On doing theology

Our research seminar here in St Andrews has started well this semester: John Webster on creatio ex nihilo followed by Lewis Ayres on Augustine on the Trinity. I look forward to Tom Greggs on ‘pessimistic universalism’ this week also.

John’s paper was characteristic, but struck a note I have not heard from him before, or at least not so forcefully: to speak of the mystery of creation, he argued, is to be in the realm where one’s speech and thought is inevitably tresspassing on the divine, and so there is a necessary spiritual preparation, an ascesis perhaps, without which one cannot hope to speak of these truths.

Lewis offered a summary of some of his forthcoming book on Augustine. The sheer breadth of the scholarship he has at his fingertips is repeatedly stunning. What I learnt most from the paper, however, was a new way of looking at De Trinitate: for Lewis, convincingly, it is in large part an intervention in a series of exegetical debates on well-worn texts. That is, the Arians simply routinely appealed to a certain set of texts as ‘disproving’ Nicene Christianity; Augustine, committed to orthodoxy, has read the standard Nicene attempts to deal with these texts, but finds them less than convincing; so he offers, at length, his own exegesis.

Spirituality and exegesis – neither is popular in contemporary academic theology, but popularity is hardly the issue. I am simply convinced that a well-ordered theology is built on a discipline of prayer and a submission of the mind to the text of Scripture. It is comforting to know, however, that people of the academic stature of John and Lewis can offer support to such a view.

Losing my religions?

A variety of conversations in the past week or so have reminded me of a conclusion I came to some years ago: I do not believe in ‘religion’. I do not mean this in some faux-evangelical, sub-Barthian sense (‘religion is humanity’s search for God; Christianity is God’s search for humanity’) – although if one hears Barth properly, as critiquing every human approach to the divine, and supremely our own, the point holds. Rather, I became convinced, largely through reading the sociological literature, that the concept of ‘religion’ is a meaningless one. There is just no general category under which we may usefully subsume the particular realities that we call ‘Christianity’, ‘Islam’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, &c. They are not species of the same genus.

The ’sociology of religion’ has attempted to define them as if they are, and has largely failed. That is, there is (as far as I could find in the literature a few years back, and I have heard nothing to change my mind since) no available definition which encompasses everything we would want to call a ‘religion’ and excludes everything we would not. Under the most convincing sociological definitions, football is a far purer religion than evangelical Christianity or Zen Buddhism. If, after nearly a century of trying (Durkheim was endlessly interested in religion when he invented sociology), and after the attempts of some of the greatest minds of that century (did I mention Durkheim?), we cannot begin to sketch an adequate definition of the genus, perhaps we should conclude that it is not, in fact, a genus?

Why, then, did we come to talk about ‘religion’ so easily and glibly? The origins are, I think, instructive. When Europe thought it was discovering the world (the world already knew it was there, and was doing fine, thank you very much…) in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the sudden, disorienting (well, probably ‘disoccidenting,’ but…) realisation that there was quite a lot of the world that was not Christian was a serious intellectual challenge. At one level, the native Americans and sub-Saharan Africans were easy – they could be characterised, no doubt unfairly, as ‘primitive’ and in need of civilisation – but India, and particularly China, were big problems. China was (as through most of history) far more ‘advanced’ (whatever that means) than Europe; it was vast and populated; and it was profoundly alien.

We always narrate alienness through analogy with what we do know (see Socrates in the Meno for the final reason); some of what China’s people did could be made to look like certain Christian practices if you stretched the point; so we (as in ‘Western Europeans’) invented the concept of ‘religion’. In part because we were becoming suspicious of our own Christian tradition, and in part because, if we still believed in some sense in that tradition we found the notion that generations of Chinese were born and died in ignorance and so reprobation to be deeply uncongenial (so, say, Lord Herbert of Cherbury), we started to imagine that there was some more general category of human life that subsumed both what we call Christianity and what we call Buddhism. For Lord Herbert, it was a set of intellectual doctrines – the five ‘common notions’; when this became incredible, Schleiermacher suggested a basic human experience of dependence; Otto an awareness of the mysterium tremens; the list can be multiplied almost endlessly.

