The Unity of the Bible?

All this talk in Chris Wright and Graeme Goldsworthy about 'overarching frameworks' and such makes me want to ask: in what does the coherence of the Bible lie? How can it be properly described?

Narratives cohere (often) around a central character or set of characters. Or, as in a saga, like D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, several generations of people living in the same place provide the threads of interconnection between the succesive stages of the novel. One novel I read, Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, coheres around an inanimate object (an accordian) as its finds itself in successive sets of hands. In Anna Karenina two plots are interwoven though there is little connection between them - they are connected in that the characters share in family relations of a somewhat distance kind.

Ultimately, it is the collecting of the elements together in the single work that unifies them, though usually there are more elements of formal coherence than that. Think of a painting in an art gallery: it is the framing and placing of the elements within the frame and on the wall that invites us to consider them as a unity, even if the elements of the painting are quite discordant. If they are discordant, we tend to ask why they have been juxtaposed and wrestle to discover what relation there might be or that we might find between them.

These formal coherences - often unimportant in themselves - invite the reader to consider and discover thematic coherences as suggested by the stories. Sometimes these are quite surprising, granted. Sometimes the formal coherences do not account for all the elements in the work, at least not obviously. But the human love of comparing and contrasting, and of finding patterns, makes for the most enjoyable part of engaging with narrative art forms.

The other aspect of our apprehension of coherence when it comes to narratives is of course time. We experience time in narratives through emplotment. No matter how many post-modern novels cut and paste their narratives, the narrative form relies heavily on a succession of events and invites us to consider (or tells us) what the relation between the events consists in. EM Forster famously wrote: 'The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.'

The canonical Bible has a coherence in a formal sense in the first instance in that it traces the history of Israel with its God in a roughly chronological order. The New Testament claim is that it continues and indeed completes this history. However, there are things that are collected within the lists of Law, Writings and Prophets that are not obviously part of the main succession of events. Very few clues are given as to why Job, for example, has been placed within the canon: which is for us readers an invitation to consider what it does contribute. It is almost as if it has been placed there by intuition: (from the human side) by an editor not quite knowing what he was yet looking at but sure that what he had was of inestimable value, and recognising in it the divine voice.

I suppose what I am leaning towards saying is this: the formal unity of the Bible consists of the collecting of these books together as Scripture; and its relation to salvation-history. The Bible describes a series of events that were connected to one another over time, in place, and by a people connected intergenerationally. This formal unity allows then for multiple strands of thematic coherence to be discerned, some of which are more prominent and others less so, and which have complex relations to one another. Of course, some of these coherence is quite obvious, as the authors of scripture deliberately cite each other, and play with and develop - even critique - the themes and other content of other scriptural books. This is also why it is inadequate to read any passage of scripture without due consideration to its relationship to salvation-history and without relation to how the particular themes within it are treated and developed within the canon.

Psalm 95 - if you hear his voice today

Cesky Krumlov

This week, I am preaching on Psalm 95. It is a Psalm that haunts me. When I went to St Andrew’s North Oxford as a kid in the 1970s they would chant this Psalm just before we went out to Sunday school. So the words got buried in my head right next to the multiplication tables and the words to Abba songs.

My kids won't have this experience, because we don't do liturgy like that anymore...

But this Psalm also haunts me because it is such a disquieting and uncomfortable Psalm. It starts out as a very normal and upbeat sounding Psalm, a Psalm of praise to God. But half way, it turns into a stern warning. It is like a cute furry animal you pick up and cuddle, that then bites you so that you scream... If you hear God's voice today, you better be ready and responsive. You had better be ready for what comes, receptive to its most angular and critical parts. You had better be soft-hearted...

It was a great choice to have this Psalm in morning prayer, just as the word of God was about to read. Come, let us sing for joy to God the rock of our salvation!... but, if you hear his voice today - and let's not mistake it, you ARE hearing his voice - be ready to receive it. Don't be deaf to it...

