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.

The Eucharist makes the Church: reading Sam Norton (Pt. 2)

Last week I posted the first part of my conversation with Sam Norton’s book Let us be Human . Today I want to take a look at the two chapters which begin the second part of the book. In chapters 5 The New Covenant and 6 Hocus Pocus, Sam outlines his argument that the church needs to rediscover how to be truly eucharistic.

There are some key planks he lays down in chapter 5 for the church to stand on. Worship has to be central to how the church orientates itself, and truly Christian worship discloses the nature of reality, and is the sine qua non of actually forming disciples by replacing the idolatries we are exposed to all around us by the worship of the one true God. The Eucharist – fulfilling the Passover and Temple rituals of the first covenant – displays Christianity as a praxis, of living by the self-giving of God in Jesus, of being the body of Christ, reconciled to God, liberated by God, and now trying to live lives which put reconciliation and liberation into practice all around us.

It is the Eucharist that empowers the prophetic witness of a church community; it is the Eucharist that empowers the Church to stand out against the world; it is the Eucharist that empowers the Church to be in the world but not of the world. (p 69)

For Sam, one of the important things is that the Eucharist eludes full understanding or complete rational explication. As for the followers who turned away in St John’s bread of life discourse because the teaching was too hard for them, so a (excuse the phrase) full-blooded belief in the Eucharist remains a scandal today. The Eucharist demands that the affective and relational are equal partners with the rational in doing theology, and a eucharistic Church will never give the academy control of theology, but insist its home is in the worshipping community. This is where the church learns how to confront the world’s “poisonous asophism” (p 74).

He then proceeds to diagnose where in his view the church’s eucharistic understanding has gone wrong. I presume that in placing the blame on Duns Scotus and William of Ockham he is at least influenced by the Radical Orthodoxy movement, but the catastrophe for him has two significant aspects. The first is that theology begins its long journey out of the cloister and into the academy, until we reach what he sees as today’s parlous state that,

the way in which clergy are trained in the Church of England (and also in many other denominations) is through the academic study of texts. This is why faith and spirituality in the Church of England has withered, and why the Church is dying (p77 – his italics).

For him the feast of Corpus Christi (and its accompanying “notorious doctrine of transubstantiation” – p80) represents all that went wrong with the patristic tradition of eucharistic celebration in the high Middle Ages. It swaps round) the mystical body (Eucharistic action) and the true body (the church) of Christ, so that the Church becomes a static mystical body, the host becomes the true body and the eucharistic action becomes a spectator sport. It turns the Eucharist from a communal celebration into a magical action.

“Now there is a profound continuity in the intellectual expression of magic and the intellectual expression of science. Both are rooted in a desire for intellectual dominance over the creation, and the spiritual roots of both involve not surrendering to the Creator.” (p81)

Here (in a statement many will have serious issues with) the separation of church and academy, the rise of a rationalist science divorced from human emotional life, and the alteration of the Eucharist from the energy of a living community to a vehicle for priestly control are all interlinked as a fall from patristic grace to today’s multiple divorce of that which God, patristic theology and monastic community had joined together.

I hope that represents a fair summary of the main thrust of his argument. And I have to say that I would also want to argue like him for a church whose eucharistic practice is central, definitive and holistic. Similarly I agree wholeheartedly with his vision for unifying the affective, the rational and the relational in what is (I think we would both say) essentially a renewed Christian humanism. And I have found it fascinating to follow the paths he goes down in exploring these key goals.

At the same time, it was in these two chapters that I most found myself missing even a light academic apparatus. I wanted to know sometimes if my argument was with Sam or his sources. For example, although I’ve a fairly limited acquaintance with the discipline of systematics, I’m fairly sure de Lubac, who as far as I could see didn’t even get a name check, is the originator of the key saying Sam quotes repeatedly that “The Eucharist makes the Church.” I think it is his summary of patristic theology, and not actually a quote from any of the fathers. Likewise, it is de Lubac, I believe, who originated the analysis that for the Fathers the Church was the true body of Christ, and the Eucharist his mystical body, whereas in the Middle Ages these were swapped over. Of course, as a fairly traditional Catholic, de Lubac is hardly likely to agree with Sam that this analysis shows how awful a doctrine transubstantiation is!

I will largely pass over the continuing influence (as I think) of Margaret Barker, but it seems to me that just because images of Passover, the Day of Atonement, and possibly the mercy seat, can be found as metaphors in the NT for the event of Calvary, that does not mean they have agglutinated into a single sacrificial blend which can be read into an early Jewish Christian understanding of the Eucharist.

