Category: Blog

History and Hermeneutics is the latest volume from the ever-excellent Murray Rae. In it Murray shows how unnecessary the divorce of the bible from the church was; each stage of the separation was intellectually corrupt, but how when the gospel is allowed to shape our understanding of history, Christian doctrine retrieves its proper apostolic role in teaching the Church how to see and hear Scripture as God’s gracious witness to the church and the world. Here is T & T Clark’s description of his latest book:

History and Hermeneutics addresses the relation between historiography and hermeneutics during the past three hundred years of western thought, traces its genealogy from classical Greek thought, and argues that the practice of contemporary biblical hermeneutics has been radically impaired by a widespread allegiance to a series of problematic assumptions about history. The book offers a theological account of what history is, centred on the categories of creation and divine promise, and proposes that it is within this theological conception of history that the Bible may be understood on its own terms.

The book is both critical and constructive, identifying problems in hermeneutics and proposing a way forward. The ecclesial reading of Scripture and the value of tradition are rehabilitated and an account is given of how we may properly ask the question, ‘what really happened?’

1. History and History Writing;
2. Creation and Promise;
3. Resurrection – The Centre and End of History;
4. Seeing What Really Happened;
5. Hearing What Really Happened;
6. The Ecclesial Reading of Scripture;
7. Re-Reading the Text.

This is Murray’s version of the famous ‘Reason and Revelation’ course at Kings College London, which was handed down, father to son, from Gunton to Schwöbel to Torrance to Rae, some of which became The Practice of Theology (which is also due a sequel). Rumour says that Murray was intending to introduce a new course on theological hermeneutics – which impertinently suggested that the Christian church has a claim on the bible, and thus that the bible is not solely a cat litter tray for academics. Now back in NZ, Murray is part of the team launching the Journal for Theological Interpretation

The lovely people at Fulcum seem to have put me onto their leadership team. Fulcum â?? â??Renewing the Evangelical Centreâ?? â?? aims to â??represent the centre ground of evangelical Anglicanism in the church and in wider societyâ??. It has an annual conference, and a huge website which offers a news and comment service, publishes essays and articles, and has a very lively forum in which people talk about what it is to be evangelical and Anglican, and a host of more general theological issues. You can read about Fulcrumâ??s founding and where it fits in the English Evangelical scene. You should go and have a look.

I donâ??t think the management at Fulcrum appreciate how slow a writer I am, and how long readers of this blog have to wait for each new, though well-worn, observation to appear from the tired brain of Knight.

It will be a big treat me to be in the evangelical centre. I don’t think I have ever got into the centre before, and I am looking forward to it. I am not sure the centre is the only place to be, though. Might not the edge, or even right outside, be the proper place for me?

Being an evangelical means you are in a good company. But sometimes the evangelical, a disciple, is on their own, pitched not only against the world, but against other Christians, even sometimes against â??the Evangelicals.â?? Sometimes the centre becomes vanishingly small and the Christian has no place to stand. Then you may experience some discomfort, as they say.

Readers of this blog will know that Christ is never without his people, and that christology therefore always involves us in ecclesiology, and vice versa, so that evangelical implies catholic, and catholic implies evangelical. Since you lot know all this, I will try out one or two things here, just between ourselves, before displaying them there on Fulcrum for all the world to see. Better I get into trouble with you than with them because the English are a bit â?¦ well, you know.

And I hope to achieve a little synergy by also talking about the recent work of the greatest living British theologian. Iâ??ll tell you who that is â?? very shortly.

Your correspondent is just back just back from the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics annual conference in Oxford. This is usually a sleepy English affair, but this year the SSCE held a joint conference with the Europe-wide Societas Ethica on ‘Political Ethics and International Order’.

But, oh dear, what happened to Christian ethics, Christian theological ethics? I heard studies on international affairs, and calls for more studies of international affairs.

