any scholar who has never paid their dues to the Jesus Seminar. I suggest the case for Galilean Torah observance (at least on some key issues of diet and ritual washing) revealed by the archaeological evidence would be much better used to ask questions about Jesus’ own Torah observance.

Despite those reservations or cautions, I shall still be placing this on introductory reading lists. Evans is a good communicator who knows his subject, and I know of nothing else which summarise so much useful information so accessibly. I wish, however, he had been less concerned with apologetic questions, and more willing to open up something of the complexity of bringing the material and literary evidence into a creative relationship.

Book note: Ben Myers’ Christ the Stranger

I have been reading Ben Myers‘ exploration of Rowan Williams’ theology, Christ the Stranger. It is a book that repays slower reading, and I’ve been taking a chapter a day for Lent so far. As Ben points out, Rowan Williams’ thought “resembles nothing so much as the forty days of Lent, a theology of slowness and discipline, abstinence and privation” (p117). That makes this book particularly fitting for the time of year, although Myers is such a sympathetic interpreter that reading his book is a spiritual exercise — reading +Rowan as attentively and patiently as the archbishop writes.

Myers’ interweaves Williams’ biography and poetry throughout this exploration of his theology in ways which are helpful and illuminating, and remind the reader repeatedly that for Williams theology is a spiritual discipline above all else. If Williams is difficult to read (and he often is), it is because God is difficult to speak of, and our words (as T S Eliot says) “slip, slide, decay with imprecision … will not stay still”. Williams stretches language to try to encompass that, probably more successfully as a poet than a prose stylist. Myers is sympathetic but critical, and manages to help the archbishop speak more clearly than he sometimes writes.

One of the few missing features – perhaps weaknesses – of the book is a lack of notice that +Rowan usually speaks far more clearly than he writes. Williams’ writing can often seem a difficult, dry, protracted and sometimes depressing exercise in spiritual renunciation of the fantasies of the heart and mind. By contrast his presence in person is attentive, humorous and kind. There is a self-forgetfulness (literally a forgetfulness of self) to the archbishop that is very attractive, and it presents as a joyful counterpoint to the willed self-renunciation of his theology. The book, by its concentration on the theology, gives Williams a dourness that belies the man in person.

That is a minor cavil. This book opens up for the reader what is often difficult theology, and puts it in its context with verve, clarity and intellectual and spiritual depth. Along the way, although this is not Myers’ overt intention, it helps explain why +Rowan is the kind of archbishop he is, and how what looks to some like an inability to give a lead is a principled theological commitment to a very particular but costly understanding of the Trinity and how we come through the crucified and risen Christ to share in God’s truth and love.

The archbishop has found himself a very able and illuminating interpreter here, who presents his theology as a profound encounter with God, an ever deepening exploration of truth, and an ongoing attempt to renounce the temptations of the heart’s’ self deceiving fantasies. This is a book worth reading, and slowly.

Pedagogy of the Bible: a review and reflection

I’ve been reading Dale Martin’s Pedagogy of the Bible. Sometime last month I vaguely promised Chris Tilling I would blog about it. So here’s the post kicking off my return to WordPress, and what I hope will be more regular blogging after my desultory and rather depressed recent blog history.

Martin (for those who don’t know) is an excellent and exciting NT scholar teaching at Yale, whose work of detailed historical investigation is influenced by queer and reader response hermeneutics. He bases this book on the results of an informal and personal investigation he undertook into seminary Bible teaching, and offers some programmatic reflections.

The seminaries / theological schools he selected for his sample of included conservative and liberal ones. Among his observations about them, the key one is that the historical-critical method rules. Interestingly, given the history of scholarship, he felt it was held to more tightly in conservative evangelical circles: “The more “liberal” schools tended to teach other approaches in addition to historical criticism—though admittedly more likely feminist, literary or perspectival approaches than thorough reader-response, deconstruction or even allegory.” (p12). Even in those schools, though, there seemed to be little doubt that the historical-critical method was king.

