Polanus on interpreting Scripture

‘The interpretation of H. Scripture is the exposition (explicatio) of its true sense and use, arranged in clear words (verbis perspicuis instituta), to the glory of God and the edification of the church.’ Even in my inelegant translation, that’s not a bad opening gambit. The (long…) section ends with a paragraph ‘on the use of H. Scripture for consolation’: ‘…therefore however grave the evil, so great and certain is the good set against it, that it is an effective remedy for sorrow. A most beautiful example (exemplum pulcherrinendum) is Isa. 41:26 ff. …’ The words are from Amandus Polanus’s Syntagma Theologiae Christianae; it was never going to be a big seller, even in theological terms. The edition in our library, published in Geneva in 1617, runs to something over 700 pages in folio, with two columns of (I estimate) six point Latin text on each. Oh, and the printer’s Greek font is all-but-illegible, at least to my eyes. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ‘Synopsis’ at the start of the book is a masterpiece of Ramist bifurcations (I counted six levels of subdivision on the definition of theology alone), and the text itself is in classical scholastic quaestiones form. What was it Barth said of Heppe? ‘Dry and dusty as a table of logarithms …’ I pulled it out the library to check a reference. I suspect I am its first reader in living memory; it is not yet on our electronic catalogue (most of our best books aren’t…), and was apparently misplaced in the stacks, so the librarian took a while to find it. Her perseverance seemed to demand some from me; and in between the anti-Roman polemic, and the fading and tiny Latin print, I found my heart strangely...

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Emergent Puritan…

…sounds like it ought to be a blog title. There is considerable grass-roots interest in the Puritans amongst a certain slice of current Christianity. This is, of course, a good thing–any interest in church history is a good thing, and the Puritans represented a practical and doctrinally serious model of living the faith that deserves and repays reflection. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in some attempts to renew popular and scholarly interest in the Puritans, and applaud some others. However… I observe that most of those interested in the Puritans fall into the ‘golden age’ trap. Ignoring all that was wrong with the movement (and there was plenty), and even all the diversity in the movement (and there was even more), the Puritans become a cipher for an idealised vision of uncompromisingly Calvinist and astonishingly reactionary Christianity that never, in fact, existed. ‘Puritan’ becomes some sort of Platonic ideal, or Jungian archetype: Calvinist, presbyterian, separatist, committed to certain ethical stances and certain patterns of worship, it is held out as a well-defined and uniform challenge and ideal to which we are called to aspire. In scholarly use, ‘Puritan’ is astonishingly difficult to define: the movement was just far too diverse. Its centre of gravity was certainly Calvinistic, but there are recognisably Puritan pastors and authors who are Amyrauldian (including Richard Baxter, hardly a minor figure in the movement!) and even Arminian; to a lesser extent, the centre is presbyterian, but the movement includes many congregationalists, some of them Baptist, and not a few episcopalians. Some Puritans (Baxter again) were astonishingly ecumenically-minded for their day; on most controverted ethical issues, they could be found on every side (John Milton offered a defence of divorce; William Perkins–again, not a minor figure–wrote books of casuistry that rival anything the Jesuits produced). The point struck me forcibly last week in two ways; I stumbled across a book in the library whilst looking for something else which rejoiced in the title Liberal Puritanism and Other Essays (A.W. Harrison; pub. 1935); in the epynonymous essay, Harrison makes a convincing case for a tradition of socially liberal thought stretching from the Puritans down. Second, when dipping into a collection of Puritan quotations, published by Banner of Truth, I read some fine words, and saw underneath the name of Ralph Cudworth. Now, Cudworth’s Intellectual System of the Universe is an excellent book, representing (alongside John Scotus Eriugena and Coleridge’s unpublished Opus Maximum) the fullest flowering of a persistent British tradition of mystical Christian Platonism. But Puritan it is not! If I had to define ‘Puritan’ in a useful way, I think I would offer four points. First, the great and uniting rallying cry of the movement was ‘Reformation without tarrying for any!’ Puritanism was a restless and urgent reform movement. They might not agree on what a pure church would look like, but they were utterly at one on the pressing and immediate need to create one. Careful, political steps designed to bring the mass of the populace–or even the mass of the congregation–along with you were not appropriate; what God’s Word said was to be done, and done now. Second, the movement was radically ‘congregationalist,’ not in the sense of a system of church government, although some of them did hold to congregationalism as well, but in the sense of a focus on the local congregation as the place where reformation must be applied, where pastoral care would be focused, and where evangelisation would happen. God’s basic tool, and perhaps God’s biggest idea, was the local church fellowship. A few of the great Puritans held offices other than local pastor, of course (John Owen, to continue the list of the greats who do not fit the stereotype…), but they still witness to the local church, where the Word is preached, the sacraments celebrated, and discipline and discipleship practiced, as the beating heart of God’s mission in the world. Third, and already hinted at, the Puritan vision of the Christian life was an astonishingly high one. Jim Packer entitled his book recommending the Puritans A Passion for Holiness; Kelly and Randall, in the one I contributed to, went for The Devoted Life. Both point to this same instinct, that at the heart of the Puritan vision was a pastoral theology that sought and expected to create a congregation of visible saints. Again, what visible sainthood might look like was somewhat controversial amongst them, but nonetheless, a seriousness in Christian practice, an utter commitment to living the truths of Scripture, was what Puritan pastors expected from themselves and their congregations. Finally, the Puritans were Biblicist, but in a rather particular way....

