MacDiarmid on Burns

A post for Burns night – well, why not?

My students tell me I quote Hugh MacDiarmid too much; maybe, but he is unquestionably Scotland’s greatest modern poet, perhaps alongside Burns and Dunbar one of the three greatest this land has produced. I tend, I confess, to his more philosophical, later, and lesser poems written in standard English. His masterpiece, though, is the early (1926) Scots poem, ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’: some stanzas from there on Burns:

Rabbie, wad’st thou wert here – the world hath need,
And Scotland mair sae, o’ the likes o’ thee!
The whisky that aince moved your lyre’s become
A laxative for a’ loquacity

O gin they’d stegh their guts and haud their wheesht
I’d thole it, for ‘a man’s a man,’ I ken,
But though the feck ha’e plenty o’ the ‘a’ that,’
They’re nocht but zoologically men.

I’m haverin’, Rabbie, but ye understaun’
It gets my dander up to see your star
A bauble in Babel, banged like a saxpence
‘Twixt Burbank’s Baedeker and Bleistein’s cigar.

This, to my mind, is classic MacDiarmid, carelessly, almost aggressively elitist (the echo of (pastiche on?) Wordsworth is obvious enough, but the throwaway reference to T.S. Eliot, in a poem published in 1926, assumes and demands so much of the readers),but remarkably populist in tone, the whole lamenting what Scotland could and should be.

And, it being Burns night, two more lines from the same poem, again on Burns:

Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name
Than in ony’s barrin’ liberty and Christ.

(Some vocab: ’stegh’ = ’stuff’; ‘haud their wheesht’ = ‘be quiet’; ‘thole’='put up with’; ‘feck’='majority’ (‘folk’); ‘haverin’ = ‘rambling’ or ‘burbling’; ‘dander’ = ‘temper’)

Romanticism and Pantheism

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (Oxford: OUP, 1992) is a fascinating little book that I wish I tripped over before. Apart from anything else, any author with the guts to start a book ‘To quote Wordsworth:’ and to follow that line with seven pages of poetry excerpts deserves some respect! The book offers readings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Novalis, Wackenroder, and Schlegel, together with some analysis. The readings of the English poets are convincing to me, but perhaps incomplete (see below); I don’t know enough about the Germans to judge.

Riasanovsky suggests that Romanticism in its original form is a remarkably brief movement, arising roughly simultaneously in England and Germany in the mid-1790s and lasting less than a decade. This is just right – for me, one of those satisfying moments of scholarship where you find someone naming and nailing something you always sort-of knew, and had groped towards. Byron and Keats and Shelley (and the rest) are just different from Coleridge and Wordsworth – if they are still ‘Romantic’ (and of course they are, because self-denominated and generally recognised), then it is a fairly fundamentally different Romanticism to that of the Lyrical Ballads.

The book also highlights something of the communal nature of these projects. The astonishing symbiosis of Wordsworth and Coleridge is known and endlessly analysed, of course (even if all the analysis gets us no nearer to understanding what went on in those few years); Riasanovsky also points towards gatherings at August Wilhelm Schlegel’s house in Jena, where the dinner guests would routinely include of his brother Friedrich, Novalis, Tieck (who published with Wackenroder), Schleiermacher, and, occasionally, Goethe. If you could be at one dinner party in history… (yeah, I know, it would be the one with Socrates at Agathon’s house – but this must be a close second!)

What sets these early Romantics apart? Riasanovsky suggests it is basically something theological: the original Romantics were gripped with an overwhelming pantheist, or panentheist vision, which was the intellectual and spiritual engine that led them to overturn and transform received ideas about nature, language and art. But each, in his own way, was quickly overwhelmed by the vision – Wordsworth becoming a crusty reactionary, trying to edit out everything that was genuinely brilliant from his poetry; Coleridge descending into drug addiction; Novalis doing the proper Romantic thing and died at the height of his power from TB; Wackenroder dying even earlier; Schlegel becoming as reactionary, if in somewhat different ways, to Wordsworth. Schlegel never finished Lucinde, let alone the larger project it was to be a part of, and valued it so little later on that he left it out own his own 1823 edition of his collected works; The Prelude remained alone, and was successively mutilated; the work it was to be a, well, ‘prelude’ to, The Recluse, never appeared; Coleridge, famously, never finished anything (this is unfair!). For a few years, a fire burned with such heat and brilliance that it transformed European literature and culture; for decades afterwards Wordsworth and Schlegel, in particular, remained as only charred timbers. As T.S. Eliot had it of Coleridge, ‘[f]or a few years he had been visited by the Muse … and henceforth was a haunted man.’