There is at least one interesting side-effect to this. Martin observed that this created a “gate-keeper” effect — not so much against cultural minorities (although that is also one possible criticism as the recent spat over Larry Hurtado’s remarks about biblical language expertise demonstrated) but within the faculty. The Scripture scholars were the priests of the one true method, and perceived as exercising a censoring role on other discipline’s ways of using Scripture in practical theology. One remark he quotes is “the stress, for example, on reading the Hebrew Bible as Jewish texts first and foremost leaves them with the impression that reading them as Christian texts is inappropriate” (p16 — a comment that needs some teasing out!). Another professor, introducing the use of Scripture in pastoral care was told by student well-drilled by their historically critical teachers “You can’t read the Bible like that!” (p17).

Martin’s broad response is that students need to be taught critical theory, and the array of questions people ask about the nature of a text, how it is read and how and where meaning is created or communicated. Students and teachers alike are in his view often unsophisticated and uninformed about the theory of interpretation. This means exposure to literary and post-modern criticism (chapter 2), but it also means a good dose of reception history and seeing the ways in which the premodern generations of Christians read these same texts and learning from them that allegorical and other readings could be disciplined and sophisticated (chapter 3). He follows this up with asking for more theological reflection on the nature of scripture and the models with which we approach it (chapter 4).

Arguing for the existence of multiple methods and varied readings held side by side, he ponders how we might then ask what bad Christian theological interpretations might be of any particular text and conversely what “truly Christian” ones might be (p90). His views on a plurality of interpretations held together in the community of faith draws on AKM Adam’s Faithful Interpretation .

Finally, he dreams of a Scripture-centred curriculum that is taught by an interdisciplinary team which locates the texts and their readings within the history of their readings in doctrine, spirituality, art, pastoral and practical theology and so on, as well as within the contexts within which they were written and edited. So the historical-critical method becomes one tool among many equally valid readings, and if there is a dominant framework it is not the text in the past, but the text in the present, and provided by a form of lectio divina in a worshipping community.

The integration of curricular content and varied interpretative methods, and the suggestion of a framework of communal lectio divina quite appeal to me. However, I can’t quite make up my mind what I think of the proposals about dethroning the historical critical method. I think some people will find them intensely threatening, especially those who have invested both their academic lives in the method they teach, as well as their souls in the conviction that the text as written in its original context is the authoritative basis for interpreting, proclaiming and obeying the voice of God through that original meaning.

I have some sympathy, myself, with both views. I think it’s far too easy for people to say “the Bible says …” as though that absolved them from their own intellectual and moral responsibility for their reading, and as though the text was simply a discrete container of meaning independent of the prejudices, presuppositions and community traditions with which the reader approaches it. On the other hand (and despite the way the canon of Scripture sometimes looks as if it were conceived to be a poster child for Derridan deconstruction) I am not convinced by the idea of giving privilege to writing rather than speech in interpretation.

Yes, the texts may now exist side by side in a complex conversation, but they were once specific intentional utterances and communications (however edited and collected into remediated communications) in original and often later forms. At its best, historical criticism insists on trying to reconstruct something of the voices of the “author” and the “audience” in a way which gives their conversation (at least the author’s one-sided contribution to it) a generative role for our conversation.

Authorial intention is a very tricky, even “unorthodox”, concept, and of course, never more than an interpretation, reconstruction or implication in itself. Nonetheless, I believe some kind of chastened notion of it is needed to honour the text as communication from someone in some place at some time (you can make those plurals as you wish) and not just communications to someone. Yes, many other readings need to sit at the same table, but why should the author not be allowed a chance, in however a halting, barely audible or stuttering voice, to say: “But what I think I meant was …”?

I don’t think we can ever go back behind the time when we became aware that the past was a foreign country where they did things differently. Historical relativism is perhaps the ultimate bequest of modernity, and all the reception history in the world combined with all the latest reader-response theories won’t make us premodern again.