Some holiday reading

Sacha gazes out over Prague.

Prague Castle with St Vitus' Cathedral from the Charles Bridge.

OK - we are are back. Czech Republic was great. Sadly, the churches seems to be emptied out shells, and I could see no evidence of Protestantism at all. The land of Jan Hus is no longer a place of the kind of preaching he was known for, even though his statue is in the Old Town Square.

I read while I was away:

Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost. I went through an Ondaatje phase back in the mid 90s - I read all his poetry and novels. Loved his poetic style and his depictions of love and pain. He is a writer who really knows about the human body. Then I never got around to this novel which he sets in his native Sri Lanka. It is brilliantly written - three or four terrific, wounded characters. And more suffering of an appalling kind mixed in with illicit and licit love. The narrative has a kind of CSI flavour which is becoming a bit tired now after all those TV shows (the main character is a forensic anthropologist).

Franz Kafka - The Trial. OK, I tried here and failed again. I have tried several times to enjoy this book and where better then in Kafka's home town? But frankly, it is a dull book. Perhaps it is badly translated...

Will Self - The Book of Dave. I enjoyed this immensely. I am a self-confessed Self fan (??). He is a real surrealist. This is a kind of dystopian fantasy of what England would like if the mad, racist and misogynist ranting of a London cabbie of today were written on metal plates and found in a post-apocalyptic future and then treated as a divine revelation. It is a non-too-subtle satire of revealed religion and its capacity to wreak havoc. But Self also endears us to Dave, who by the end of the novel has been redeemed sufficiently to have written a second, more humane book... Wonderful passages written entirely in Cockney.

Sam Wells - God's Companions. I have to review this book - as I said before, I think it is frustratingly cheesy. I won't put it like that in my review...the best thing is that Wells has discovered the local church as the site of theo-praxis. Evangelicals I think have know that the local church is where the action is for years. The emphasis on symbolic practices is curious to me: Wells wants us to practice foot-washing, for example. It is funny that ritualists read scripture literally at this point, and non-ritualists read it metaphorically...

Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imagineries. Interesting take on the way in which revolutions come about and why or why not they are successful. There needs to be a vision of what a society could be under a new regime - merely opposing the current ruler will produce chaos unless there is a deeply felt sense of an alternative national/social/political identity. Why did the Velvet revolution succeed in 1989 without bloodshed? Because it was obvious to the Czechs that there was another and better way of being Czech, without communism. Maybe Taylor is only saying what is obvious in different words... also, he clearly feels he has earned the right to make sweeping historical statements without footnotes or evidence. It is hard to challenge him when he is writing like this.

Roger Scruton - Modern Culture. Scruton is a fabulous English conservative. The real thing. And thoroughly Kantian. His thesis in this book is that without religion 'high' culture will die. He mounts a sterling defence of high culture against the dominance of 'cultural' 'studies' in our schools and universities. I have to say he has my sympathies: good writing just is good writing I am afraid. You can't make pop culture better by clever criticism of it I am afraid. One of his best points is that the canon of Western culture is already a tolerant and diverse and self-critical canon - and is so because of Christianity. To present as a single monolithic ideology is simply false. Scruton is an unabashed Kantian, and I feel this is his great weakness - because he presents Kant's view of religion rather than the really Christian one. Christianity for Scruton seeps out of the English soil and is the natural accompaniment to Englishness. Only an Anglican of a certain blinkered and rural kind could think that.

A break

Well, we are off:

it's time for a holiday and so we are going to visit relatives in the Czech republic!

Back in two weeks or so: but feel free to rake over the coals of a few of the discussions below and add your thoughts.

Rowan Williams on Maurice Wiles

Yesterday I went to a cafe and read an essay that Williams wrote in 1993 on his former Oxford colleague Maurice Wiles. In the 1970s, Maurice Wiles made quite a stir by challenging the incarnation, among other orthodox Christian doctrines.

