Serious thinking does not always lead to the same conclusion

Steve Chalke was kind enough to tweet a link to my piece on his invitation to a global conversation; in the same tweet he linked to a piece by Brian McLaren on the same theme. Brian’s piece was entitled ‘The Biblical cat is out of the fundamentalist bag’, which mostly left me straining to think of mentions of cats in the Bible (I don’t think there are any – several lions of course…); the piece was mostly a series of links to interesting posts elsewhere; at the end, though, McLaren writes: …the real question is this: in the privacy of people’s own hearts, will they (will you, will I?) have the courage to think, rethink, question, and consider the possibility that the conventional view of the Bible is in need of radical rethinking – not to reduce confidence in the Bible, but to discover a wiser, more just, more honest, and more proper confidence? This form of argument (‘if you think seriously about X, you will change your mind’) is remarkably common in both academic and church discourse; it seems to me to have two fundamental problems: first, it is simply false; and second, it is utterly unrealistic (apart from those two issues, I’m completely with it…) I take it that the first point is obvious at some basic logical level: even assuming that my current opinions on the truth or falsity of statements are simply random, and also assuming that serious thought will lead me infallibly to truth, then 50% of my opinions will happen to be right by chance, and thinking hard about them will only confirm them. Therefore, a prediction that ‘if you think hard about X, you will change your mind’ will be true 50% of the time, and so no better than the prediction ‘if you think hard about X you will not change your mind’. On this basis, the argument is only interesting if there is some reason to assume that the accuracy of my current opinions are significantly worse than random – if I have somehow become predisposed to believe falsehood. Now, such a situation is not impossible to imagine; indeed the Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’ – and the wider concept of ‘ideology’ – suggest positively that this situation obtains around certain subjects in certain contexts (and I accept at least some of these analyses, as it happens). That said, McLaren’s point concerned people in churches who had believed what their pastors taught them; does he think that the several varieties of Christian teaching available in our churches are all so bad that they are significantly less reliable than a random choice of opinions? If not, his argument has no validity. My second argument, that the point is utterly unrealistic, goes like this: I cannot be an expert on everything, so I study what I can, and develop a discriminating trust of authorities on the rest; given this, to ask me to distrust credible authorities and investigate for myself on every issue is unreasonable and impossible. I have (random example) not studied the raw data on climate science; I know that there is a very strong scientific consensus around the truth of global warming, and also that some people deny this; I choose to accept the consensus and to modify my behaviour accordingly; is McLaren suggesting that I should do otherwise until I have become expert enough to examine the raw data? This seems to be the import of his argument, but I suggest – on the basis of the analogy I have given – that this position is not just wrong but actually dangerous. Now, if (like a climate change denier) I thought I had reason to suppose that the authoritative voices were trying to mislead on the issue, I would have good reason to expend the energy to grasp the evidence in order to check each proposed fact – but again, McLaren’s comment here is about local church pastors, essentially – is he really suggesting that across the world (or across the USA) local church pastors are en bloc actively colluding in misinformation? (I mean, America is fertile ground for generating bizarre conspiracy theories, but this one would be right up there with the worst…) I believe not just that I have thought seriously about questions of Biblical authority, but that I have thought more seriously than almost everyone on the planet currently about these issues (there are, perhaps, a few hundred people I would bow to…). On almost every issue, I have concluded that in fact what I was taught as a young unreflective Christian was in fact right – no doubt because...

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A global conversation on the Bible?

