What is it about theology – or perhaps, what is it about human intellectual activity generally – that makes it so hard for us to listen to each other well, read carefully what others have written, and restate each other’s views accurately? And then, what is it that makes us so cross, defensive, dismissive, when we find ourselves misunderstood or misrepresented or miscriticized?
It has a lot to do, no doubt, with the fact that so much of our dialogue and debate is done impersonally: we react not to people whom we know and love but to books or to blog posts or to bloodless online personalities or to remote overrated celebrities. I had lunch this week with a couple of pastors from a church that feels rather alien to – even hostile towards – my own theological and spiritual sensitivities. Indeed, I pointed out to them that I have written books that fundamentally disagree with their positions on women in leadership, prosperity theology, and the imminent return of Jesus. It could have been an awkward lunch, but they were very gracious men – and just establishing that much of a personal relationship was enough to suppress the urge to pick a fight. Instead, I left thinking that we should not tolerate or reinforce the gulf between, in this case, (charismatic) neo-Reformed and ‘emerging’ or ‘new perspective’ theologies – and that we should certainly not take so much satisfaction from the adversarial character of the debate. If we invested as much time in building relationships as in building up our polemical stockpiles, we might find a way beyond the impasse.
Having said that – OK, call me a hypocrite – what got me started on this tack was a couple of critical remarks that I came across while scouring the web in search of something to get wound up about.
Yes, the New Testament still has a future
In an article called ‘Preaching that lifts the bar’ Greg Haslam argues from the example of Apollos in Acts 18:24-26 that as preachers of the Word of God we should be, like Apollos, ‘true to the message of Scripture’. He admits that there are few honest preachers of Scripture and that we all share the prejudices and blindspots of our particular ecclesial culture. So far so good. He then goes on to explain how this affects our use Scripture:
We learn to subtly subtract or add to scripture, and there are some parts of the Bible we would never consider preaching on at all e.g. What Paul had to say about the roles of men and women in I Tim. 2; Romans 1 and its analysis of homosexuality and lesbianism; the ‘gifts of the Spirit’ in I Cor. 12-14, his advice about marriage and parenting in Eph. 5 and 6, his discussion of money and giving in 2 Cor. 8 and 9, or the Second Coming of Christ in I and II Thessalonians (just read Andrew Perriman’s ‘The Coming of the Son of Man’ – NT Eschatology for the Emerging Church 250 pages of extreme ‘Preterism’ – all the future sucked out of it!)
Now quite why he should suddenly have picked on me in this context I don’t know. In a way I’m flattered, but what annoys me is the charge of having subtracted from Scripture. It would have sucked the future out of the New Testament if I’d argued that Jesus and Paul were mistaken in their predictions of future events, or that they never actually made such predictions. But what I have argued is that they took the future very seriously, that they made predictions about future events that were of enormous theological, political and pastoral significance for the emerging churches, and that they were proved right – in the first place, by the events of the Jewish War and, in the second, by the victory of Christ over the gods of the ancient pagan world. I also argue that there is an ultimate horizon in the New Testament, consisting of a resurrection of all the dead, a ‘final justice’ (I like Wright’s phrase), and a renewal of heaven and earth. Far from sucking out the future from the New Testament, my view is that the community’s look to the future is pivotal for understanding New Testament theology – including Paul’s argument about the justification of God in Romans (the first copies of The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom are on their way to me).
Of course, there is room to disagree over the historical reference of the prophetic language; and I accept that the argument removes something from our future and relocates it in our past. But I don’t see that as at all a bad thing: it is a substantial theological gain for us as the people of God in Christ that Jesus and his disciples were vindicated for their defiance of Judaism, and that the early church was vindicated for its defiance of Caesar. And as I said, we are still left, I believe, with a final resurrection, a final judgment, and a new creation. That’s quite a lot really.
It also annoys me that this argument is so often confused with Preterism – extreme Preterism at that. It may look a bit like Preterism, it may smell a bit like Preterism, but it is not Preterism – and I say this only partly tongue-in-cheek. It is a matter of taking seriously the historical perspective of the early church for which the New Testament was written. Call it Perspectivism. Call it Historical and Theological Realism. The hermeneutical principle is very simple: it is to ask how the future appears if we consider it from where they stood, given the practical concerns that they would have had, given the natural fears that would have beset these marginal, persecuted communities of faith in Jesus, and given the symbolic and narrative framework within which they interpreted their circumstances.
