Ben Witherington in St Andrews

‘The School of Divinity presents a special series of open lectures byProfessor Ben Witherington (Asbury Seminary, Lexington, KY)

Oral Texts and Rhetorical Contexts: Rethinking the Nature of the New Testament (Monday 14th Jan 2-3.30)

Will the Real Beloved Disciple Please Rise Up? The Historical Figure of the Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John (Tues 15th Jan, 2-3.30)

Did the Canon Misfire? Rethinking Recent Rethinking about the Canon (Thurs 17th Jan 2-3.30)’

I shall have to miss the first of these, unfortunately, unless I can cancel a long-standing engagement in the south of England, but I’m looking forward to the rest. Ben is a fairly regular visitor to St Andrews, and always worth hearing.

On no longer being sure whether I ‘believe in’ God

In writing the previous post a footnote occurs to me: is ‘believe in’ the right verb?

My gut instinct is that many others are happier: I think the Church (and with it and in it, me) more nearly ‘confesses,’ ‘proclaims,’ and ‘worships’ God than ‘believes in’ Him.

Such gut instincts could only be proved or disproved by a decent exegetical and theological analysis of ’salvation by faith,’ I suppose, but I offer as a first thought that privileging ‘belief’ (or even ‘faith’) over confession and worship might come in part from privileging Paul, or perhaps even a particular reading of Paul, over the rest of Scripture, particularly perhaps the Old Testament. And I am almost certain that the meaning of belief in modern English (‘giving cognitive assent to’) is a million miles away from anything Paul meant to suggest was important.

On no longer being sure whether I believe in ‘God’

Christmas for me brought one clear message, and one potentially interesting thought. The message came from a series of gifts: by the time I had received a gym ‘stepper’ machine, a new tracksuit and a kit bag, to go with three free sessions at the gym, something was becoming obvious…

The thought began with the new leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, who was asked in a radio interview just after his election if he believed in God. He replied ‘No.’ The answer was both clear and succinct, suggesting he is doomed to fail in politics; it was given close enough to the Christmas news drought to provoke a brief media flurry of comment about the place of belief in God, or at least of public declarations of belief in God, in British political life (rather too often accompanied by comparisons with the United States, as smug and self-congratulatory as they were asinine and ill-informed). In the course of reading one of these, I suddenly realised that I know longer knew what my answer to the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ would be.

Philip Pullman might be the proximate cause, although I suspect Richard Dawkins and (particularly) A.C. Grayling are the deeper roots. I confess to not having read Pullman’s novels (‘Had we but world enough and time…’), but the release of the film has brought an inevitable body of Christian reaction, ranging from the somewhat hysterical, to the rather thoughtful. A common feature at the more thoughtful end of the spectrum has been the suggestion that the God criticised in the films has nothing to do with the God Christians confess and proclaim. This put me in mind of Grayling’s defence of Dawkins against a common criticism earlier in the year: Dawkins’s critics suggested he needed to know more theology, to which Grayling (repeatedly) made the point that one does not need to be an expert ‘fairiologist’ to not believe in fairies. At the time I reflected that the point only half-held. One needs to know enough to know what a fairy is before one can rationally disbelieve in their existence, and so it remained open to any religious believer to suggest that the being Dawkins attempts to disprove is not the God she worships. (Alvin Plantinga deployed the argument entertainingly and convincingly here.)

So to the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ I suppose I had always thought the question ‘which God?’ a smart answer, but now I suspect it is important, because, in reading journalistic reflection on the question, I have come to suspect that the ‘God’ in the question defaults to the ‘God’ of the Deists—limited; philosophically-defined; basically inactive—rather than the triune God of the Church’s confession.

But my answer to the question is less interesting than reflection on this odd cultural quirk. The Deists were members of the intellectual elite, of course, but the movement was short-lived and numerically very limited; if I am right, why has their conception of ‘God’ become assumed in Western public discourse?

I have some thoughts on an answer, and indeed on whether ‘belief’ is the right verb but those are perhaps for another post.

Bruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (3)

The third lecture, ‘Immutable in Passibility: The Contribution of Karl Barth,’ traced the origins of Barth’s Christology in Dorner and Herrmann. Jason has suggested in a comment on the second of this series that this was the best of the lectures; I would not disagree. It happens it was also the one I chaired.

