Category: Contemporaries

[This continues from the posting ‘NT Wright – where to begin?’, my response to the FD Maurice lectures, given by Tom Wright Feb-March 2006 – see below]

The Bishop of Durham:

Well, so it’s one sort of power-play (disclosing that my reading is in service of my tradition) or another sort of power-play (not disclosing it and thus being cunning). Welcome to the wonderful world of Nietzsche! The readings I am proposing are in fact often very critical of my own traditions, and I live with that tension much of the time.
I think what you have your finger on is the fact that these are the FD Maurice Lectures at a half- (but not fully-)secularized department, in an increasingly (but not utterly) secularized university. In that setting, the problem of a private Christian language is very real, and I have spent my entire adult life trying to avoid such a thing (speaking only within the in-house world, rather than across the wall to the world outside)…

Knight:

Dear Bishop Tom,

…I began to think about you in more Church terms as a result of reading the impressive piece you addressed to your clergy on the state of play after the Windsor report. There you were talking like a Church-man and bishop. It seems to me that one can also do that to a degree in the university. I do not think that there is a simple contrast to be made between Church and secular audiences, or that well-argued Christian theology is simply a private language. When a law lecturer or medic talks in public, he or she talks like a lawyer or medic, from the assumptions, and using the conceptuality of their profession, but this does not make theirs a private language. We do not insist that they find some value-free domain and neutral language in which everything they say is instantly comprehensible to every member of the public. We are all aware of the appropriateness of the vocabulary and conceptuality of each distinct area of expertise. These two vocations require long apprenticeships: not everything can be immediately seen by the public or comprehended by those only at the beginning of that apprenticeship.

The same is true for Christian discipleship, another form of expertise. In this life, lived by faith, not everything is comprehensible all at once (Christians can point out that this is not only true of the Christian life, but of any life and lifestyle – again, demonstrating that the Christian hermeneutic is more sophisticated than the modern, not less). We argue for the truth of what we say, by demonstrating the plausibility of the Christian faith – that it is productive of real insight. This does not mean that we cannot point out that it requires an apprenticeship (indeed is an apprenticeship). We can freely concede that what Christianity is, is not entirely clear from the outset – it is an adventure.

The Christian tradition is a good tradition, and we can say this in public, and it is good for the public forum that we do so. My musings on this point are owed to the remarkable Reinhard Hütter (at Duke, ‘Suffering Divine Things, and more recently ‘Bound to be Free’) and to Bernd Wannenwetsch, who after the departure of O’Donovan and Webster is now Oxford’s finest (‘Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens’ OUP 2004).

Hütter and Wannenwetsch insist that we learn through tradition (this is the point that modernity is in denial about) and that the right tradition (relating to the distinct Christian citizenship and form of life) makes us free, mature and human, reconciled by God to one another. The Christian tradition doesn’t do this all at once, but it does embark us on a long hard course of paideia, in which baptism is an important milestone.

On the secular v. religious issue, one aspect of O’Donovan’s argument is crucial: the secularizing impulse is not opposed to Christian theology only, but is rubbishing the Western tradition as a whole. It not only finds Christianity problematic, it is no willing to see any part of the Western intellectual tradition (Plato, Aristotle – founders of the Academy) as a living tradition, which we have to remain in conversation with in order to flourish. This is the sort of secularizing that we are now seeing in universities. Only the Christians can point out that moderns equally talk their own in-house, private language, that by flattering us, encourages us to think of ourselves as consumers, accountable to no one. The issue is that Christians (I at least) are so well absorbed by that language of modernity that we don’t forget that it is a merely sectional language, that excludes those whom God does not exclude.

Why should a bishop be reluctant to speak from the Church in the university? I only ask you this because you are a powerful advocate of the plausibility of the Christian gospel – and precisely so a (God-given) assert to the university, as much as the Church. Few enough of your colleagues can make any contribution within the university. But every bishop can remind the university that it can only aspire to be a real public square if it properly considers the claim of the Christian tradition, understood as a demanding apprenticeship.

