Theological misapprehensions

Abstract

Angus Paddison (ed.), Theologians on Scripture (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016); 236 pp.: 9780567182401, £95 (hbk); 9780567681720, £28.99 (pbk)

This is an interesting book, though perhaps not always for the reasons apparently intended by its editor. Paddison (a Reader in Theology at Winchester) has invited a variety of professional theologians to write about their trade, and the relationship between that and their basic source material, the Scriptures. To guide their thinking he asks some general questions:

In your theological work, what has been the implicit or explicit theology of Scripture that you have worked with?

How has the reading of Scripture shaped and contributed to your theological vision?

With whom do you read Scripture?

For whom do you read Scripture?

In your theological work, how have you utilized the contribution of biblical studies and how have you negotiated the challenges and potential of ‘historical critical’ readings of the text?

Clearly, there is considerable overlap between these questions, and his contributors have found very different ways of approaching them. Although some essays have five sections, nominally answering the questions above, they have widely different sub-headings, and, while a few have more, others have none at all.

Although Paddison, like any competent editor, in his final survey attempts to draw common threads from the replies to his questions, a rather different reading might suggest how little these various theologians actually have in common. Certainly one’s heart warms to Stephen Holmes (St Andrews), a Baptist and a confessed evangelical, who faces the problems of his trade by admitting at the outset the sheer strangeness of Scripture, and its inherent resistance to any kind of systematization (p. 107). This does not, however, shake his faith in its ‘inerrancy’. More constructively, Timothy Gorringe (Emeritus Professor, Exeter) in a well-considered and closely argued essay, writes that ‘Scripture was itself tradition, the history of a long argument in which Jesus and Paul themselves take sides’ (p. 72). Such a definition of ‘tradition’ in terms of an ongoing historical debate accords more with T. S. Eliot’s idea of tradition as a process of continual change than with the alternative notion of an unalterable treasure, handed down from generation to generation – common, oddly, to both conservative evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic thinkers alike. But to suggest that ‘Scripture’ might itself be part of such a tradition of constant change is certainly a bold move – and not one supported by many of the other contributors to this volume.

Nevertheless, although one might at least assume that the ‘Scripture’ alluded to in the title consists primarily of the Bible itself, in practice what is meant by the word amounts almost to different things. For Andreas Andreopoulos, an Orthodox priest at Winchester, liturgy is paramount, and the actual text of the Bible is viewed and interpreted through the lens of Greek Orthodox liturgy, with little or no attempt to give it any other kind of historical context. For others, coming from evangelical traditions, the ‘inerrancy’ of Scripture itself is an axiomatic starting point for Holmes and Murray Rae (Otago); the latter even refers to ‘the inspiration of Scripture’ as a ‘doctrine’ (p. 134). For Christoph Schwöbel (Tübingen), however, this is anathema:

Where in a Christian context the inerrancy of the biblical text itself is posited as the first fundamental article of faith it displaces the triune God and God’s revelation as the foundation of Christian faith. (p. 176)

To raise the most familiar modern problem of biblical inerrancy: none of these academic theologians attempt to defend Genesis on historical grounds, although Mike Higton (Professor of Theology at Durham) casts a nervous glance towards Creationists, adding that just as the Bible is not a science textbook, nor is it a moral textbook (pp. 98–9). This is, of course, an interesting point, since until Darwin and the concept of deep time in the nineteenth century, it was the morality of many of the Old Testament stories that most troubled critics. Creationism is more radically, if not explicitly, challenged by Oliver Davies (Kings College, London), who takes the long-controversial relationship between science and religion to a new level by relating Scripture to what we know of human evolution. In particular, he argues that there is very little evidence of what he calls ‘social violence’ in hunter-gatherer societies (p. 44), and that it is only with agriculture that ‘the levels of human violence suddenly soar’ (p. 46) – a conclusion, incidentally, not supported by Steven Pinker, one of his cited sources. But the attempt to give historical and cultural sources for such myths as the Fall and the Tower of Babel, however conjectural, is at least interesting and provides a much-needed move towards a more unified understanding of human physical and moral evolution.