But – and back to the point – however we multiply the list, it fails. There is no credible definition of a general category of ‘religion’. The idea that there is should be named for what it in fact is: an arrogant colonial assumption that European thought-forms are adequate to explain the particularities of non-European life. (Anthropologists live within a culture as guests, and try – even if they fail – to tell its story from within; sociologists too often impose already-imagined concepts on a culture and try to force it to fit them. Sociology is a modern, anthropology a post-modern, science.)

Assuming this is right, so what? Well, let me offer just one significant theological result: much of our Old Testament interpretation is predicated on a ‘history of religions’ approach, which assumes a generic account of how religious thought evolves, or should evolve, in any culture from primitive animism to German protestantism. The account is of course borrowed straight from Schleiermacher, but with none of his insight or subtlety. If ‘religion’ is a meaningless concept, then this mode of interpretation is ruled out a priori. That seems to me already a non-trivial point.

Pushing the atonement to the limit?

(What follows is a summary of a paper I’ve been meaning to write for several years now, but never got around to. If anybody is interested enough to comment, I’d be happy to know if it would be worth actually doing…)

The doctrine of limited atonement seems largely forgotten by mainstream academic theology today. Actually, that is wrong – it is not forgotten, it is remembered with shame, derision, and sometimes amusement. Yet once this doctrine was seriously held by the majority of Reformed theologians. Why? They saw a theological advantage: they understood their claim about the atonement to be that it was definite, rather than limited. That is, on their scheme, Christ died to accomplish a certain fixed end, and that end is infallibly accomplished. Their basic reason for their position, however, was straightforwardly exegetical: they believed that there were Scriptures that could not be evaded that taught limited atonement. (And they believed that the Scriptures that seemed to teach universal atonement could be evaded.)

Let us praise them first – rightly, they took their stand on exegesis. But I suspect that they (and their early modern Arminian opponents) gave in too quickly to the insistent demands of logic: there were seemingly-compelling texts on either side of the argument, and Calvinists and Remonstrants alike assumed both could not be right, and so sought to evade the clear teaching of one set of Scriptures.

(Of course, one can believe in an atonement that is both definite and universal by becoming a universalist; this route became popular in many formerly-Calvinist traditions. The issue then becomes the need to evade the Scriptures that seem to teach clearly the reality of an eternal punishment awaiting the impenitent. Again, I suspect that exegesis too quickly surrenders to the claims of logic in these arguments.)

Let me then pause at the level of exegesis: some texts seem clearly to teach that the atonement is limited in intent, and/or definite in application; others to teach that it is universal in intent, and/or indefinite in application. I take it that, for all our sophisticated advances in exegetical practice in the last three centuries, this basic impasse remains. Is there a way through it? Can we try to imagine that in fact both sets of texts are right? I do not want to propose embracing paradox, but I do want to suggest that exegetical responsibility is such that we should linger long, wondering whether the apparent logical either/or cannot be overcome, before we start our theological attempts to evade this or that part of Holy Scripture.

We have learnt in the last couple of generations learnt to embrace simultaneously divergent understandings of the atonement, at least at the level of mechanism. Using language of ‘metaphor’, ‘parable’, or similar, we see differing accounts as complementary rather than competing. This is fine, however, when we are talking about simply different explanatory systems – medicine vs law court vs slave market, say. But in the case of Calvinism vs Arminianism, and particularly in the case of limited vs universal atonement, we are not dealing with incommensurate explanations, but with directly competing claims. A warm and fuzzily inclusive appeal to ‘metaphor’ will not defuse the logical problem with which we are faced.

Thinking about the nature of metaphor might, however. The old story of the three blind men and the elephant springs to mind – each uses a helpful metaphor to describe the part of the truth that he has, quite literally in the case of that story, grasped. Could we begin to imagine an account of the saving work of Jesus which is in one sense universal, and in another particular, in one sense simply given by divine decree, in another made available to human response?

At least on the first of these pairs, it happens that the tradition offers a minority report as to how this might work. A number of late nineteenth-century British evangelical theologians (most famously, James Orr; most interestingly, perhaps, T.R. Birks) offered what Henri Blocher and Stephen Williams have variously described as a ‘fourth view’ on the nature of hell (alongside eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, and universalism). They suggested, one way or another, that all people were affected by the death of Christ – it was in one sense universal – but that not all were saved – it was in another sense particular. The reality of the eternal fate of the unsaved was decisively different, and better, because of what Christ has done, but a binary distinction remains.