However, I must point out against the argument on p68, that there are several uses of the word anamnesis in the Bible: apart from the Pauline usage (1 Cor 11:24) echoing or being echoed by the Jesus tradition as given in Luke 22:19, it is used rather differently in the NT in Hebrews 10:3. In the Greek Bible it is used in Lev 24:7, Num 10:10, the title lines of Psalms 37 and 69, and in Wisdom 16:6. That usage does not on its own justify including the idea of “re-enactment” within the core meaning of the word.

I don’t know if I am right to detect the influence of Radical Orthodoxy on Sam’s analysis of where it all started to go wrong with Duns Scotus, compared to Aquinas “creative and faithful” thinking (p76). But an unwary reader could go away not realising that not only did the big bad feast of Corpus Christi antedate Duns Scotus’ theology, but Aquinas made some significant contributions to the liturgy of Corpus Christi, including the great hymns Pange Lingua and Verbum Supernum.

It’s not just that I doubt Sam’s analysis of the feast: if I remember rightly (I don’t have a copy to hand) John Bossy’s admittedly Catholic revisionist history Christianity in the West 1400-1700 makes a convincing case for both the Eucharist and the Corpus Christi “carnival” procession being a communal celebration of the social body as constituted by Christ. More to the point, one of my real arguments with Radical Orthodoxy is the idea that there is a moment of “intellectual fall” which all the ills of theological flesh are heir to. I think it smacks of romantic “golden age” utopianism, and prevents a more sober analysis which incorporates gains as well as losses and is ready to live with the imperfectability of life this side of the eschaton.

It’s in that vein that I want to enter a plea for a greater overt recognition of the achievements of the Western intellectual tradition alongside its faults. Indeed, Sam’s book is situated in this tradition of analysis, and one of the strengths of this tradition is that it so often forms people who can generate some powerful self-aware critiques of what has shaped them. Indeed, the debt this book owes to the modernist paradigm is nowhere more ironically self-evident than in a statement near the end of the sixth chapter:

The church has a much better sense of history now. In particular, it has a much better sense of what scripture teaches than at any time since the Apostles. We have a much better understanding of the texts and what the New Testament is teaching than the Reformers did, for example. … we can go right back, ad fontes, to the source and spring (p86)

It is rather astonishing to find such an example of high modernist confidence towards the close of a passionate argument against the imperialism of reason at the expense of lived out and affective faith, and against the dominance of the academy over theology at the expense of its roots in ecclesial practice.

I agree with Sam entirely that theology finds both its fount and ultimate horizon in the blend of prayer and practice which spring together from eucharistic community. But it seems to me that last quotation illustrates precisely how much more we need to integrate the Western tradition of intellectual reason within it as an ally and not an enemy. After all, as Sam argues, in the Eucharistic body we practice reconciliation.

Let us be Human: Sam Norton’s vision for today’s church (1)

First of all I’d like to thank Sam Norton very much for sending me a copy of his book Let us be Human. It has been provoking me to much thought, which I’m sure he’ll be glad to know. Not all those thoughts are necessarily ones of which he would approve!

The first thing that strikes me, I think by design, is that this is intended as a prophetic book: a word to today’s church summoning it to change, so that how it lives its life and teaches God’s word is truly a gospel – good news – for a world in one hell of a predicament. Sam begins by drawing some significant inspiration from Jeremiah, although I’m sure he hopes for better reviews than the prophet. In what I say I shall necessarily be selective, since in many respects, to grasp the whole of Sam’s argument, you need to read the whole of his book. I hope, if I have accidentally misrepresented his thinking, he will pop up in the comments to correct my misunderstanding.

At first I thought the book took something from the template of a traditional evangelistic sermon. Its first half is entitled “When we were still far off”, and its second “You met us in your Son” – borrowing the language of David Frost’s ASB (and now Common Worship) post-communion prayer based on the parable of the Prodigal Son. And indeed it seems to start off with Sam trying to persuade us how much and in which ways the world is in dire straits and in need of salvation so that we might be receptive to his answers. It’s not quite that simple, since the proclamation of judgement persists into the second half of the book in more complex ways, and the question of what salvation looks like wanders in and out of the argument. However, the proclamation of wrath, while also analysing today’s church and society does seem to be preparing the reader to receive the gospel according to Sam.

In this post I shall try to deal with part one, in a subsequent post with the eucharistic chapters which begin part two, and then probably a third part dealing with Sam’s vision for renewing the earth and the human – and eucharistic – community. Although this is a thin book in terms of page numbers, there’s a lot in it in terms of ideas and passion.

Here, then, I shall do my best to summarise Sam’s initial overview of the human predicament. Predicament is his deliberately chosen way of expressing it. It is not a problem to be solved by human ingenuity, but a predicament from which we need rescuing.