But what we want is surely not more studies in the sense of more information, for there is already a vast mud-slide of scholarship from the international relations departments of universities. We want to learn how to judge all this scholarship of international political relations, don’t we? We want to learn our own (Christian) tradition well enough to be able to comment intelligently – theologically – on all this information, so we can offer more than a crock of platitudes on international political affairs.

Christian ethics seems to me to be a great righteous clucking that occurs whenever nice people get together to be enraged because other people are not nice.

What can save Christian ethics from Pelagianism is gratitude to God, expressed in worship of God (theology as doxology) and discussion of the cost to the Christian community of saying, and in its own community life showing, what is the cost of the peace and justice we commend, nationally and internationally.

So I was hoping to learn something about the distinctive voice of the Christian community and its witness to the great geo-political circus, by pointing towards an alternative, counter-cultural, way of life. I wanted to hear a little about the cost of this witness, because this witness is not always popular, and some times and places it is even opposed. I think the best way to talk about international politics is to talk about how churches exchange information and practices across continents and cultures. By this exchange the churches, and their discourse on justice and forgiveness, sustain and support the rule of law, pioneering the way for other international institutions, legal frameworks, courts of justice and commissions of peace and reconciliation. In this way churches support any institution anywhere (not just states) which wants to provide justice and security for their citizens.

Christians can point out the social and environmental costs of fossil fuel industries in places where the state is too weak to protect its own citizens from the multinationals intent on serving my demand for cheap fuel. They can point out where a severe labour discipline imposed by some regimes on their workers in order to satisfy my demand for cheap goods. They can even drawn attention to the violence that some states mete out on those Christian leaders that become too articulate on such subjects. And they can remember those Christian leaders in their prayer and vigils. They can point out the temptations for states (and not only other people’s states) to become kleptocracies, robber-gangs (I was listening to Michael Northcott and Luke Bretherton at this point. You see, I do pay attention).

I wanted to hear how the Christian community can explain to our (Western) societies how to receive the challenge and rebuke of international legal bodies. Are we are aiding the illegal detention of suspects without trial, the import of war material into conflict zones, supporting Israel’s occupation of territory that is not its own, in defiance of UN resolutions? (I wish the Church in the UK was more in touch with the Church in the Middle East – Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine. I have been meaning to find links from this blog to churches in Lebanon.) You see, I don’t want to hear about what other people should do, without learning the cost to ourselves of our political-ethical prescriptions, and understanding that the Christians bear these costs gladly – because they know that they are really borne by their Lord. That is how Christian politics begins.

Bonhoeffer got a regular mention, but there was no interaction with the very considerable Catholic and Papal contribution to thinking on international relations, all of it very accessible and better than any of the papers I heard at this conference.

But the company was good and Oxford, in the sunshine, is still beguiling…

In the Oxford University Press Economics catalogue I found Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence. His opening sentence: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’ Offer ‘critiques’ the ‘assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.’ Here is OUP’s blurb for the book:

Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown, addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic insecurity, and declining trust.

Avner Offer argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in these societies, because they present an environment in which consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social commitment is undermined by the flow of novelty. His approach draws on economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.

Consistent choices are difficult to achieve, eh? Freedom of choice does not maximise individual and social well-being, eh? The entire conceptual basis of the last two hundred years of this ‘science’ of economics turns out to be faulty, eh?

Economics is a blessed naivety. It is as though Aquinas and a long tradition of Christian political and ethical thought had never been, as though before utilitarianism and the marginal revolution there was… just nothing at all. Social scientists are people without memory or historical awareness. I thought I would share my amazement with you.

I am so sure that Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence is well worth a read that I have put it on my Amazon wish list. (But remember, this is just a wish list, and the self control that keeps my wishes just wishes makes me at least as happy as acquisition of these titles).

Alban Books are Erdmanns’ UK and European distributors. We have made friends already – our first date is to be the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics (SSCE) conference in Oxford 23-27th of August. See you at the book stall.