This seems to me a fruitful thought, theologically. In fact, I would want to extend it further: there are accounts of the atonement that suggest that the whole of creation should be transformed by the saving act of Christ (I take Anselm’s logic as pushing fairly strongly in this direction); others that seem to suggest that every human life must be transformed (the physicalist accounts of the Greek Fathers); others that there is a transformation that applies sovereignly and without human effort to all those in the church (accounts linking baptism with salvation most obviously); others that there is a genuinely human role in the appropriation of salvation (Abelard). Might it be that all these things are true? That the saving act of Christ, particularly His atoning death, reconfigures the whole of creation in far-reaching and complex ways, with particular intensities of reconfiguration and salvation attaching to the concrete reality of the church, and perhaps to other places too (the heirs to the promise given to Israel?)? Working out a narrative of this saving act would be enormously complex, and would require patient and particular exegesis of texts that too often are lumped together and are assumed to say the same thing, but it should be possible.

(Note: even if it worked spectacularly, this scheme would not, unfortunately, offer any useful purchase on the Calvinist/Arminian (or the Banezian/Molinan) debates; in their interesting forms, Calvinists and Arminians (still more Banez and Molina) are united in believing that, to quote my line above, ‘there is a genuinely human role in the appropriation of salvation’; the interesting debates concern the extent to which genuine human action is possible without specific (rather than general) divine enabling.)

A cold and broken hallelujah?

I was down at Evangelical Alliance Council last week, and added several other meetings in London with it. I had a conversation over a glass of wine with someone who I like, and indeed respect greatly, which, at one point, was depressingly familiar. My friend had been at a big Christian gathering; some recently-written choruses had been sung; the theological content (or lack thereof) of the choruses was deplored and/or ridiculed.

I hear so much criticism like this that sometimes I feel that I ought to join a 12-step programme – ‘My name is Steve, and I am a charismatic…’ The fact remains, I enjoy, appreciate, benefit from, this style of worship. Several times a year, I find myself in ‘big tent’ worship gatherings, and for me they are amongst my spiritual highlights (along with solitary silent retreats, prayer with certain friends, and being at worship with my own local church). I’ve had a go (or two or three) at defending modern worship music before on this blog, but a new thought struck me that seemed worth recording.

Some of the common criticisms are of course merely irrelevant. The poetic quality of the songs is not up to… So what? If I want poetry, I’ll read Eliot or Dante or (current favourite discovery) Whitman – if I want devotional poetry, I’ll read Donne or Milton or Herbert (or R.S. Thomas, actually). Hymns are not poems; this is just a confusion of genre. Wesley and Watts were not great poets; they were great hymnwriters. (And Cowper was a very good poet, but a lesser hymnwriter.) The theological content of the songs is not up to… So what? If I want theology, I’ll read Augustine, Thomas, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Barth, … This is another confusion of genre. Wesley and Watts were very, very far from great theologians (Watts tied himself in knots over basic Trinitarian grammar later in his life).

More interestingly, perhaps, and repeatedly, in the criticism I hear or read, the song is taken as an object (‘text’) complete in itself, and then criticised as incomplete in some way: it does not address this or that idea, held to be so central that it may not be omitted; or it is one-sided in its appreciation of a complex truth; or it does not adequately identify the One who is addressed in worship.

This, however, is to mistake the nature of these songs. It is akin to criticising an arm because it is not the whole body (to borrow an illustration). No song intended for public worship is written to be a whole, complete in itself; rather it is a component that may be correlated with other components to build a complete and adequate liturgy. An act of worship may be incomplete, less than adequately theological, or whatever; an individual song, prayer, or other liturgical component cannot be, considered of itself.

Now, there are no doubt songs – and indeed readings, written prayers, and other liturgical actions (elbow bumps of peace, anybody?) – that are so confused, lacking in content, or just plain wrong as to be unusable in any liturgical context. And, sure, there are plenty such in recent charismatic hymnody. (I had a friend who edited one of the early songbooks. He said that every other song arrived with a note saying, ‘the Holy Spirit just gave me this…’ to which his standard reply was, ‘well, I can see why He wanted to be rid of it.’) But more often, when you explore the criticism, the song is in itself perfectly serviceable; it was just used badly, placed in a context where it didn’t fit, or asked to support a weight it could not, of itself, bear. That doesn’t make it a bad song. It might be a great song, distorted horribly by an awful liturgy.