Even the casual reader of the poets will know the sense of loss of vision that afflicts them all in different ways. Consider this, from Wordsworth’s Intimations:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;–
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Or this, from Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me…

What is lost? For Riasanovsky, it is the consuming pantheist experience described by Wordsworth in his note on Intimations: ‘I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times when going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to reality…’ (q. on p.75) This felt pantheism, or at least panentheism, is at the heart of the Lyrical Ballads, of the original version of The Prelude (& it is what Wordsworth attempts to edit out in successive editions), of Lucinde, even of the Hymnen an die Nacht – try this:

Die Lieb’ ist frey gegeben
Und keine Trennung mehr.
Es wogt das volle Leben
Wie ein undendlich Meer,
Nur eine Nacht der Wonne–
Ein ewiges Gedicht–
Und unser aller Sonne
Ist Gottes Angesicht.

It is also at the heart of the vocation of the poet described in the Biolgraphia Literaria and Athenaeum (and even more so, perhaps in Schlegel’s fragments – see fragment 116 especially).

Coleridge’s drug addiction, Wordsworth reactionary politics, Schlegel’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, the self-neglect that perhaps contributed to Novalis’s early death – all were in different ways grasping at walls and trees to recall themselves from the abyss.

I find this broadly convincing, but incomplete. A minor question would be whether this analysis, based as it is on the poets, can be extended to other forms of Romantic art. Friedrich was painting his Wreck in the Sea of Ice at about the time Coleridge was describing another such wreck in the Rime, after all, but Friedrich’s full Romantic vision was only achieved later (The Tetschen Altarpiece of 1808 is generally classed as his first major painting), and did not wane until his stroke in 1835. Again, after dinner at the Schlegel’s you could go to take in the premiere of Beethoven’s latest piano sonata – maybe the Pathetique (OK, it would probably have been a bit of a trek…) – the Eroica was not premiered until 1805, however (it seems at the same concert he premiered Fidelio – of you could be at one concert in history…), and who will say that the choral conclusion to the Ninth (first performed 1824) is one whit less Romantic – indeed, less Frühromantik – than Novalis?

(Schiller’s An die Freude had been written in 1785, but surely, at least in Beethoven’s hands, captures some of the religious ecstasy of the early Romantics. It could not be described as ‘pantheist’, though – ‘Ahndest du den Schoepfer, Welt? / Such ihn ueberm Sternenzelt. / Ueber Sternen muss er wohen.’)

My more major question: it seems to me that there is, in Coleridge and Wordsworth at least, a reason Riasanovsky does not notice for the loss of this experience of pantheist ecstasy. He traces (with the help of McFarland’s great book on Coleridge) the inherent instability of Romantic pantheism (roughly, if pantheism is true, human individuality cannot exist, a conclusion intolerable to any Romantic – Coleridge, in a letter: ‘make yourself thoroughly, intuitively master of admitting a one Ground for the Universe (which however must be admitted) and yet finding room for anything else.’ Certainly this is a reason for the loss. But there is also, in the two English poets at least (I don’t know the Germans well enough to comment), a fundamental loss of confidence, which I have traced in a couple of writings on Coleridge. He once believed he could grasp the truth of things in his pantheistic ecstasies; in the daemonic poems ecstasy is still a reality, but the possibility is raised of it being profoundly misleading (is the report of the Mariner true? How can Christabel’s father be so wrong about Geraldine? And the right way to treat the ecstatic mystic? ‘Beware – beware his flashing eyes, his flowing hair – weave a circle round him thrice and shut your eyes in holy dread…’). Coleridge is not just afraid of loss of self in ecstasy, he is afraid of hallucination, of being wrong.

He finds his answer, and recovers his confidence, through a stunning construction of a Christian Platonist vision. But I’ve written about that elsewhere.