There is a danger with any great theologian that s/he becomes detached from historical context. St Thomas is studied as if Peter Lombard had never written, and Albert the Great had never responded; works on Calvin represent him as springing from nowhere, ignoring half a generation of Reformation debate that is crucial to understanding what he was about; all of us who teach, I fear, have painted the caricature of Barth that has him repudiating all he learnt in the German schools when he came to write on Romans. Bruce, by contrast, took us from the speculative idealism of Dorner to Church Dogmatics IV, via Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics, showing the connections along the way. The result was an impressively fresh vision of what Barth was about.

Wilhelm Herrmann was the key here, at least to the thread I am trying to develop in these comments (there were other narratives going on in the lecture series; I judged this to be the main and controlling one, but I am open to correction on that). Herrmann’s rejection of metaphysics remains in Barth as a rejection of abstraction. The truth is not found in such conceptions as ‘humanity’ and ‘deity’, which are then applied to particular things; rather it is found in concrete actual events. We should not first consider what it is to be divine and then think about incarnation; we should consider the particular history of Jesus Christ, and discover any ideas about ‘divinity’ we may want to hold from there.

This is some distance from Herrmann’s own, almost existential, take on the nature of Christianity, of course. Dorner’s influence is what is important in explaining the shift. Despite his heavy commitment to idealism, Dorner succeeds, at least in part, is shifting from substance to actuality in his consideration of Christology. That is, he narrates the incarnation on the basis of the particular event that happened, not abstracted accounts of what must have happened given the necessary properties of ‘divine nature’ and ‘human nature’. Barth completed what Dorner set out to do. His Christology makes use of classical metaphysical terms at times, and idealistic language at other times, but this is all merely a borrowing of language when it happens to become useful; these technical vocabularies do not indicate, still less demonstrate, a commitment to the underlying intellectual systems. (Bruce argued this point at some length, and completely convincingly to my mind. In fact, my major, perhaps only serious, criticism of the entire lecture series was that he argued this point too convincingly for one of his subsidiary theses to stand. More on than later, though.)

So, for Barth we can only understand what deity means by listening closely to the gospel history. This means that (picking up the language of CD IV) humility, obedience, and the like are intrinsic to what it is to be God—specifically, to what it is to be God the Son. Dorner’s devastating critique of the nineteenth-century Lutheran kenoticists can be avoided by extending his own insights concerning incarnation: in the act of kenosis God the Son does not surrender what it is to be God; rather the act of kenosis is precisely what it is to be God the Son.

However, this victory cannot be too easily won. (One of the—many—impressive features of these lectures was the repeated refusal to claim victories too early; problems were faced up to and addressed with seriousness at every turn.) If kenosis is what it is to be God the Son, then from all eternity this must always be true. Barth’s response to this is his doctrine of election: the gospel story mirrors the triune shape of God’s life; in the act of election the Son is determined for reprobation; suffering; rejection; self-abnegation; death. The Son empties himself—that, simply, is what it is to be the second mode of being of the divine life.

What N.T. Wright should have said last night (imho…)

Jon (Hi Jon; don’t you get more than enough of my ramblings in class?!) left a comment on the previous post, saying he wanted to ask Tom Wright a question: ‘Can a scientist believe in the resurrection?’ I wasn’t at the lecture, so can’t assess the implied criticism that it didn’t adequately address the title, but the comment got me thinking in the watches of the night. It is/was an odd question to address in a lecture, in that it admits of a trivial empirical answer:- even on the strictest possible definition of ‘scientist’ (say, doctorate; published research; currently employed in the field), there are several dozen scientists in my acquaintance who do believe in the resurrection, and actuality entails possibility (if they do, they clearly can…).

So, why might this have been an interesting question for Tom to ask, or to be asked (if the title was given to him)? I think I can see an answer; before outlining it, I ought to confess that, not only was I not at the lecture, but (embarrassing confession time) I haven’t yet read the third of Tom’s series on Christian Origins, The Resurrection of the Son of God, so I really am flying in the dark here!

Wright’s project is, even in his own estimation, a renewal of the quest of the historical Jesus. That is, it is an attempt to discern what can be known of Jesus by the methods of historical scholarship alone. Hence the various debates with the Jesus Seminar: they are about the same task with the same tools, if disagreeing how to use them. Hence also the enormous apologetic value of the project, if it works: the aim is to develop a body of knowledge about the person of Jesus Christ that is certain, and not dependent on a faith-perspective or prejudice or anything else.

Hence, finally, the various debates about the appropriateness of the project: can we really abstract questions of fact from questions of perspective so easily? The question of the resurrection is somewhere near the heart of these. Wright has tried to argue that the existence and nature of the early Christian movement is sufficiently remarkable that it demands explanation, and that it can only be explained historically by an astonishing event happening very soon after the crucifixion of Christ. He has, in the past, cautiously suggested that the account of the resurrection of Jesus, would, if true, be an adequate explanation for this fact. He has further suggested that no other proposed explanation is remotely adequate.