The essay represents an intriguing generational shift, however. Williams is highly critical (in a very polite British way of course!) of Wiles because, in his re-appraisal of Christian doctrines, Wiles applies a kind of Kantian 'abstract universalist rationalism.' Williams, the child of the 60s, and more of a neo- Nietzchean, suspicious of power claims and special interests, wants to question this whole method: why is this rationalism immune from critique? What methods can settle the legitimacy of doctrinal claims? Even though Wiles claims to have recovered a pre-dcotrinal Jesus, he has done so by de-historicising and universalising him. Williams rightly disputes this procedure:

If Jesus is constitutive for Christian language about God and for the present reality of the believer’s relation to God, in such a way that what is said, done, and suffered is strictly unintelligible without continuing reference to Jesus in a more than historically explicatory way, doctrine will be an attempt to do justice to the way in which the narrative and the continuing presence (or presence-in-absence, if you want to nuance it further) of Jesus is held actively to shape present horizons, in judgement and in grace. The disagreement is not over whether doctrinal utterances are or are not to be received uncritically, but over whether any kind of critical method can settle the legitimacy of the distinctively doctrinal enterprise itself as generally conceived by Christians, an enterprise resting as it does on the conviction, variously and often very confusedly articulated in our primary texts, [note the doctrine of scripture here! MJ] that our world of speech and corporate life has been comprehensively remade, so that new conceptualities are brought to birth. Kritik can look hard at those conceptualities, with a wide variety of suspicions; but not all Wiles’s reasoned eloquence should persuade us that it is in a position to disallow the underlying unsettlement of our thought: the question, ‘What is it that is true of Jesus of Nazareth that would make some sense of the Church’s commitment to new imaginings of God and humanity and of the possibility of new relation to God and humanity?’ I believe that this is in fact the question that arises from taking with full seriousness the notion of parable which Wiles finds so attractive – an event which interrupts us and compels us to take up new positions by showing us quite unexpectedly where and what we are in respect of an unforeseen reality set down before us; something more than an extended simile. Wiles is far from insensitive to this priority of krisis over Kritik; but how can his model of doctrinal criticism allow it its proper weight?

The answer is no! See how Williams gets from Ricoeur this idea of parable interrupting and compelling new and unforeseen ideas: and how vague Williams is because he is speaking of what may yet come about in an unpredictable way.

Kostenberger and O'Brien on Mission

I found this comment from Kostenberger and O'Brien to be a helpful clarification (Wright's book suffers from conceptual confusions):

The mission of the exalted Jesus is accomplished through the witness of the apostles in the power of the Holy Spirit. The one who is himself sent by God sends his representatives to bear testimony to his salvation, to announce the forgiveness of sins and to make disciples of all nations. In other words, his witnesses continue the mission of Jesus by declaring to men and women everywhere the glorious gospel of the grace of God. As the Father has sent him, so Jesus sends them. Moreover, this testimony to Jesus and his saving work involves a wide-ranging series of activities that result in believers being built up in Christ and formed into Christian congregations. It is not limited to primary evangelism and its immediate results...

And so: good works of all kinds, that flow from the impact of Christ in the power of the Spirit, are rightly ordered to mission (and to ecclesiology, too).

K and O'B do a much better job at a 'Biblical Theology of Mission' I find, partly because they don't overplay the OT to the extent that Wright does.

The Mission of God IX

How big is our gospel? Chris Wright asks, in his chapter on God's model of redemption. (I am curious about this language of 'models'... I think there is a problem here, not sure what yet).

He goes on:

The scope of our mission must reflect the scope of God's mission, [Granted] which is turn will match the scale of God's redemptive work. [well i think I get what he is trying to say...] Where do we turn in the Bible for our understanding of redemption? Already it will be clear enough that in my view it will simply not do to turn first to the New Testament. ...

What!??

YOU project starts again

My on-again off-again project is on again!

Love to have you comments.

The Mission of God VIII

An important issue to settle for me is 'what IS mission'? That is: does mission include any good work that Christians may do? Is fighting for 'social justice' (whatever that means!) found theologically speaking under the heading of 'mission', and if so, why? What about taking care of the environment?