(It happens to the great hymns as well, of course. How often, at the wedding of a non-Christian friend, have you been asked to sing ‘breathe through the heats of our desire thy coolness and thy balm, let sense be dumb, let flesh retire…’ because ‘Dear Lord and Father’ is the only hymn the couple know? This is a far, far worse liturgical placement than any example from my recent experience of charismatic liturgies, but no-one blames the hymn for it.)

Recent Christian worship songs can be used to construct meaningful and beautiful Christian worship that is theologically profound and liturgically satisfying. Routinely, in my experience, they are. If they are mis-used, it is not the fault of the songs, but of the liturgist. Of course, all of us who have led worship have made egregious errors often in our time – but this goes for the construction of formal liturgical worship as much as for spontaneous charismatic expression. It may be that the liturgist in the one context sins more in omission – not considering the ways in which the set prayers for this Sunday might be deeply and painfully inappropriate for her congregation – but the failure is just as complete, and either way it remains the failure of the liturgist, not the failure of Thomas Cranmer, or of Matt Redman.

I was down at Evangelical Alliance Council last week. The worship was led by two young people (25?) with a keyboard and a couple of microphones. Blending sensitive use of Biblical readings, recent songs, extempore prayers, and even a time of open singing in tongues, they led worship in ways that I could not fault theologically, and that I appreciated enormously. Some of the songs were perhaps shallow in themselves; they were given context and depth by what else was around them. I was moved, inspired even.

I don’t need a 12-step programme, I’ll say it loud and proud:

‘My name is Steve, and I am a charismatic.’

Trying to understand Mark Driscoll

(Yeah, I know, being somewhat nice about John Piper is one thing, but…)

The thing is, I think several of Driscoll’s sillier comments (and surely the most partisan supporter will own that he has said some rather odd things over the years?) are manifestations of the same two basic positions, and I find that an interesting reflection.

Driscoll’s public comments (by which I mean those that have attracted notice) have largely been to do with issues in ethics. He is famous for discussing what Christian people should and should not do, in detailed and often rather graphic terms. Of course, he lives and pastors in a nation where (to borrow Samuel Butler’s magnificent line) many people are ‘equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced’ – although this is probably less the case in Seattle than in many other areas of the USA.

My first exposure to Driscoll was reading his first book (I believe?), Radical Reformission. There is a chapter in there where he narrates his realisation that drinking alcohol is not forbidden to the Christian in Scripture. Fair enough; I think there are all sorts of good reasons why one might choose to be teetotal, and there are many situations where it is a pressing ethical imperative, but one glance at the convoluted logic of those who claim it as a Biblical position is enough to discount it.

Driscoll, however, then moves directly to the position that it is thus a Christian duty to drink alcohol. He puts it like this: ‘My Bible study convinced me of my sin of abstinence from alcohol. So in repentance I drank a hard cider over lunch with our worship pastor.’ (Radical Reformission, p. 146.) This seems a very odd comment, explicable in only two ways. Either he is assuming that if an act is not forbidden, it must be commanded, or he found particular reasons for regarding his previous teetotal stance to be not just not required, but actually sinful. It happens that both of these seem to be factors in many of Driscoll’s positions.

To take the latter first, in the book Driscoll links prohibition in the USA with feminism:

Tragically, as feminism grew in America around the turn of the twentieth century, the women’s suffrage and prohibition movements, which were the result of a feminine piety that came to dominate the church, also flourished. This all occurred as more women became pastors and the church became more feminine. At the same time, some denominations even began to condemn alcohol as sinful … The marriage of Christianity and feminism, helped to create a dry nation… (p. 146)

Probably the kindest thing to say about this paragraph is that not many local church pastors understand how church history and culture mutually interact (although most manage not to display both their ignorance and their lack of comprehension quite so blatantly either…). I will also do Driscoll the honour of assuming that the implication that it is sinful for women to want to vote in elections, although logically demanded by his words, was not one he intended.