This, however, presents us with a big question: can the event of bodily resurrection be part of a historical reconstruction? There is a response to Wright’s programme that sees it as magnificent, but fatally flawed at precisely this point. Historical scholarship operates with a ‘methodological naturalism,’ that is, it refuses to accept, a priori, any explanation that does not accord with a purely naturalistic account of what may happen in the world. On such an account, Tom Wright’s work then becomes at best a massively elaborate reductio ad absurdum: purely naturalistic history cannot explain the existence of the Christian churches, one of the major facts of world history, without denying its own premises by accepting the possibility of bodily resurrection. It may be that Tom can demonstrate the premises of this argument, but even if he can, all he has proved is the inadequacy of naturalistic historical scholarship, not the truth of the resurrection—that’s the way the logic of a reductio works.

This response, however, probably credits the generality of historical work with more philosophical self-awareness than it in fact possesses. I suspect that most historians, if pressed, would not reach for words like ‘naturalistic’, but for words like ‘plausible’: they seek to give an account of events, and the connections between them, which is ‘plausible’ to the intellectual culture in which they write. Thus, eighteenth-century historians might have appealed to ‘extraordinary operations of Providence’ (at least until Gibbon), and nineteenth-century historians might have assumed the inevitable evolution of all human cultures until they mirrored the civilization of (Protestant) Europe, but such ideas are no longer culturally acceptable.

If this is right, then to shift the cultural plausibility status of the resurrection from ‘impossible’ to ‘extraordinarily unlikely’ would be a major gain for Tom Wright’s argument. And a discussion of the science of resurrection is probably the best way to attempt to do that.

N.T. Wright in St Andrews

So, as I type, Tom Wright is giving a lecture down in town entitled ‘Can a Scientist believe in the Resurrection?’ This is the first of the Gregory lectures on Science and Religion, an excellent venture which my colleague Prof. Alan Torrance has organised.
Me? I’m ferrying children to and from a primary school Christmas disco. I’ve been trying to think of some pious comment about the importance of children in the Kingdom, (or even some sarcastic Baptist comment about bishops), but actually, I’d much rather be listening to Tom.
Oh well. Ben Witherington is with us for three lectures next month, and I should be able to make at least two of those.

A less than devotional thought that crossed my mind whilst celebrating the Eucharist in a medieval chapel in NE Scotland in December

Say what you like about Baptist architecture; at least we have central heating…

St Samthann

No, I hadn’t heard of her either. We have a weekly college eucharist here in St Mary’s, organised by our student society, and I was celebrating this week. Although it was the last of term, I did not want a Christmas theme, so I glanced at a couple of lectionaries I had handy for readings. One of them noted it was the feast of St Samthann yesterday, although other resources place her today.

She was the adopted daughter of an Irish king, and like so many of the female Irish saints was delivered from an arranged marriage by a miracle and then devoted herself to serving God as a nun. Various miracles are recorded in later years, but she was known mainly for her wisdom: she gave guidance and advice to many, including the teacher Dairchellach and Maelruin, the leader of the Ceile De, one of the most significant reform/renewal movements of Irish Christianity.

The hagiographies do not mention it, but one other point I noticed: in more than half the stories I found recorded about her, she was laughing (‘giggling’ at one point, although I haven’t checked the Latin!).

She died in 739. A woman who taught the leading churchmen of her day, and whose holy wisdom repeatedly broke into laughter. I wish I had heard of her earlier.

Learning to preach from Graham Norton

The preacher left me cold, although I could tell the, mostly elderly, people around me were enjoying it. I began to analyse what was going on. He was an able preacher, in a style I recognised, the message carried by good-humoured anecdotes. Then it struck me—it was like listening to Ned Sherrin (a comedian and raconteur who formed his style in the 1960s, although he was active in broadcasting until his death in October).

I pursued the thought: the preachers we admired fifteen years ago when I was at college could be compared to Ben Elton doing stand-up—the style was loud, brash, fast, and political, just like ‘motormouth’ had been.

So, I have a prescription for good preaching (in Britain) today: be like Graham Norton.