We modern ethicists like to make out that we stand above all traditions and religions equally. We find each religion a sorry falling away from the truth of ‘religion as such’, which we call ethics, and by which we mean being ‘reasonable’ – you know, like us.

The greater part of our product, ‘ethics’, consists in identifying the particular practices that mark out some particular community, and belittling it, marginalising it, making the majority indifferent to it or resentful of it, until we can get rid of it by legislation. Our project – ethics – means standardisation or homogenization. But our levelling programme has no level at which it decides that it has been successful and switches itself off. It is a neurotic tic, a witch-hunt, in which those who pointed fingers will one day be under accusation themselves.

Dear I.B.Tauris publishers

You have sent me your catalogue, offering amongst many things, ‘A Modern Introduction to Theology: New Questions for Old Beliefs’. Your blurb says:

Most existing undergraduate textbooks begin from basically traditional positions on the bible, doctrine, authority, interpretation, and God. It is very difficult to find a satisfactory survey of what theology is about, and how it has developed historically, unless one shares the assumption that these traditional positions are normative. It is hardly surprising that people many people from outside the theological guild, or the Church, dismiss theology as anachronistic and self-absorbed discipline of little relevance to modern life. What makes this book singularly important and uniquely different is that it has a completely new starting point. The author contends that traditional Christian theology must extensively overhaul many of its theses because of a multitude of modern social, historical, and intellectual revolutions. … A Modern Introduction to Theology moves a tired and increasing incoherent discipline in genuinely fresh and exciting directions.

Incoherent? There is certainly something incoherent here, most obviously your surprise that theology textbooks talk about God. Your blurb is surprised that ‘most existing undergraduate textbooks begin from basically traditional positions on the bible, doctrine, authority, interpretation, and God.’ If textbooks begin from basically new positions, they simply cannot be textbooks. If you find theology ‘anachronistic’ – we hear your hostility – do not read it or publish it. Publish something else that you do enjoy instead.

These traditional positions are normative – Thanks be to God. That means that they are binding on us, so you and I cannot change them. That is what is meant by dogma, the summaries of the teaching of the Church, repeated in the creeds. To be surprised that traditional positions are normative is as vain at protesting that we are ‘still’ playing football according to the old dogma of two teams, two goals, one football.

If you find it unacceptable that Christian dogma does not change, you are free to give up your interest in Christianity. Why not find another religion? Can’t find one to your taste? Make one up. But when you do, don’t call it Christianity.

When I look at you I see people I am not inclined to like. In the same way I did not think much of Christ. I thought Christ was irrelevant, impotent, a matter for others. I did not recognise him for who he is.

Just as I did not recognise Christ, so I do not recognise you. I thought you were incompetent and so I avoided you. But now I understand that you are given to me and set before me by Christ. You are the people he has chosen, for me now. In order to receive him I have to receive you and I cannot have him without taking you – you are him to me. There is no way to Christ for me except through the people I want to avoid. Now, teeth still gritted, I have to open up to you, pass on to you the things given to me, love and trust you, even though I know that that trust will be betrayed many times before it is vindicated. But for the first time you are becoming visible to me as you will be.

This love also obliges me to tell you what a way you have to go. If I love you, I have to correct you, and I have to put with the dislike, bafflement and hurt that that brings, understanding that this is the very opprobrium that Christ carries for me. So let us no longer look at the Church and see only a corrupt, despicable institution, or a hierarchy, separable from Jesus. When we do not see that is our sin, made visible there on the cross, it remains our sin. When we do see that it is our sin that he is carrying there, then it is no longer our sin, for he has really taken it away from us. Jesus is Christ – anointed – with his whole people, among them the people in church and classroom whom we may no longer regard as inadequate, but in reconciliation and union with whom we are being made perfect.

My picture shows the Orthodox are doing all the talking and the Anglicans all the listening.