I don’t think I’m a neo-Barthian, but I can’t be sure
The second criticism comes from a lengthy article with a lengthy title by R.G. Morrin: ‘Emerging Difficulties: A look at how the Bible today is being watered down in an Emerging Church context; comparing the neo-liberalism of Karl Barth with an Emerging Church Bibliology.’ Morrin argues that in its treatment of Scripture the ‘emerging church’ movement ‘looks very much like a resurgent Barthian approach to the Bible’, by which he means the ‘neo-orthodox’ view which ‘states that the Bible only becomes the Word of God in certain instances’ (4).
In an astonishing turn of events for contemporary biblical scholasticism, there is a movement afoot in the ranks of evangelical believers reverting back toward the unfounded biblical positions of Karl Barth. Terms like Emerging Church and Open Source Theology are found in connection with what appears to be more and more like a neo-Barthian movement among anti-orthodox theologians and pastors. Brian McLaren, Andrew Perriman and Rob Bell are among the names that head the list in this development. Their cavalier approach to and use of Scripture is strikingly similar to that of Karl Barth. (6)
Again I’m flattered to be cited between Brian McLaren and Rob Bell – though I think Morrin really needs to recalibrate his list of noteworthy representatives. As far as my paltry contribution to the debate is concerned, Morrin makes two particular charges. The first is that according to the Open Source Theology model for theological investigation truth is also ‘wide open to exploration, dialogue and reinterpretation’ (8). Well, there’s some truth in that. I do think we should regard our theology not as a fixed, immutable deposit but as an open-ended conversation. But it is a conversation that always addresses, engages with, takes its bearings from, and remains true to the text of Scripture. So it is not true to say (at least, not as I intended it) that ‘Open Source Theology is a departure from the certainty of Scripture as a complete revelation of God’s Will for man.’ It is merely a departure from the assumption that our ‘theology’ (8), in its various forms, scholarly and popular, formal and informal, constitutes a fully reliable account of Scripture – or of the mind, interests, actions, arguments, preaching, etc., of its historical cast.
Morrin also objects to my suggestion that the Bible should be read as a ‘profane text’:
Emerging Church leader Andrew Perriman also approaches the Bible as though it were a profane text. According to him, superimposing a meaning from above is to be avoided and a process of deconstruction for reconstruction afterward is an approach to Scripture for the emerging movement. Such deconstructionist thinking can also be found with Bell in his view of an “open-ended Bible.” … The bottom line is this, for both Barth and Emergents, absolute truth is out of reach since their view of Scripture is equally watered down. (10)
The point, however, has been taken out of context. The suggestion was explicitly an attempt to deal with the tension between fideistic and historical-critical approaches to Scripture: ‘Should we regard the factual content and coherence of the Bible to be divinely guaranteed? Or should we accept more public criteria for truthfulness and deny that the Bible is an epistemologically privileged text?’ I carefully stressed the ‘as though’ aspect of the argument, and I highlighted a limited set of practical benefits that accrue from this heuristic method: ‘it allows us to read the Bible as the unbeliever reads it; it helps to defamiliarise the Bible for us, which will be an essential aspect of the deconstruction process; it keeps open the possibility that a more robust and persuasive truthfulness will emerge as we grapple with the fact of the Bible’s historicity; and we keep in view the significance of the Bible as the Word of God for the church.’
It is not Scripture that is deconstructed and reconstructed: it is the system or worldview or metanarrative that has come, at the end of Christendom, at the end of modernity, to encase the text.
Finally, I do not pretend to have much of an understanding of Barth’s theology, so I may be missing the point; but I don’t see how this argument can be confused with Barth’s existentialist hermeneutic. My contention would be much more along the lines that the Word of God is to be encountered in the interaction between theology, testimony, parenesis, preaching, story-telling, etc., and the concrete historical experience of the community. Inasmuch as we now have the text but not the historical context, it’s perhaps not unreasonable to speak of the text as the Word of God. But the text always entails, implies, presupposes, a historical context and outlook, and I would suggest that it is by engaging with a critical imagination in the historical narrative, in Scripture as reflection on context, that we most usefully reconnect with its evangelical fulness – with the conviction that what God does through his people is ‘good news’ for the world.
This is not at all a watering-down of Scripture. Quite the opposite: it brings Scripture to life as a robust, relevant and reliable text for the church today. As for categories such as ‘absolute truth’, they contribute very little to this reconnection. They belong to a world-view is alien both to Scripture and to the chastened circumstances of the post-Christendom church.
Good. I feel a little bit better for that…
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