All that said, the identification of ‘feminism’ as the key social evil seems to me to be rather characteristic of Driscoll, and driving a lot of his positions. His particularly hardline version of ‘complementarianism;’ his aggressive assertions of masculinity; his rather strange vision of Jesus as muscular superhero, even – all have at root this strange fear that the church is being feminised.

(I take it that there is no need to defend here either the proposition that feminism is not the all-consuming social force Driscoll imagines, or the proposition that an adequately Christian theology demands the affirmation of the full humanity of women, including the recognition of God’s calling of all women, and all men, to proper Christian vocations, and God’s calling of some women, and some men, to leadership and teaching positions within the church.)

The second feature here is the assumption that all actions are either prohibited or demanded by Scripture. This curious ‘law of the excluded ethical middle’ seems to me to be a repeated problem in Driscoll’s commentary. He has spotted that the repressed 1950s sexuality he apparently grew up with had nothing to do with Scripture. Good. But to move from there to preaching that it is a Christian duty for married couples to engage in various forms of sexual activity is ethically illegitimate and, I suggest, pastorally unhelpful (particularly when allied with his rather crudely-stated views on the proper ordering of authority within the family – see above).

So what? Well, something like this. It is rather easy to paint Mark Driscoll as some sort of madman who shoots off his mouth in bizarre ways. But a bit of thought demonstrates that actually he is just someone who is working out some false assumptions, assumptions which presumably could be challenged and corrected. Once again, I suggest the task of theology is more to understand than to condemn – and having understood, to attempt to correct, if that is needed.

Two thoughts on the sacraments

The Rutherford House Edinburgh Dogmatics conference this week, which is always a highlight. Amongst many good things, I came away with two passing comments which might yet between them change the way I think about the sacraments.

The first was from Bruce McCormack. Bruce simply pointed out in passing in a paper that there is no obvious NT linkage between baptism and Eucharist – they are not described using the same word, or spoken of together, or… There is thus no good reason for us to assume that we can deal with them under a common head, ’sacramentology’ – it might turn out to work, but we should not assume a priori that it is the best way forward.

The second was from Henri Blocher, who suggested the key question to be asked of baptism and the Supper is ‘what do [they] give us that we cannot obtain otherwise?’ This seems to me a great question, which takes us helpfully to the heart of the issue, and maintains a useful experimental and soteriological focus.

Trying to understand John Piper

John Piper’s recent blog post, which offers an interpretation of a surprising tornado as God’s providential warning to the ECLA convention during its discussion of a denominational statement on sexual ethics, has attracted a fair amount of – I think the best word would be ‘derision’ -  from theological bloggers. I have not seen, however, any attempt to explain why Dr Piper should have come to this interpretation.

I tend to the view that a large part of the task of theology is to probe the connections between ideas. I know that attempting to understand patiently, rather than to condemn loudly, is unfashionable, particularly in online theology, and it is certainly no way to attract readers to a blog, but allow me my idiosyncrasies.

As far as I can see, John Piper’s various public positions have at least a degree of intellectual coherence. In general, he belongs to a recognisable tradition of American Evangelical Calvinism. His attempts to interpret providence, however, are decidedly unusual within the modern exponents of that tradition. However, he has repeatedly, albeit usually humbly and hesitantly, suggested that we may be able to guess, on the basis of Biblical guidance, God’s reasons for permitting this or that natural disaster.

Given that this is unusual within his own tradition, it seems reasonable to ask why Piper thinks this. (A question, incidentally, which is distinct from the question of whether he is right – if he happens to be, why is it that no-one else has seen the same truths? What is it about Piper’s thinking that gives him the ability to see something here that most others in the same tradition cannot?)

Piper assumes that we can ‘think God’s thoughts after Him’ in the area of divine providence, and so interpret a natural disaster. An ill-informed commentator might dismiss this strand of Piper’s public platform as ‘medieval’; such a dismissal gestures towards something significant, but is ultimately wrong. The significance first: I believe that one of the most far-reaching and decisive dividing lines between pre-modern and modern (and now late- or post-modern) Christianity is the modern loss of confidence in doctrines of active providence. We could probably trace this to an earthquake in Lisbon of course, but for whatever reason, our ancestors in the faith prior to November 1, 1755 (to pick a date at random…) had no difficulty believing that the events of the natural world, and the course of human history, were alike actively guided by God to secure certain providential ends. We find this much more difficult, at least on a scale beyond the personal. It remains a staple of Evangelical piety that God uses at least some circumstances to guide and teach us in our own personal, family, and perhaps congregational, lives, but few of us would find a divine word addressed to our nation in war or flood. (In the UK, in the last two decades or more, I recall some suggestion that a lightening strike on York Minster was a sign of divine displeasure at the then-Bishop of Durham’s (as it happens, misreported) views on the resurrection, and one Anglican Bishop coming to notice for suggesting that the floods of 2007 might be understood as a warning of divine judgement; both positions were treated with mere embarrassment by the churches.)