There are two ways of arguing. One (my preference) is to say that we participate in the mission of God as we call people from darkness into his marvellous light, making disciples of all nations. Paul's mission to the Gentiles, for example, did not seem to have a lot to do directly with 'social justice' - though it certainly had the effect of changing society remarkably in lots of ways as people heard the gospel and responded to it. Neighbour love is, then, an imperative outworking of mission, but it isn't mission in and of itself. Having said this, it is true that the loving actions of Christians may indeed result in others giving glory to God, and that the NT has a lot to say about the coupling of actions to words in mission. Fair enough: but mission refers to the work of God in reconciling the world to himself in Christ. We do 'mission' insofar as we work to this end. Commending the gospel in word and deed is our mission. Question is I guess: does me secretly reducing my carbon footprint (for example) contribute to the mission of God? Has a Christian agency whose aim is alleviating poverty without any other evangelistic consideration have the right to call itself a 'mission' agency? (Note: I am not for a second questioning the importance of such agencies; merely wondering whether 'mission' is the right theological heading for them. Nor am I saying that one ought to preach the gospel without alleviating suffering where it is found. On the contrary).

The alternative position is that almost anything given to Christians to do can be called 'mission' if it seen to be fitting in the purposes of God . So, yes, caring for animals: mission. Alms-giving: mission. Lobbying for fairer laws: mission. Campaigning for fair-trade: mission. In fact almost anything we do having been sent out at 11:00am Sunday until we meet at 10:am the next send can be labelled mission, if it is doing what God wants done.

Brock, on Augustine, on the Psalms

Brian Brock's readings of the Psalms are really doing it for me:

...the love of earthly goods without the love of their giver turns into a fear of losing them. And fear of losing them develops into a social rationality - an ethos. Augustine asks, Do all those who trust in technology live better lives? Do all those with comprehensive insurance coverage avoid disaster? Does ever-increasing investment in medicine stop untimely death? Augustine saw clearly that whole societies are structured around the avoidance of pain, embodying the escape from their primal fears.... 'Singing the Ethos of God' p. 161-2

I am sure Augustine didn't know about comprehensive insurance, but still, the point is made: security is never quite secured as we hope it will be.

Brock goes on...
Augustine shows how this vision of the blessed life shapes the Christian understanding of the church, which is conceived not as a safe haven from the world but as the focal point of a praising people caught up in Christ's service to the world.
This is the pilgrim church, we might say: secure, yes, but also exposed and vulnerable. Liable to get persecuted; but secure in hope.

Pionius and Sabina see the funny side...

Pionius said: 'Would that I were able to persuade you to become Christians.'
The men laughed aloud at him. 'You have not such power that we should be burnt alive', they said.
'It is far worse', said Pionius, 'to burn after death'.
Sabina smiled at this, and the verger and his men said: 'You laugh?'
'If God so wills,' she said. 'I do. You see, we are Christians. Those who believe in Christ will laugh unhesitatingly in everlasting joy.'

The Acts of Pionius, 8.

The Mission of God VII

Chris Wright says:

How then can it be suggested that evangelistic proclamation is the only essential mission of the church? It seems impossible to eme to justify such reductionism if we intend to sustain any claim to be taking the whole Bible seriously as our authority for mission and as that which defines the content and scope of our mission. Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people... p. 306

This is typical Wright, and it is problematic in a typical way. I would never dispute that we need the whole Bible for our understanding of mission. This is what Wright has got so wonderfully right. However, Wright does not sufficiently account for the difference between the Old and New Testaments. He has over-reacted to a contemporary Marcionitism by going to the opposite extreme, it seems to me. We cannot relegate the exodus and the jubilee to a bygone era, sure: but also we cannot simply take them on board in an undifferentiated way. We are not Israel. We are the church. This basic observation cannot be overstated! Things are different: even the most ardent advocate of a third use of the law knows this. Wright gives (as far as I can see) an insufficient account of the difference.