Annunciation and Nativitie

Two sonnets of John Donne, from the series of seven entitled ‘La Corona,’ each of which begins with the last line of the previous poem.

Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which alwayes is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,
Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,
Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye
In prison, in thy wombe; and though he there
Can take no sinne, nor thou give, yet he’will weare
Taken from thence, flesh, which deaths force may trie.
Ere by the spheares time was created, thou
Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother;
Whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d; yet thou art now
Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother;
Thou’hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe.

Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe,
Now leaves his wellbelov’d imprisonment,
There he hath made himselfe to his intent
Weake enough, now into our world to come;
But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th’Inne no roome?
Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Starres, and wisemen will travel to prevent
Th’effect of Herods jealous generall doome.
Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he
Which fills all place, yet none holds him, doth lye?
Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pittied by thee?
Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe,
With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe.

Happy Christmas to all!

Steve

Divine generosity

To begin with, a little Christmas quiz. Who wrote the following?

I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption.

I’ve noticed a few Methodist friends who blog following a meme asking them to post five things they love about being Methodist. Obviously, we couldn’t do it as Baptists (how to get it down to only five?!), but it has struck me that they, and others they link to, all one way or another pick up on the Arminianism of the tradition, usually by contrasting the openness of Methodist soteriology with an imagined opposing view that salvation is limited to ‘the chosen few’.

Chatting with another Methodist friend, Tom Greggs, when he came up to give us an excellent paper on ‘pessimistic universalism’ last month, we began swapping notes on views on the extent of salvation amongst various Calvinists. It struck us that we could not, between us, think of a significant theologian in the tradition who was not convinced that those who God elects would far outnumber those who would finally be lost. Tom had done some research into Calvin’s own speculations about the number of the elect, which varied widely, but (he told me) in every case suggested a large confidence on Calvin’s part that there were many in his day beyond the nascent Reformed churches who God would save. I thought about the later tradition, where two factors – a dogmatic decision that all who die as infants are elect, and a postmillennial eschatology that saw a coming thousand-year period of such health and prosperity that the population of the world would vastly increase, and when virtually all would be Christian – led every theologian I know who asked the question to believe that the elect would significantly outnumber the reprobate.

This seems to me interesting, because it is a position that most dogmatic Calvinists today do not hold, and this different vision of God’s generosity (or otherwise) must seriously affect their theology and spirituality. To believe both in predestination, and that God’s election is limited to a few, seems to me enormously difficult to square with a Biblical presentation of God’s character, and with the seriousness and significance of Christ’s atoning work. If this were the only option, I could understand my Methodist friends’ commitment to their Arminianism (although I probably still couldn’t share it…)

The quotation I began with? A dangerous liberal revisionist theologian by the name of Charles Hodge. It is reported in his son Archibald Alexander Hodge’s Evangelical Theology, where AA acknowledges that much is uncertain about eschatology, but lists six points that he believes are certain and uncontroversial. The fifth begins:

Although heaven can only be entered by the holy, yet such, we are assured, is the infinite provision made for human salvation, and such the intense love for human sinners therein exhibited, that the multitude of the redeemed will be incomparably greater than the number of the lost. My father, at the close of his long life spent in the defence of Calvinism, wrote on one of his conference papers, in trembling characters, a little while before he died, “I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption.” …(p. 401 of the Banner edition)

The five points of Dort can only be called ‘doctrines of grace’ if they assume this fundamental divine generosity; this is, to my mind, authentic Calvinism.

Irish Evangelical response to civil partnerships

Glen posted a link to an interesting document produced by the Evangelical Alliance Ireland (an entirely separate organisation from the Evangelical Alliance UK) in response to the current Irish Civil Partnerships Bill. The EAI’s response is well-summed up in the phrase Glen highlights in his blog post:

…as followers of a just and compassionate God we can recognise the justice and fairness of providing some legal protection for the reality of both same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting relationships.

As the rest of the document makes clear, the EAI is not softening its commitment to traditional Christian teaching on marriage at all, but arguing that, in a culture where other patterns of family life are now extremely common, it is a matter of justice that the law should recognise this.