Earlier, Robin Gill (Emeritus Professor, University of Kent – and, not least, editor of this journal), whose professional work was much concerned with medical and other forms of public policy, takes on, by implication, such modern emotive evangelical shibboleths as homosexuality and abortion, and outlines what he terms ‘theological realism’, which, in any historical period ‘sees continuities between theological and secular thought and is sceptical about the capacity of Scripture or any other ancient text to deliver unambiguous, specific and self-sufficient moral precepts appropriate for the modern world’ (p. 54). Instead, he is prepared to make common cause with any other faith or humanist group prepared to acknowledge the four virtues of ‘compassion, care, faith/trust, and humility’. That last quality is one not always present among theologians – and he is, I think, the only one of the contributors to mention it explicitly as a theological virtue.

But all such liberal theological positions are sharply outflanked in essays by Lisa Isherwood (Winchester) and Anthony Reddie (University of South Africa) on feminist and black liberationist theologies, which explicitly cherry-pick passages of Scripture that support their interpretative perspectives, while discounting others which do not. To be fair, both, in various ways, make the point that the Bible not infrequently contradicts itself, and therefore that all interpretations of biblical texts involve a high degree of selection, privileging certain passages over others – and that they, in effect, are only consciously doing what those of the ‘inerrancy’ school are doing, no doubt unconsciously. Thus Reddie writes:

This adherence to Scripture by Black people in Britain is selective like all approaches to reading the Bible. I have placed the last few words in italics because I think it is of crucial importance in the context of this discussion. I believe that all faithful reading communities of the Bible across the world are selective, idiosyncratic and contradictory in the way they handle this sacred text. (p. 152)

Evangelical critics might well wonder what the word ‘sacred’ is doing in that last sentence. More confusing is Isherwood’s unexplained distinction between ‘feminist’ and ‘womanist’ – a new term at least to me. What is perhaps more significant is her need to make her radicalism more emphatic by embracing the static and unchanging meaning of ‘tradition’, rather than allowing that she, herself, by such writing, might be entering the alternative aforementioned meaning of the word in terms of ongoing debate.

But my point should now be clear enough: in addition to the variations embraced by Paddison’s rather arbitrary selection of theologians, a great gulf emerges between those who believe in the inerrancy of their basic texts, and those who see it as their professional business to question them. Without agreement on even the fundamentals of their trade, including the meaning of words such as ‘scripture’ and ‘tradition’, there is little hope of agreement elsewhere. As if sensing that somehow their accounts do not adequately cover their work, many of the contributors – with honourable exceptions, including Gill and Schwöbel – make too great a play of pious and self-regarding commitments in abstract terms. The following, which I quote, tactfully, without attribution, is typical of many other passages in this book:

Caught up myself in the transformative work of God, I pray that by God’s mercy and grace, my thinking and speaking in the light of Scripture may itself be a witness to, and so play a part in, the creative, redemptive, and sanctifying economy of God.

Amen. Who – except perhaps the meanest and most pedantic of reviewers, such as myself – could possibly object to such sentiments? The problem is that this kind of pious self-description was tacitly invited, if perhaps not anticipated, by the terms of the original briefing. It would be interesting to find a second volume with a slightly more rigorous questioning of the terms of the discipline itself rather than the piety of the respondents.

As is inevitable with a work of this diversity, there are a few misprints and typos, but by far the most puzzling is Paddison’s own claim that one contributor, Zoë Bennett, ‘imprecates that theories are models or maps’ (p. 199). The metaphor of theories as maps is common enough, and perhaps useful in context, but surely there is no need to suggest she is swearing?

Footnotes

Author Biography

Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Glasgow and Honorary Professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.