Wright is of course highly selective in his reading of what aspects of the OT are still operative, though he keeps banging the 'holistic' drum. His version does not highlight the moral law, as forms of Calvinism do; rather, he pulls out some aspects of social justice and concerns of a vaguely left-wing nature. But it is just as arbitrary. This particularly obvious with the year of Jubilee, which is given a quite questionable amount of emphasis in this book considering its lack of prominence in the Scriptures. And I keep searching for an enunciated principle of differentiation that would account for his selectivity.

Evangelistic mission, I would argue, is deserving of particular emphasis and priority, also. But more of that later.

The living out scripture meme

Jason and Byron tagged me with this meme begun originally by Andy Goodliff. I haven't done them before because I get confused doing all those links... but this is a good one.

The brief is to post "that verse or story of scripture which is important to you, which you find yourself re-visiting time after time".

For me: Colossians 1:15-20:

15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

I guess I just didn't realise how big the work of God in Christ was until I 'discovered' this passage. It's the scope that gets me: not only is Christ the supreme means and end of the whole creation in all its material and immaterial aspects, he is also its final destiny. Even death is not insurmountable, though of course the passage points to Christ's death as the point of peace and reconciliation between all things and himself. The atonement is a universal reconciliation of all things in Christ, to Christ.

The song that comes to mind? Radiohead's Everything in its Right Place. I am sure they didn't mean it to be a Psalm, but it is.

[PS: I notice that in Pierced for our Transgressions the authors make nary a mention of this key passage. Shame.]

Rowan Williams on Christian beginnings...

...what is mysterious in Christian beginnings is not the experience of hearing the Christian kerygma but the record and image of Jesus himself. His is conceived as a parabolic story, yet it is remembered in diverse and less than wholly coherent narrative forms, whose historical foundation is uncertain. To be introduced into relation with such a figure is to encounter what is not exhaustible in word or system - or so Christians have concluded: it is to step into faith (rather than definitive enlightenment). In so far as certain features of the development of canon and orthodoxy paradoxically worked against the absorption of Jesus into a thematized religious subjectivity and a system of ideas, they preserved the possibility of preaching Jesus as a questioning and converting presence in ever more diverse cultures and periods, and the possibility of intelligible debate and self-criticism within Christianity. 'Is it possible to speak of a pre-Nicene orthodoxy?' p. 17

Well this is an interesting encapsulation of Rowan Williams' theological vision. Williams accepts the historical-critical paradigm of the gospels, but actually tries to make what may have seemed like an insurmountable difficulty into a virtue. That is, the gospels themselves show, in the difficulty they have in rendering the life of Jesus into a credible and unified narrative form, how inexhaustible the figure of Jesus is: he won't sit still even for his portraitists. He eludes even them: so that we cannot merely absorb him into our theological system of ideas. The canon, and orthodoxy with it actually ensured this: orthodoxy prevented a far too glib schematisation of Jesus with the massive benefit that the gospel of Jesus is rich enough to be preached even today. What is important for Williams - a central tenet of all his theological work (or such that I have read) - is that Jesus functions as 'a questioning and converting presence': his a parable of a life, functioning to bring about transformation in human beings.

What this conversion might be, Williams doesn't want to pre-empt: that would be to short-cut the process, which would render the process of transformation and conversion a still-birth. That is why I think he is often so infuriatingly vague: because his Jesus is a Jesus who holds out who knows what possibility for newness in human life, a newness that can't be described beforehand but can only be prepared for by attentive and self-critical listening to what the Spirit may be saying.

It is interesting that parable features so prominently: I think that this is because for the historical-critical writers at their most sceptical, the parables are what can be traced to the authentic Jesus himself. (So, JD Crossan, for example). So, the gospels then represent a churchly attempt to grapple with this parable of a life... It is the grappling that we are to imitate, not the answers that they necessarily were able to achieve from their grappling.