I find this heartening. Our culture (in Britain – maybe it’s different in Ireland?) seems increasingly to fail to recognise any distinction between ‘I think this is morally wrong’ and ‘I think this should be illegal’. This attitude seems to have infected much Christian commentary on matters of public policy in this country – we have demanded too often that the law be brought into accord with our moral intuitions, without exception or reserve. Evangelicals have probably been worse at this than most.

But the Evangelical Alliance movement was born, in 1845-6, out of a desire to protect and extend liberty of conscience and, whilst undoubtedly it was the liberty of people to be evangelicals in majority Roman Catholic countries (such as Ireland) which mainly concerned them, they understood from the first that they could not deny to others the liberty they demanded for themselves. The intuition (first, I am proud to say, articulated by a Baptist, Thomas Helwys, in 1611) that it is the moral duty of government to maintain a studied neutrality on certain matters, and to offer space and protection for its people to live in the way that they might choose, is a natively evangelical one.

(This also, incidentally, explains the concern Glen registers in his post – the desire to provide ‘some legal protection’; a standard problem in modern law concerns whose rights trump whose, and the EAI does not want legal protection for cohabiting couples to extend to the making illegal of the moral witness, and the expression of that witness in appropriate ways, of churches, mosques, &c.)

Finally: evangelical theology

This is a slightly embarrassing confession to make, but I have just last week come up with a definition of ‘evangelical theology’ which I find convincing. As I have written articles on the subject for significant reference works, intervened publicly in controversies over evangelical identity, and chaired the theological commission of the Evangelical Alliance for the past couple of years, this might seem slightly late in the day – hence my embarrassment. For reasons some will know, I have had to be thinking about defining the boundaries of evangelicalism once again in recent weeks, and I think that I have seen something new (to me at least) and helpful (to me at least).

Perhaps some story would help to explain this. I joined the Evangelical Alliance when I was a student, a recent convert to Christianity via a CICCU mission (if this starts sounding like a re-write of Phil. 3:5, apologies…). A friend was encouraging all of us to join, and I did so without much thought (I think I remember who it was, but he is now quite well known in academic theological circles, and probably not wanting to be reminded of this bit of his past journey). Quite quickly, I went to train for ministry at Spurgeons; for my time there, and for some years afterward, I kept up my Evangelical Alliance membership, but deliberately donated by cheque each year – I was conscious that this was something I wanted to be forced to think through every so often, mainly because I was not sure at the time what ‘evangelical’ meant. I became comfortable owning the label sometime around 2001; this was not, as far as I can see at this distance, any shift on my part, so much as a belief that  I did finally understand what the word meant, and was happy that it was a word I could identify with as describing my own spirituality.

I choose the word ’spirituality’ carefully: my conviction then was that evangelicalism was better understood as a cultural reality than as a theological system. The way I prayed, the songs I sang, the way we lived church, unspoken dress codes, patterns of speech, … I realised that I was (and am) evangelical in much the same way as I was (and am) English middle class – while both labels include some broad patterns of belief, most of the decisive things are more about patterns of living than about commitment to certain doctrines or concepts.

Since then, studying evangelical identity has been a minor, but repetitive, part of my research agenda. The most generally-accepted definition is the Bebbington quadrilateral of conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism; of these, the latter two suggest, not specific doctrinal commitments, but areas of doctrinal concern; the former two are about spirituality: the narration of spiritual experience and patterns of devoted living. Mark Noll essayed a definition in terms of communities of conversation – an explicitly sociological/cultural account, which is very helpful in understanding some of the hard cases. Tim Larsen has recently (in the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology) offered a five-fold list, which begins by asserting that an evangelical is ‘an orthodox Protestant’, but moves on to historical location (’stands in the tradition of the global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revivals…’) and spirituality (‘has a preeminent place for the Bible in her or his Christian life…’) before returning to hover on the boundaries of doctrine and spirituality (’stresses reconciliation with God through the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross … stresses the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of an individual…’)

At most, these definitions gesture towards certain theological emphases as being necessary to, but not sufficient for, evangelical identity. A Calvinist is defined by the doctrines she believes; an evangelical not so. Until now, I have been fairly happy with this pattern of definition; now I think I can make an advance and sketch the broad shape of an explicitly evangelical doctrinal commitment. This requires, however, reflection on something a little more complicated than just belief in certain doctrines.