That predicament is well illustrated in his view by (the somewhat controverted concept of) Peak Oil (chapter 1), particularly as a very good example of understanding our life as lived with finite resources in the face of exponential population growth (chapter 2). This latter is considered mainly as an economic and migratory crisis, not as potential for future military conflict. The various strategies of an ostrich, a Mr Micawber or even a (wonderful image of Douglas Adams) a Someone Else’s Problem field, which are among the most commonly adopted are labelled bluntly by Sam as anti-Christian. I did find myself wondering whether there was room for a broader range of issues here. Peak Oil (however much it is an area where Sam is something of an expert) doesn’t seem to me to be so unassailable as to be anything other than a useful illustration of finite resources. There may be other economic questions which might cumulatively support his thesis better. The more wide-ranging the illustrations the stronger (but also more nuanced) the case might become.

He then takes his analysis further using both Alasdair MacIntyre and an author I’ve not come across – Antonio Damasio – to argue (in his own coinage) that we have become an “asophic society” (Chapter 3) lacking in practical and ethical wisdom. He likes the Aristotelian term phronesis to describe this capacity for wise practical judgement (p44). Following Damasio he argues that emotions are an essential component of the processes “by which we evaluate information and make decisions.” (p43) He further suggests that whilst science needs to use what he calls (in another neologism) an “apathistic stance” – putting desire aside so as to investigate the world as it is – as a tool, it has in actuality made the split between emotion and reason an end in itself. “True wisdom depends upon a reintegration of our emotional lives and our rational intellect” (p45) “Science has nothing to say about wisdom.” (p47) You will see that he does not shy away from controversial statements, and like many a prophet before him believes that you can’t nuance wrath or judgement!  

This theme – and especially the sundering of rational and emotional decision making – will return again later. Unfortunately so does the vocabulary of asophic, anti-phronetic, and apathistic society, and in this reader’s opinion, at least, the neologisms irritate. Broadly I am in sympathy with it, although I think that some of the criticisms he makes of science are really of technology, and he is in danger of perpetuating a divide between intellectual and emotional knowing when he dismisses science quite so roundly. I found myself wondering whether a more positive appraisal of the patristic treatment of apatheia as a spiritual virtue might have allowed a more rounded appreciation of science’s “apathistic” methodology. The indivisible unity of truth – which seems an essential affirmation about the relation of God and the world – points to the integration of scientific enquiry and human emotion within in a more relational epistemology.

In the following chapter Sam tries quite hard (and bravely) to maintain and reinterpret the unfashionable concept of “wrath” for today, exploring and contrasting pagan and Christian ideas of sacrifice, and arguing passionately for reframing a hierarchy of values with the concept of idolatry – “Idolatry occurs when we make something more important than it really is.” (p49) He is intriguing where he uses Rene Girard and his disciple James Alison to develop a powerful argument about scapegoating as a real human and modern problem. In my view he rather undermines the power of that argument by following the idiosyncrasies of Margaret Barker’s reconstruction of Temple ritual and theology, the evidence for which seems to me to lie mainly in her imagination.

Modern society, and much of the modern church, is (he claims) fundamentally idolatrous in its values, and destructively dehumanising in its behaviour towards both other people and the created order. As such it lies under the wrath of God, since to continue in such idolatry and dehumanisation carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Only the alternative vision of humanity, given, experienced and enabled through Jesus of Nazareth provides the way out of this predicament.

He makes the claim that “This is what Scripture sees as the pagan understanding of sacrifice: there is an angry god who has been offended and needs to be appeased” (p52) The wrath he is talking about is much more a “natural” consequence of living ethically and practically out of sync with reality (going against the natural order (p57), and it includes the way we treat one another as scapegoats and sacrifices, rather than as human brothers and sisters.

This analysis begs some mighty big questions about the treatment of sacrifice in scripture and Christian tradition, and perhaps gives a Girardian understanding of atonement the same dominance that evangelicals tend to award to penal substitution (which presumably also comes under Sam’s strictures of “pagan” understandings). It sits oddly with his attempts to preserve the concept of wrath as impersonal and natural consequence, whereas, however much one might disagree with it, penal substitution in many evangelical versions, or at least its Anselmian satisfaction precursor, is relational and personal in both the exercise of judgement and salvation from it.

Sam’s analysis in this opening part of his book is always provocative and challenging, and makes this reader think very hard not only about contemporary cultural and economic landscape, but about his own complicity in it. Much of the writing does show some of its origins in talks, and there are plenty of places where one feels it’s half of a discussion missing its Q & A session. It’s quite possible that some of my pushing back is simply trying to supply my own Q & A session for his talks, or it may just be a way of resisting some of his challenges! Nonetheless (and this will emerge again in my next post, I think) I am more positive about the modern world and the gains of the so-called Enlightenment than he is, more sceptical of grand narratives and apocalyptic visions, and perhaps more resistant to the prophetic vocation.

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.