Charles Taylor's 'social imagineries'

Taylor offers an interesting analysis of the ways in which societies conceive of themselves:

By social imaginery, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectuual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how thigs go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. 'Modern Social Imagineries' p. 23

To talk about a social 'theory' is not enough to capture this, because people don't think of their societies in terms of a theory so much as in terms of legends, myths, values and images. However, theories can infiltrate the social imagineries by a kind of trickle-down effect.

'I am not a religious person'

When a person says: 'I am really not a religious person', what are we to understand them to mean? I am tempted to say back 'I am not religious either'. I don't see myself as a religious person, but I take it that they would usually think I was.

In a way I want to disbelieve them though: aren't all human beings religious in some way? Aren't we homo adorans?

I guess I am asking: 'what is meant usually by 'religious' in the sentence 'I am not a religious person'?

The Mission of God VI - 'Frameworks'

At Stowe Gardens. Simon pretends to be a tree. No-one else takes any notice.

Wright has a couple of guiding metaphors. He offers his reading of the Bible as the 'key to unlock' the Bible's narrative (is the Bible a safe that needs cracking? a door that needs opening? is it somehow closed without the key?). This sounds uncomfortably reminiscent of George Eliot's scholar Casuabon and his never-ending project to find the 'key to all mythologies'. He also repeatedly speaks of the theme of God's mission as a 'framework', or an 'overarching framework'. (Goldsworthy uses the same vocabulary). Though it isn't a framework, really (which is a structural metaphor), but, in the way Wright uses it, an organising motif. But: why do we need a 'framework'? Why do we need such intensive exploration to uncover the 'framework'? Why are there competing 'frameworks' of equal plausibility? Are we saying that without the framework, the Bible's unity and coherence is in question somehow? (Interestingly, Wright does not discuss at any length other suggestions for an organising principle, though there are many). Isn't Jesus the Christ the organising principle (at least for Christians) and all the framework that is needed? Part of the problem here is the Wright wants to make more of the OT ethically speaking than a properly Christological reading of the OT will let him.

Interestingly, Wright starts by offering his theme 'the mission of God' as one possible hermeneutical key among many. By the end, it has become THE right and correct way to make sense of the Bible. So, he is saying more than: this theme is a neglected theme and look how much of the Bible is related to it. Now he is saying 'this is what the Bible is about, and it isn't about something else'. It becomes less a book about mission, and more a book about how to read the Bible.

Publishing Clangers

I received a copy of my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy's newish book Gospel-Centred Hermeneutics today.

Imagine my surprise when on closer examination, instead of Goldie's friendly visage (as per left) on the dust-jacket, some strange middle-aged professorial-looking face stared back!!

IVP Academic have printed the WRONG PHOTO on the book!! How embarassing is that!! What a clanger!

Mind you, IVP UK have published Chris Wright's The Mission of God without putting page-numbers in the table of contents. This is a real inconvenience in such a massive tome. It is amazing to see such sloppiness from the people who reep the bulk of the profits.

Life is Good - the martyr Pionius

The record of Pionius death is one of the most complete and interesting Martyr-Acts.
Pionius was implored by his pagan fellow-citizens to recant:

'Listen to us Pionius, we love you. There are many reasons why you deserve to live, for your character and righteousness. It is good to live and to see the light!'

Pionius replied: 'I too agree that life is good, but the life that we long for is better; and so too of light, that one true light. All these things are indeed good, and we do not run from them as though we are eager to die or because we hate God's works. Rather, we despise these things which ensare us because of the superiority of those other great goods.

Christian martyrdom never was intended to spring from a hatred of life, or from a death wish.

The Mission of God IV

[Caveat: I am responding to the book as I go rather than producing a well-thought response. Things may annoy me now that won't when I see the whole vision of the book.]