Let me remind you of the theologians whose work I have been posting (find them in the ‘Contemporaries’ section) –

Christopher Seitz, Ephraim Radner, Oliver O’Donovan, Augustine DiNoia, R.R. Reno, Reinhard Hütter, Douglas Farrow, Oswald Bayer, Gavin D’Costa, Stephen Long, TF Torrance, along with the others whose books are displayed in the ads on this blog – Robert Wilken, Robert Jenson and John Webster.

People always ask about books to read, and in the case of diploma students and undergraduates just starting out on this subject I don’t know what to suggest. I have make lists of books for students and lost them again. You can see my latest efforts to compile book lists on my Amazon page – please make suggestions, or alternative lists. Anybody can get an Amazon page, by the way, just by posting a book review.

But after teaching Anglican ordinands – always the most lost on the subject of the Christian faith – it occurred to me that there are no good introductions to Christian theology. So I have decided to write one – it is called The Apprenticeship. I did promise you that I would post pieces for this as I went along, and I really must make more effort on this.

Coming up on the DK blog:

Servais Pinckaers, George Weigel, Benedict XVI and the whole mountain of John Paul II’s papal teaching – Fides et Ratio, Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Ut Unum Sint. And we should have a look at the Catechism and Compendium. You are not Catholic? Neither am I, but when your neighbour comes up with a good idea, don’t you ‘borrow’ it?

More on the issues of Christology, sacrifice, atonement, Israel and the Old Testament, supersessionism, history and modernity – and on why I wrote The Eschatological Economy.

Colin Gunton

Matthew Baker on reasonable worship and Christ our great high priest (Matthew has very kindly started to take my education in hand. Solly and Alan Brown will be relieved).

And there will be more from the Anglicans, particular from Ephraim Radner and the Anglican Communion Institute.

James Merrik provides much more intelligent comment on the Anglican crisis than I can, while the Anglican Communion website formally and Kendall Harmon at Titus 1.9 conveniently channels the torrent of statements that issue from all parts of the Communion.

Dear Paul

Your Luther chapter is wonderful. It is particularly wonderful when you get out of the secondary lit and into John and the Catechism. What a star Luther is. I think there is more you could quickly pick up from Jenson on Luther speech-act approach to the theology of the Word – Jenson ST2 295 ‘According to Luther the soul becomes what it hearkens to. Luther : ‘Do not be surprised that I said we must become the Word.’ The old notion was that the mind is formed by what it sees. Luther makes the mind to be formed instead by what it hears.’

But there is something much more important to say at this juncture. You are nearly out of time. If you do not submit in time those years you spent with us in London and in Germany, and the hope and effort of Colin will have been for nothing. You may not feel this as a act of judgment – and of self-harm – now, but in the long term you will. You cant help anybody outside the immediate parish without this doctorate, so if you don’t make a great lunge for it right now, you will be confining yourself to the parish for the next thirty years, unable to help the rest of us.

You have no time for anything new. So don’t bother with a final Gunton chapter. Gunton is probably everywhere in this thesis. You must now very speedily and drastically hack everything down into a smooth product. It is great to have a sense of your authorial voice, but not your talking voice – don’t be chatty, get more terse. You must understand that you now have to produce a thesis-lite. You are writing for just two people who will give it a rushed reading on the train to your viva, have a bad conscience about it, and who only want to be confident that you are competent (not be troubled by having to judge whether you are brilliant or wayward). Safety first. Throw away everything that you cannot instantly clarify. None of it will be lost and whatever you throw away now can be re-included and developed later. You must finish this by kissing your summer goodbye, closing the door on the church and the family and accelerating away to the end of this thesis. You are good at winging it. Do so now. You should email every chapter at the end of every week between now and September – to Lincoln or Chris or me or anyone – just to give yourself the sense of urgency and progress you need. Don’t feel detached from the rest of us – we all feel this urgency in a much more hostile environment, and not having you around doesn’t make it any easier. I hope you will send me frequent new instalments, starting with conclusion and introduction.

Your server has bounced this mail back six times now, so I’ll post it here and hope you find it.

Good luck

DK