This is only half a joke. Preachers need to communicate in a culturally-aware and up-to-date way. If we sound like we’re two generations out of touch, then we reinforce the stereotype that church, and with it Christ, is irrelevant to modern life. What comedians witness to is the sense that cultural models of good communication change very rapidly. (I could write something very pretentious about hypermodernity here, but actually I think this happens from time to time in every culture—look at the shifts in poetic diction from Pope to Byron, or the development of dramatic voice during Shakespeare’s lifetime. If I were better educated, I’m sure I could find some examples from non-English speaking cultures…)

Norton, & with him other mainstream current comedians, cultivates a style that is self-deprecating and self-mocking (Sherrin exuded quiet confidence; Elton in-your-face brashness). The humour comes much less from stand-alone jokes as from comic themes that are developed and continuously re-appear later in the discourse; there is an assumption of cultural literacy, which allows allusive references or un-narrated visuals to become a part of the humour.

A homiletic style modelled on Graham Norton (or Jonathan Ross, or Ricky Gervais, or Linda Smith, or Sean Lock, who all exhibit the same style, more-or-less) would be relaxed and understated, refusing to take itself seriously, it would build in moments of mockery of its own shortcomings and mistakes. Illustrations would be themes developed early in the sermon and referred to several times in the course of the development. There would be an identification with the hearers by means of an easy assumption of shared cultural reference frames.

And in five years time it will be completely out of date.

Bruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (2)

Bruce McCormack’s second lecture, ‘Passibility in Mutability: The Failure of the Older Kenoticism,’ focused on the nineteenth-century kenotic Christologies of Thomasius and Gess, and on Dorner’s critique. The British kenoticists (Forsyth and Mackintosh), and Baillie’s objections, were there, but the treatment was slightly more cursory, I think because Bruce thinks that Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics should have been found decisive, and so no-one should have developed a kenotic Christology after it.

‘Kenotic Christology,’ for those who don’t know, takes its cue from the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which affirms that Christ ‘emptied himself’ (heauton ekenosen, hence ‘kenosis’ and ‘kenotic’). A kenotic Christology understands what happened at the incarnation in terms of this self-emptying: God became human by giving something up or laying something down. As Bruce showed, the idea is very consistent with certain traditional themes of Lutheran Christology, and was developed at some length by a school of nineteenth-century German Lutherans, headed by the great Thomasius. (It later made its way into Britain, being embraced by, amongst others, P.T. Forsyth and H.R. Mackintosh,until D.M. Baillie’s God was in Christ put an end to it.

The thesis of this lecture was, essentially, that the positions of Thomasius, Forsyth, and indeed any other kenoticism in the nineteenth-century pattern, will inevitably collapse into the radical kenoticism of Gess.

Very crudely, Gess suggested that in the incarnation the divine Son simply chooses to stop being divine. This is obviously unacceptable, but the question is how you have any kenotic Christology which does not eventually affirm the same thing. If the divine Son voluntarily chooses to give up being omniscient, say, then either omniscience is not an essential property of divinity, in which case God is not omniscient at all (because there are no accidental properties in God; all that He is, He must be), or it is, and so the Son becomes something less than God in the act of self-emptying. Any account of kenotic Christology falls to such logic.

First comment on this lecture: the historical narrative was simply stunning. It’s not really my period, but I have taught modern Christology at postgrad level, supervised on Forsyth, & recently examined a doctoral thesis on Dorner, and I do think I know my way around this stuff. Bruce’s knowledge of the detail of the texts, and insight into the grand sweep of the arguments, was nothing less than inspiring.

Second comment: as Bruce indicated, the problem repeatedly in the nineteenth century was the assumption that the patristic hypostasis and prosopon could be translated into the English ‘person’ (or German ‘Person’), with all the connotations of those words in a post-Romantic age. Strauss, for instance (a quotation Bruce used): ‘to speak of two natures in one person is to speak of a single self-consciousness, for what else could a single person mean?’ However, it is clear that in the patristic construction of Trinity and Christology such ‘personal’ characteristics as ‘self-consciousness’, if considered at all, were attached to natures not persons—this was, for instance, the whole point of the orthodox solutions to the monoenergist and monothelite controversies. (This is why Barth preferred ‘mode of being’ to ‘person’ for the three hypostases of the Trinity; in post-Romantic terms, all that is ‘personal’ in God is one.) Bruce’s whole lecture was constructed on the suggestion that nineteenth-century German Christology, at least, was endlessly struggling with how to hold together the confession that the human nature is anhypostatic (it does not exist apart from in union with the divine Son) and that there is a genuinely human will alongside the divine will in the incarnate One (‘dithelitism’). I think this is an extraordinarily perceptive reading of the history, but I also think that, with a clearer understanding that the word ‘hypostasis’ does not mean ‘person’ in a Romantic sense, we can cut through the problem very easily.

Footnote: anyone know how to enter Greek on a wordpress blog?