Mission that claims the high spiritual ground of preaching only [sic!] a gospel of personal forgiveness and salvation without the radical challenge of the full biblical demands of God's justices and compassion, without a hunger and thirst for justice, may well expose those who respond to its partial truths to the same dangerous verdict....if faith without works is dead, mission without social compassion and justice is biblically deficient. p. 288

Yes, yes, yes: but it is the conceptual looseness that confuses me here. Is social action part of 'mission'? (Actually, I have a problem with the term 'social action' anyway). Or is social action the result of mission? Or is social action mission? The false dichotomies and straw men don't help. He is attacking nameless opponents: do they exist? Who knows? As he says:

There may be an element of caricature in the way I have sketched this view, but it is not unrepresentative of a certain brand of popular mission rhetoric. p. 280

This is frankly annoying. We are in the middle of what purports to be a scholarly work and what we get is hearsay and gossip! Come on, Chris! I am not interested in whether you can show up a 'certain brand of popular etc.' Who cares? Find a serious thinker who would oppose you and show where THEY are wrong and that your argument is stronger.

In this section, where Wright starts to use the OT to draw ethical implications for Christians today, I start to scratch my head, as I did with his OT Ethics book. It just seems so arbitrarily done, or done with so little reference to the distinctive character of the Church qua Church and Israel qua Israel. Unless you are quite ruthlessly and unbiblically supercessionist, you can't just say that the Church adopts the habits and marks of Israel except in a carefully qualified way. I remain to be convinced as to whether the qualifications have been made here. But I have a long way to read!
Is the Jubilee such a prominent theme that it warrants a whole chapter? Also: I will be very interested to see what he does with the wars of conquest. Mission in OT perspective was carried out by means of the sword! (no index entries under 'Conquest' or 'War' I note)...

Is your pastor a reader?

I was once involved in interviewing some candidates for the ministry as part of a panel. I decided to ask each candidate (as the representative of the academic training institution rather than of the denomination) 'would you call yourself a reader? Do you read for pleasure?'

Of ten articulate, well-above average intelligence, gifted candidates (all males), nine said 'no'.

What is the meaning of this? Should we be concerned?

The Mission of God III

Wright asks:

‘I would ask that the missional framework I propose in this volume be exaluated for its heuristic fruitfulness. Does it in fact do justice to the overall thrust of the biblical canon? Does it illuminate and clarify? Does it offer a way of articulating the coherence of the Bible’s overarching message?'

Help me here: isn't this last sentence a tautology? I mean isn't he saying 'does it offer a way of articularting the coherence of the Bible's coherence?'?

Is it the coherence that needs articulating? Or is it the message itself?

The Mission of God II

The Mission of God opens with the bold claim that 'Mission is what the Bible is all about'. He wants to ask 'can we take mission as a hermeneutical matrix for our understanding of the Bible as a whole?' p. 32

But mission is a rather rubbery word. Has Wright succeeded in taming it? A little further on we read:

Down through the centuries it would probably be fair to say that Christians have been good at their messianic reading of the OT but inadequate ... at their missional reading of it. We read the OT messianically or christologically in the light of Jesus; that is, we find in it a whole messianic theology and eschatology that we see as fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. In foing so we follow his own example, of course, and that of his first followers and the authors of the Gospels. But what we have so often faikled to do is to go beyond the mere satisfaction of ticking off so-called messianic predcitions that have 'been fulfilled'. And we have failed to go further because we have not grasped the missional significance of the Messiah. p. 30

It seems by 'mission' Wright means something like 'purpose'... so, the missional perspective is always asking 'what is God doing here' 'what is his purpose or his plan?'

The 'gentle answer' discussion

It would help me (and might help others) if were to crystallise my position on the matter of Christian polemics. Partly, the debate has revealed that there is a consensus at a theoretical level, and that what we are discussing is a matter of discernment or wisdom. What's my big problem?