Theologies have a certain shape, as well as a certain content. Typically, the unreflective theology of (say) a new undergraduate student in the discipline is rather flat – more-or-less everything is equally important. This is dangerous and brittle; a particular view of church order (say) is just as much to be contended for as sola fide salvation; doubting the historicity of the Jonah narrative is as threatening to faith as doubting the historicity of the resurrection narrative. More mature theologies are shaped differently – they are not flat. Some things are foundational, or central; others are peripheral. And we can disagree as much about the shape of theology as about the content: Calvinists do not, historically, believe very differently (in content) about predestination to Catholics or Lutherans; but they regard the topic as far more central; today, debates of ordination (whether of women or of sexually active gay men and lesbians) are not just about who should be ordained, but about how much that matters. (Most conservative evangelical Anglicans were – and are – opposed to the ordination of women, but did not – and do not – see it as church-dividing; most of them do seem to see the gay debate as church-dividing, however.)

So, my proposal: the distinctiveness of evangelical theology is not so much its doctrinal content, as its shape. Evangelicals are people who see different things as central, when compared to other Christians. Let me offer some evidence.

In the eighteenth century, there are already debates about the shape of theology. Most people believed that a pattern of church order was central – presbyterians unchurched episcopalians, and vice-versa, for no other reason than this difference. In the historic denominations in Britain, there was disagreement over the centrality of doctrines of grace: the Baptists were formally divided over the issue, and Presbyterians were thoroughly committed to Calvinism, but the Church of England managed to tolerate both Calvinist and Arminian wings. Some denominations saw Trinitarian doctrine as unimportant; others took a stand on it.

Amongst the early evangelical leaders, there is debate also. The Wesleys are both very committed to episcopal government (when John finally at the end of his life gives in and ordains some preachers for the American mission, Charles’s response is astonishingly vitriolic), and to Arminianism; Whitefield is episcopal and Calvinist, but not very interested in either as defining points; Edwards is prepared to shift on church government (he is Congregationalist, but suggests he would be happy to become Presbyterian at one point in a letter), but is profoundly committed to Calvinism. For all of them, however, soteriology becomes a central doctrine, in particular, as it relates to sanctification. The Wesleys are convinced that the defining doctrine of their movement is punctiliar entire sanctification (see John’s, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, or Charles’s ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’ – a confident prayer for the gift of sinless perfection that seems to be sung remarkably often by people who would object quite strongly to that doctrine). For Jonathan Edwards, the defence of the Awakening turns on the visible lived experience of sanctification, as when he tells his wife Sarah’s story in Some Thoughts concerning the present Revival of Religion.

With the birth of pan-evangelicalism around 1800, however, comes a definite decision concerning the shaping of theology: questions of church order, including who may ordain or licence to preach, and the proper mode and subjects of baptism, and the Calvinist-Arminian debate, are alike consciously relegated to be secondary issues. The primary issues are the atonement of Christ, the primacy of Scripture, and the possibility and necessity of both personal and social transformation. The Bible Society, the Society for the Reformation of Manners, the Anti-Slavery campaigns, the London Missionary Society – and something like three dozen other organisations – are founded as a calculated and deliberate attempt to put to one side, almost as adiaphora, the then-decisive questions of church order and the doctrines of grace in order to embrace a shared focus on the power of a broad protestant theology to change society for the better.

So, an evangelical theology is not merely a conservative protestant one – in the eighteenth century there were many who were more conservative than the evangelicals, but who nonetheless opposed the ‘enthusiasts’. An evangelical theology is, within certain fixed limits, determinedly irenic and ecumenical, refusing to allow doctrinal differences to interfere with a shared commitment to mission aimed at personal and social transformation.

Scotland still knows extremely orthodox presbyterians who however have no evangelical spirit at all; indeed, the Evangelical Alliance has always been regarded with a certain suspicion within some sectors of the Scots churches, it seems, because it is explicitly soft on Calvinism (and on presbyterian government). But this softness is a decisive part of what it is to be evangelical, I think – to regard Calvinism as more important than personal conversion or social renewal is to espouse a non-evangelical theology.

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.’