In all this, I am not getting at you at all, but musing appreciatively, grateful for the opportunity to think these things through with you. Despite all my understatement I hope you feel my real gratitude for your life’s work

Many thanks
DK

[I hadn’t realised what a lot of splendid teaching material there is on the NT Wright Page – see the ‘Wrightsaid’ pieces, for instance]

Dear Bishop Tom,
I have enjoyed the Maurice lectures immensely. In your first lecture you told us about postmodernity, apocalyptic and time, and talked about the tension between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’, and about true and false expectation. Your second lecture, about art, suggested that good art tells us about this tension between present and future, so we understand two things about the glory of God – that it does already fill, and that it does not yet fill the earth.
Often you introduced what you had to say with the phrase ‘the New Testament narrative shows …’, or ‘the Scriptural tradition shows…’, and at other times with the phrase ‘Art shows…’. Can I ask some questions about this?
Does the bible show us…, and how does it do so? Does art show us…, and how does it do so? Isn’t there is endless wonderful disagreement and controversy about what either the bible or art shows us? How should we assess what you say they say? What criteria do you commend to us?
Isn’t bible just another text, or artwork or commodity, about which everyone’s opinion is equally valid, until we, its readers, come under some control? If your view of the bible is right, isn’t that because you have found the right control? The right control enables you, and us, to read the bible as a key to some of the other subjects you have explored …. art, culture and politics. Is there any reading of the bible that is useful until it is under some control and is honest about what that control is? The particular control that you and I advocate is that given by the Christian Church and tradition. Why be reticent about saying so? If we are not up front about this, we will be concealing our control. All other discourses – art, politics and above all, the market – conceal their hermeneutics because they want to conceal what communities, and elites, they serve. If we do not say straight out that our control is the Church and its tradition, what we have to say about art, or politics, or the bible, is just another ‘discourse’, a piece of rhetoric and power-play.
We agree, I suppose, that the bible and the Church belong to each other, each being the source and control of each other (both sourced in the kindness of God)? The bible makes Christian doctrine. The bible creates the Christian community, its form of life and the account it gives of that form of life through time, that tradition of teaching that has learned from the encounters of the bible with different cultures. Christian doctrine is the accumulated experience of the Christian community at reading (1) the bible and (2) the world. This community of the Church reads the world through the bible. Any other community or hermeneutics will read the bible through the world, and so get as many readings of the bible as there are views of the world. Have I got this right?
Why don’t we say that there is no useful interpretation of modern culture or of art that is not formed by the discipline of the Christian tradition, itself controlled by the bible (both functions of the generosity of God)? Only when we are under this control does the bible give us a distinctive Christian hermeneutic and way of approaching the world – in faith, in hope and in love, for example. Aren’t you offering the distinct Christian view without saying where it comes from and how you got to it? You are giving us your answer to the sum without giving us your workings, that is, without giving us the means by which we can follow you and come to the same conclusion.
Is there any useful interpretation of modern culture or of art that we Christians can give that is not formed by the discipline of the Christian tradition (itself controlled by the bible and by God)? Of course each of us can give our own opinions, without sourcing any of them from Christian teaching, but then the question is, what is distinct about the views we offer? Only when we are offering what the Church knows, which is different from what everybody already ‘knows’, are we doing something really useful. Are we giving what we have received (in faith, hope and love), from the Church, and which the Church has received from God? Or are we offering what derives from ourselves as individuals, so is ultimately just rhetoric and power-play?
It is good thing to be a Christian – Church-formed – reader of the bible, because such a reader of the bible may be a well-formed interpreter of art or commentator on global politics. The mind formed by the long experience of the Church shaped by the bible is a good mind, and even the secular university can concede that.
It is unfair to make this charge against you of all people because, far more than most scholars, you do display your workings. You show us the politics that drive the New Testament exegesis and hermeneutics in The New Testament and the People of God, for instance, so you offer your argument in a generously-drawn context. But, because you are a bishop (discipled by, and discipling us with, the authority of the Church) you are big enough to take this question: Have you done the same in these university lectures? In your talks so far you have not said that your views are anchored in what the whole Christian community declares publicly to the world in every act of Christian worship.
So when, in your first lecture, you took us through the doctrine of hope (eschatology), why did you not tell us that you were offering us what the whole Church offers, and teaching us what the whole tradition teaches? Why did you not once say ‘the experience of the Church on this point is….’ or ‘Christian doctrine alerts us to…’? Why not quote the teachers of the Church – Irenaeus, Augustine, Gerald Manley Hopkins – so we can look them up and begin our own acquaintance with them? Don’t tell us that Hopkins is a poet – tell us that he is a theologian, found edifying and approved by the Church. It is intellectually robust and generous to wear your colours on your sleeve. It dares other discourses to do the same. Christian faith is intellectually respectable and may be argued from at the outset. It does not require that we argue to it from some other, notionally wider, more acceptable because ostensibly more liberal, position. It is not the case that if you talk from within the Church, only the Church hears you. The world will hear too the moment the Church says anything distinctly its own.
Many thanks