Why then would describing Piper’s comments as ‘medieval’ be wrong? I think because they are made with a confidence and a specificity that medieval and early modern theologians (I will not speak of popular piety, as I know little about its normative patterns in the pre-modern period) would have found troubling. To speak of the period I know best, the Puritan fast-day sermons are striking for their lack of specific criticism of particular events: drought or famine is confidently interpreted as a sign of God’s displeasure on the nation, and a wide-ranging denunciation of the various sins of the people would follow, but claims that this event was specifically related to that error were not, as far as I am aware, at all common.

In the Puritan tradition this began to change in New England. Initially this seems (to me – I am conscious that this older historiography has more recently been challenged) to stem from a strong identification of the settlers with Israel venturing into the wilderness. God guided His children through Sinai with special providences of nature, and so the invitation to read the (presumably exceptionally puzzling, because different from old England) events of the natural world as signs of God’s evaluation of the colonists’ lives was strong. This particular theme perhaps declined as history went on, but a willingness to read nature in all its forms as the revelations of God arose. This borrowed from old England – such texts as Flavel’s Husbandry Spiritualized were very popular in the colonies – and, with Cotton Mather particularly, there was a new confidence about natural theology: the ‘book of nature’ could be read and understood with clarity and confidence – although my colleague, Bill Tooman, who knows Mather better than I tells me that this leads to a simple incoherence in his mature thought, between a thoroughgoing natural theology and a fairly traditional Puritan account of depravity. Bill tells me that Mather seems simply to acknowledge and to live with this incoherence.

Not so Mather’s inheritor in the area of reading the book of nature: Jonathan Edwards, who pressed forward in finding both natural types, and in seeing God’s hand specifically at work in the events of human history. He solved Mather’s problem by suggesting that the regenerate mind could learn from the Biblical examples how to speak the divine language of types, and then interpret with confidence supposed natural typologies that were not taught in Scripture. In history, most of his efforts seem to have been motivated by a historicist view on the Book of Revelation, and a clear belief that the events leading to the end could be perceived in the history of his own day, particularly the continuing wars between Roman Catholic and Reformed nations. Edwards thought that the French and Indian War was potentially of decisive eschatological significance.

I take it that Edwards was inspired in part by an Enlightenment confidence in the power of the human intellect to perceive truth, which he unquestionably shared in. God’s ways were not as obscure to Edwards as to most of his predecessors in the Christian tradition, but he had not lost any confidence in the fact of divine providence on a geopolitical scale (he died only three years after the Lisbon earthquake, of course). He therefore offers, in those parts of his writings that are rather less read by the current Edwards industry, a peculiarly confident and strong account of how God’s ways with the world may be perceived and understood by the attentive believer, and this as a result of a particular coincidence of Enlightened epistemological confidence with early modern belief about providence.

Of course, John Piper has read deeply in Edwards. More than that, however, it seems to me that aspects of the tradition he represents demonstrate precisely this same coincidence of epistemological confidence superimposed on early modern Reformed orthodoxy (the way claims about Biblical inerrancy are played out would be one example – at once both too confident and too diffident about Scripture when compared to classical accounts of perspicuity, as I have argued in various places; another would be Piper’s particular ways of teaching about divine sovereignty in the face of suffering which, when compared to the teachings of Samuel Rutherford, say, show a very different tone because of a considerably-lowered sense of the inscrutability of God’s ways with the world).

None of this, note, is a claim that Piper is right or wrong; it is an attempt to understand the genealogy of his thought. If one is convinced he is right, perhaps understanding this tale helps to understand why his voice is so distinctive; if one believes him to be wrong, perhaps this helps to understand why a transparently humble and godly man should entertain such strange ideas.