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Great theologians (2)

How about this, from Erasmus of Rotterdam? ‘To me he is truly a theologian who teaches not by skill with intricate syllogisms but by a disposition of mind, by the very expression and eyes … ‘In his kind of philosophy, located as it is more truly in the disposition of the mind than in syllogisms, life means more than debate, inspiration is preferable to erudition, transformation is a more important matter than intellectual comprehension. ‘Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians.’ (HT The...

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‘Infallibility’?

I am preparing a lecture on differing Evangelical views of Scripture, particularly in trans-Atlantic perspective, which I will post up here when it is done. I stumble over the word ‘infallible’: in normal English usage, it means ‘will not fail’, and so demands a qualifier (‘will not fail’ to do what?); thus confessing the Bible to be infallible without any indication as to its purpose is precisely meaningless in logical terms. The standard claim, which I can trace back no further than Packer’s God has Spoken, although it then crops up in the Chicago Statement, the Westminster Handbook, and various other reference works, seems to be that ‘infallibility’ means ‘the quality of neither deceiving nor being deceived’ (Packer, p.111). This is generally defended etymologically: Latin in + fallo, which primarily means ‘to deceive’. OK, but: 1. Warfield and Hodge used ‘infallibility’ to mean ‘inerrancy’ in 1881: not ‘not deceiving’ but ‘not erring’; 2. fallo does not primarily mean ‘to deceive’ when applied to inanimate objects; there it basically means ‘to fail’; 3. infallibilis is used (admittedly fairly rarely) in medieval and early modern Latin, first by Augustine I think, always with the sense of ‘not failing’ (Augustine uses it of the certainty of the divine decree of election); 4. ‘infallibility’ is never used with the sense Packer et al. want to give it in English (so the OED); 5. as far as I can presently tell, no Reformation or post-Reformation writer or confession used infallibilis of Scripture in any sense, with the sole exception of the Latin translation of Westminster, where it was a back-translation of the English ‘infallible’, and so must be assumed to have the natural sense of that word (Schleiermacher cites the ‘conf. March.’ as describing Scripture as infallible, but I have no idea what the ‘conf. March.’ is!) ; 6. the most common use of infallibilis in theology is in debates over the status of the Pope, where the word always means ‘unable to err’ (in particular circumstances, of course). So, whence Packer’s supposed meaning of ‘unable to deceive’? Can anyone enlighten me before I have to give this lecture (Tue...

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Being with pastors

Over the past month I have traveled more than I should have, probably; there was a day when, feeling rather overwhelmed by life, I looked for a reason, and realised that I was about to sleep in my sixth different bed in six nights… The traveling included some great times, though. I spent three days at continuing education events for pastors, one with the Free Church of Scotland, and two with the Scottish Baptists. Days like these remind me of several things: my own vocation; the purpose of theology; and the goodness of God. I am called and vowed to the ministry of Word and Sacrament. It may be, at present it looks likely, that for the remainder of my life my salary will be paid by institutions of higher education, but vocation is not about employment; the day I stop believing that I can adequately fulfill my ordination vows in the academy will be the day my resignation goes in. This is not the same for every theologian, of course: I have good friends who have courageously held on to a vocation to lay theology, when ordination was offered by ecclesial authorities and looked an easy route to academic employment one way or another. I am convinced, however, that theology is the church’s science. We do what we do to serve the people of God, the bride of Christ. Being Baptist, I am further convinced that theology is the churches’ science: we do what we do to serve not some idealised ecclesial entity, but messy and difficult local fellowships which gather Sunday by Sunday around Word and bread and wine. For me, this means that those occasions when I have the privilege of being with pastors are moments of testing and, by the grace of God, always thus far, of validation: have I got something to offer these brothers and sisters, that will feed, aid, and sustain their ministries? Not, of course, that everything done in the study or seminar must be immediately translatable to the pulpit or pastoral visit, but that the time spent in study and seminar has produced some fruit that is now ripe for the picking. I believe the Pope claims as one of his titles servum servorum Dei, ‘the servant of the servants of God’; perhaps the title is his pre-eminently, if his role in the determination of doctrine is as it is claimed to be, but for all of us who are called to wrestle with the teaching of the church, the implications of the gospel, this title offers an aspiration–to serve God’s ministers. And the goodness of God. An old friend, with whom I have since lost touch, trained for Anglican priesthood as I trained for Baptist ministry; Moira’s wisdom and insight was remarkable, and talking to her enabled me more than once to name my own experiences. She said once of Wycliffe Hall, where she trained, ‘I have never been anywhere where people laughed so much.’ That’s it. That’s what being with pastors means to me. I came away, particularly from the Baptist meeting, with a sense of having been immersed in something remarkable–wholeness? wholesomeness? holiness? All of those and more–Moira would have known what to call it. The events end, of course, with fulsome expressions of gratitude, a generous gift, and I depart, unable to articulate the truth that I received far, far more than I gave, or ever could give. But it is ever thus in God’s economy of...

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