Adolph Schlatter lived at the turn of the 20th century and taught New Testament and Theology, Church History and Metaphysics; he was a keen churchman, and much loved pastor. The shadow cast by Harnack was long enough to keep him on his mettle and the young Bultmann had not yet made his mark, though his challenges would soon occupy formal theology. Schlatter was known for his work on God’s action in the world. He is a New Testament scholar who worked closely in the Old Testament and especially Genesis 1-3. Nowhere does Schlatter work to establish the philosophical warrant for his using the Old Testament doctrinally, to account for how God might be said to act in time and space. There is a natural movement between Old and New Testaments and into the doctrines of Christian believing and living. Schlatter takes it as a given—at the level of metaphysics—that in order to know who God is and how he acts, in ‘creation, preservation, and in all the blessings of this life’ one reads as closely as possible the sentences about this activity as the Old Testament sets them forth. One feels nothing of the later environment of the history of religions; or of theories of development in authorship of the Pentateuch or in comparative Near Eastern studies of creation accounts. And yet there is nothing of the air of creationism or defensive apologetics either, and in this he is rightly regarded a sophisticated forerunner of Karl Barth. There is just the exhilarating task of letting scripture—OT and NT—have its theological say, tracking as closely as possible the way in which it says that according to its own idiom.
I found myself asking: how can Schlatter do this? And why has it been my instinct as a teacher of the Old Testament to believe it has the capacity to speak of God as God is, and not as a God en route to some subsequent recalibration or development? Why has it become almost impossible for one to speak of the ‘ontological trinity’ in the Old Testament? Or, of the eternal word Jesus Christ bound up within the words, and sentences and paragraphs of the Old Testaments? And why would I sense the absence of this as a great loss, and so read a Barth or a Schlatter and discover in them something of the same tacit knowledge, of God’s word and self, which animated the earlier history of biblical interpretation, in figures as diverse as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Luther?
I believe the answer lies in the way a kind of Prayer Book worship I was exposed to in my upbringing as an Episcopalian functioned to reinforce what was in the early church called the rule of faith. This same kind of exposure could account for why Schlatter was able to use the Bible the way he was, and also remain committed to preaching, pastoral care and the no doubt messy counsels of German Protestant church life and mission, before the onslaught of two world wars.
The rule of faith made certain threshold claims about the character of God in that time before the formation of a second testament of scripture, one whose name and authoritative character as a ‘New Testament’ drew for its inspiration the sole scriptural witness handed to disciples of Jesus Christ from the bosom of Israel, what would in time be called the Old Testament. The rule of faith, whatever else it may have been and however we understand its actual usage, insisted that the Risen Lord of Christian worship, Jesus Christ, was one with the named LORD of the scriptures. This Lord and creator had given his name, the name above every name, to Jesus, so that at his name, every knee would bow, to the glory of the Father. The triune God was the LORD of Israel in reality and in promise both. In turn, this confession assured that one now knew how to read these scriptures, as setting forth Christ in a wide variety of ways: not just in prophetic promise pointing beyond itself, but also primarily inside its world, as a type and a figure, alongside the new covenant church itself, prefigured, in judgment and in blessing, in Israel herself.[xi] For no other reason than this would it have been felt apt to speak of Christian ministers as new covenant priests with a High Priest Jesus Christ, or of promises related to the name of Israel’s God among the nations now having to do with naming in Christian baptism, and so forth.
It would be possible to enlarge on this theme, but the basic point should be secure. My own conviction is that precisely these threshold assumptions about God, established by the rule of faith, have their liturgical reinforcement in the Prayer Book worship of Anglicanism, and have governed my own theological instincts at levels as difficult to detect as what I sensed in Schlatter. When in the worship of Morning Prayer one says or sings a canticle, as the Jubilate Deo or the Venite, these fancy Latin names never disguised the fact that we were citing specific words from an Old Testament Psalm and by so doing were introducing ourselves at the very start of worship, at the threshold of our attending to our lives before God, to the only God with whom we had to do in Jesus Christ. The rule of faith was never anything more or less that the doxological affirmation with which these Old Testament psalms were concluded: ‘Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.’ Here we encountered, in succinct form, the logic behind prayers of this same ordered worship, addressed to the Father, in the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. No one was being called upon here other than the one Lord of the Old Testament’s scriptural declaration, understood, from the standpoint of our inclusion in Jesus Christ, as the LORD, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.
Read the whole of Chris Seitz The Anglican Crisis in Interpretation and the Two Testament Voice of Christian Scripture