Of course, I realise that arguing like this in a blog post is an error of genre: the accepted use of the form demands that one shouts that Piper’s doctrine is indistinguishable from Scripture’s, or instead that one denounces him as the embodiment of evil. May I take some comfort from Biblical exemples of genres being subverted because the attempt to speak Christianly will only fit in re-made vessels?

Culture, guilt, and Lockerbie

Local news today is full of the debate over whether Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, should be freed on compassionate grounds. He is dying of cancer, and my understanding is that it would be normal practice in Britain to allow any prisoner who is terminally ill to die at home (indeed, another very high-profile convict, Ronnie Biggs, was freed on such grounds just last week).

His crime, of course, affected families and the wider community in the USA as much as in Britain. The news reports I have heard suggest that the notion that he might be freed is being greeted with simple incredulity in the USA. The breadth of condemnation from across the Atlantic is striking: it is not confined to (families of) victims, or to social conservatives, but seems to be almost universal (Democratic senators have intervened publicly, and Hilary Clinton has been reported to have been involved).

Is Britain – specifically in this case Scotland – just more liberal than the USA? Actually, probably it is, but I don’t think that this is the reason for the divide in this case. Rather, our understandings of what words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ mean are culturally-determined, and somewhat different. To us, dying in prison seems a cruel and unusual punishment, and so essentially unjust; it seems that the default assumption in the USA is that sentences should be served, and so that any relaxation is unjust.

My own instincts are, unsurprisingly, fairly straightforwardly British. Is this right or wrong? I don’t know; being exposed to different cultural understandings at least allows me to ask the question, though, rather than simply assuming that what I have grown up with must be right.

What is the theological point here? Simply this: words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ are rather central to at least some accounts of the atonement (‘justice’ has wider theological application, of course, not least in theology proper and in discussions of providence). It is rather easy to use these words assuming that we all agree what they mean. We don’t, and if we are to understand each other’s attempts to speak adequately of the salvation of Christ, we need to realise that, and to be sensitive to it.

Theology and the Bible

I gave a paper on Calvin last week, picking up on the recent historical work (by David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and others) that has given us a far better understanding of his context. One result of this is to revise our understanding of how to relate the Institutes and the Biblical commentaries. Roughly, an older way of reading Calvin saw the Institutes as the central text in his corpus, understood as some sort of proto-systematic theology, which everything else – including the commentaries – fed into; a better understanding of Calvin’s work sees his Biblical commentaries (and sermons) as central to his endeavour, with the Institutes not a systematics, but a text designed to aid Calvin in writing the commentaries, and his readers in reading the commentaries.

This reversal does, I tried to show, actually make a difference to how we understand Calvin’s theology. I ended the paper, though, with some freewheeling thoughts about the proper relationship of theology and Biblical studies. Here in St Andrews, we have been interested in this relationship for a while, of course – and mostly in the direction of how theology can influence Biblical studies. I can’t speak for my colleagues, who are far cleverer than I am, but it occurred to me in reading Calvin that I had always assumed that the final word was going to be dogmatic: after all our Biblical work was done, the final scholarly aim would be an ordered statement of Christian truth. The great texts of Reformed theology all seem to point in this direction (van Mastricht has his pars exegetica before moving on to the pars dogmatica; the great Leiden Synopsis invited the Biblical professors to feed in to a work of dogmatics, not vice-versa; &c.). This scholarship would then serve the pulpit and the pastoral visit, of course; but the basic intellectual aim was systematic and theological.

Calvin’s work suggests otherwise. The final academic task in Biblical exposition. Dogmatics is useful insofar as it serves exposition, and not otherwise. This is a surprising reversal, but one that, the more I think about it, the more I think it might perhaps be right. I have been thinking recently about the proper shape of evangelical theology, (in part because of my work with the Evangelical Alliance). It is obvious that an adequately evangelical theology ought to be determinedly Biblical, but what that looked like (having ruled out Grudem-like proof-texting as both intellectually inadequate and inattentive to the actual shape of the Biblical text) was something I struggle with. My new working hypothesis: it looks like Calvin.

Reimagining preaching?