• an apologetic issue - I really think we forget how aggressive rhetoric and polemics from the pulpit is a big turn off for a large numbers of people. Politicians now know this, and even Tony Abbott (an Australian politician) is trying to be more winsome.
• the biblical evidence - while there are examples of strong rhetoric and polemic in the Bible it is usually at the point of the extreme, and on the lips of the prophets, or Jesus, or Paul - ie someone who has a particular and unusual authority. It is almost always the case that when a command or proverb is given to us as to how we are to speak, then we are to be winsome, gentle, peaceable etc.
• a foothold for the devil - so many of the NT lists of sins include things like quarreling, dissension, strife and discord and what have you. As a hotheaded young man, hearing preachers regularly denounce other versions of Christianity fed the self-righteousness and pride of my heart. I think it has taken me some years to repent of this. I don't think I was a very unusual young man - and so it is pastorally unwise to encourage this tendency, I feel. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is like passing Playboy around a group of young men, but... it certainly is encouraging in them a temptation that lies close at hand.
• a matter of integrity - the use of hyperbole and extreme rhetoric is effective. It gets people thinking. It can blow apart people's frameworks. But the line between hyperbole and outright dishonesty is quite a blurry one, isn't it? Saying one thing in public and yet conceding that things aren't so simple in private leaves me scratching my head: was the rhetorical effect really worth the perjury? Shouldn't we eschew the rhetorical tricks of politics and advertising?
• educationally unwise - in the short term, the use of extreme language can be convincing, even overwhelming. It can be transforming. But it doesn't help people to encounter the world in a mature and wise way, because the world is complex and difficult, and people need a depth of wisdom to live in it by God's spirit. Also, when people find that things aren't as it was explained to them they experience a great sense of dissonance, and lose trust in the original speaker.
• keeping your powder dry - remember that teacher you had in school who only ever shouted at the class once? And that was enough?
• the impression of defensiveness - too much negative and aggressive speech actually conveys to outsiders the impression that we don't believe what we are saying. Can't God defend himself?

Over at Giraffepen, Tony P asked a great question:

... in our postmodern world, does the accusation of nastiness, or being overly critical partly stem from a deep aversion to truth telling?

I am sure there is something in this. My own research is into moments when truth-telling becomes a matter of life and death, in fact. Jesus predicted it. But, my question in return would be: is an accusation of nastiness or being overly critical then become a necessary hallmark of truth telling?

The Mission of God I

I have been asked to write a review article for Anvil on Christopher Wright's magisterial new book The Mission of God. So as always, a few notes here first.

The scope of this book is truly impressive, as is its aim: to give an account of all of the Bible ordered to the concept of God's mission. In one sense it feels like old hat, because this is the kind of thing that Moore College has been serving up for years via Dumbrell, Robinson and Goldsworthy.

I notice, however, from looking at the index and the bibliography that hardly any of the authors cited are theologians. They are almost entirely contemporary biblical scholars of one kind or another. He reference precisely no patristic sources; no Augustine; no medieval writers; no Reformation greats (oh, I think Calvin gets a mention); no evangelical revival era or Protestant scholastic thinkers; no Puritans; no Karl Barth (no Karl Barth!). No Moltmann, no Guttierez, no Gunton, no Webster, no John Frame. Vanhoozer gets a couple of passing references.

And so far, no mention of martyrdom!

Brueggemann, Wright, N.T., Bauckham, etc: they are all there. Lots of contemporary missiologists, of course.

Is this another example of the mutual deafness between the disciplines?

Aestheticizing Tendencies - beware

Simon at Douai Abbey in Berkshire where we visited old old friend Fr Hugh Somerville-Knappmann OSB (Scott to us!). This is Watership Down country... so they say.

It's been a tough day (not personally, but academically).

At my last meeting, one of my supervisors told me that I had to 'confront my aestheticizing tendencies.' I think this means that I tend to just say 'wow, that idea is way COOL!' (in academic language) rather than actually provide arguments. Or, I narrate: just wheel in some biblical narrative and assume that it does all the work for me.

Re-reading my stuff, I realise how true this is. Now I have to go and actually provide some substance. Probably, you long-suffering blog readers knew this months ago!