Doug Pagitt: Preaching Re-Imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith (Zondervan, 2005)

I got hold of this because I wanted to read the best arguments for dialogical preaching; Glen suggested to me that this was one of the key texts. I found it particularly interesting, because it doesn’t assume the standard (in my experience) dialogical argument (the role of preaching is to convey information; but, monologues are a poor way of conveying information; therefore, monologue preaching is poor preaching; it seems to me that neither premise is sustainable…)

Pagitt’s argument/vision starts with a concept of community: Christian communities are to be places of genuine relationship; the role of Bible is to be ‘an authoritative member of our community, one we listen to on all topics on which she speaks’ (195). In community, Pagitt argues, the notion of deferential listening to a monologue has no place: we learn and discover by dialogue. The Bible’s voice is to be heard directly in the dialogue by all, not mediated indirectly by one particular person. The task of the community is together to grow up into Christian maturity.

Refreshingly, Pagitt recognises the power of the monologue to touch hearts and minds; however, he dismisses this as manipulation: ‘Knowingly manipulating the emotions of my hearers to get them to come to a predetermined  conclusion felt like the very thing a pastor shouldn’t do. It felt like a violation of the human relationship.’ (74). Well, perhaps. Pagitt is clearly deeply troubled about any intrusion into the sovereign interiority of the American self; I tend to the view that all of us are constantly shaped by all sorts of messages, and so I am less worried about attempting to convince my hearers of a point I believe happens to be helpful, meaningful, and true. (And appeals to emotions are the normal currency of human interactions, surely – I say to my wife, ‘Oh come on, you’ll enjoy it…’ or to my daughter, ‘I know you don’t want to – but you should do it…’; it can get manipulative, and we all know when it does; but making an appeal to the emotions is not in itself the same as manipulating.)

Instead of the monologue, Pagitt suggests ‘progressive dialogue’: a model of preaching where the preacher introduces a subject or Bible passage and then together the community discuss it, each listening to the other, and building insight and conviction through their shared conversation. The Bible becomes not a truth to be ‘applied’, but a story to be indwelt (a third-hand echo of Hans Frei?), and a voice in the conversation that carries peculiar authority.

Many of his criticisms of contemporary church life hit home, although perhaps particularly in America (I doubt there are many local churches in the UK where there are regular worshippers who do not know the pastor(s) personally, the ‘megachurch’ phenomenon not having particularly hit us, except in a few isolated instances in London). I am not sure that the proposed solution is adequate to the task, however. In particular, the notion that a rational dialogue about what Scripture demands of us will be enough to change the way we live in community seems to me astonishingly optimistic. Pagitt thinks that the problem with our communities is an informational deficit: we don’t know what we ought to be; I suspect it is far more a volitional deficit: we know what we should do, but it seems too hard, or asks us to give up too much, and so we evade the issue.

Paradoxically, I think most of the reason I disagree with Pagitt is that I have a much more modest – but, I think, more precise – account of the nature of the preaching task. As Pagitt imagined his ideal Christian community, I was reminded repeatedly and forcibly of the old vision of Baptist/Congregationalist life: a people covenanted together before God to seek the mind of Christ, to walk according the rule of Christ, and to call others into the covenant community. But you can’t do all that on Sunday morning. Conversation is vital as a part of the prayerful discerning of the mind of Christ for this people at this time – the task of Church meeting. The hearing of Scripture as a shaping voice in our conversations was a part of ‘godly conversation’, later formalised into small group ministries. Pagitt wants to do all that in the sermon, and discovers that the sermon isn’t very good at it. That might be why we used to do it elsewhere…

What is the sermon good for? In the earliest Baptist communities, three or more members would preach when the people gathered – but each sermon would be monological. Why? I think because they instinctively grasped that the monologue is uniquely powerful to address the emotions, and so to challenge for change. The preachers, week by week, would call the people to repentance and conversion, to a desire to re-align their lives with the gospel of Christ. Then, in ‘progressive conversations’ that took place elsewhere in the life of the church, that desire could be nurtured and realised. But until hearts are changed and godly desires awakened, the progressive conversations will achieve very little.

Pagitt is right to see progressive dialogue between the community and the Bible as vital; but he has nothing, I think, to say about the deceitfulness of sin, or about how, under God, stony human hearts will be melted and changed. Thus far, I know no better answer to that question than the monological sermon. So I keep preaching them.