I was told some while back that Steve Chalke was writing a piece on the Bible, and invited by someone to give a response; I refused on grounds of friendship – I did a formal response for someone else last time Steve published a position paper, and I don’t want to make it a habit… …when I read Steve’s piece, however, I confess to being puzzled; I’ve now read it more than once, and I remain puzzled. So this is just me, responding as Steve asked us to, not with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, but with a ‘why?’ Because I’m puzzled. On the Oasis site where Steve’s paper is posted it is introduced with the line ‘Steve Chalke calls on the world-wide church to have an open and honest dialogue about how we should understand the bible…’; in the paper, Steve says this directly: ‘I want to encourage a global discussion (for this is a global issue) around the following suggested principles…’ (p.5 of pdf). My puzzlement is simple: I thought we’d been having a global conversation, which looks to me pretty open and honest most of the time, for two millennia or so (I’m not a specialist on patristics, and there may be earlier texts, but the first systematic engagement with the question of hermeneutics I can think of is Irenaeus, ad. haer., written around 180AD; serious text criticism begins with Origen’s Hexapla which was put together about 50 years later – certainly before 240). Steve makes no reference either to the history of this conversation, or to its current contours; does he think that all of us who are engaged in it have together contributed nothing of worth? Or is he actually unaware of it? Take one issue, more or less at random: Steve’s fourth bullet point begins: ‘We do not believe that the Bible is “inerrant” or “infallible” in any popular understanding of these terms.’ (Footnote 15 defines the two words, as it happens wrongly, or at least in a very eccentric way.) Last year’s ETS conference was devoted to the topic of inerrancy and last year’s Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference (which I helped to organise and spoke at) was on the Doctrine of Scripture; recent books directly on the subject include – this is just from memory – Five views on Inerrancy, Greg Beale’s The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism (a robust defence of Chicago inerrancy), Andy McGowan’s Divine Spiration of Scripture (suggesting a European tradition of Biblical authority which is not inerrancy, and which is to be preferred to it), Pete Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (arguing for an incarnational model of Biblical authority – something I also tried in my contribution to Lincoln & Paddison, Christology and Scripture), &c., &c., &c. In my 2008 Laing Lecture (later published) I specifically addressed the issue of inerrancy in global perspective, pointing out it is a natively North American concept with little purchase elsewhere; a point Mike Bird made from his Australian perspective in his contribution to the Five Views book. I’ve since written about it from a specifically Baptist perspective in five or six other places. The conversation is happening. The books mentioned offer perspectives from four or five continents; this is a global conversation (I’ve only listed books in English; I could name off the top of my head good books on the subject in  at least six other languages, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to discover many more). They do not agree (sometimes the clue is in the title: Five Views…), but there are a number of broad agreements on either negative points (‘you might be able to say A, B, C, but it is not possible to say X, Y, Z’) or conditional points (‘if you believe F, you have to also believe G;’ ‘if you believe H, you cannot believe J’). I could offer a similar list for every other point Steve proposes for conversation. Steve appears at several moments in his paper to be unaware of this conversation, or of the broad agreements it has reached – at times he proposes something that has been exhaustively explored in the global conversation decades ago, and found to be inadequate (of course such ideas can be revisited, but the usual manners of the conversation are that you discover why they were judged inadequate and show that there is a reason to regard that judgement as wrong or premature when you revisit them…) The response might come that this is an academic conversation, and it is not happening at the level of ordinary church life. This does not ring true to me: to stay with the same examples, the...

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On pessimistic conservatism: a prolegomenon to more comments on Scottish independence

I do not currently have any metrics enabled on this blog – I genuinely have no idea how many people read any given post; I am alert, however, to who shares or comments on a post. A bot that says a thousand visitors came by matters less to me than one person whose judgement I trust saying ‘what you said there matters’. On this basis, I was very struck by the reaction to my first attempt to say something on the question of the coming referendum on Scottish independence: a number of people whose opinions I trust deeply indicated it was very helpful, so much so that I intend to offer some further comment over the coming weeks/months. This post is, as the subtitle suggests, preparatory to that comment; as I reflect on the questions, I am aware of something that colours the way I think about political issues, something that also should be disclosed before I offer any argument. It is a basically pessimistic conservatism. Not, I hasten to add, any sort of Conservatism – that particular political party holds almost no attraction for me. Rather – well, it begins with my Doktorvater, Colin Gunton, and with his conviction that the continuing task of theology was to overcome the Enlightenment. And yes, I know that we do better to talk about several national enlightenments than ‘the Enlightenment’, and yes, I know that Colin’s historical constructions were cast in the highest contrast, when nuance is more often needed in history – but sometimes, often perhaps, he saw to the essence of things. Enlightenment thought in almost all its varieties – even Evangelical Christianity, which is a variety of Enlightenment thought, as David Bebbington has shown, and to which I am indebted and by which I am formed – is profoundly optimistic about the potential results of human endeavour. The characteristic Enlightened attitude is that we can and should change everything, because we can and probably will do everything better… …I don’t believe that. Nor, of course, do many of us today; a few of us discovered modernity in the fin de siècle despair of Housman or Munch or Mahler – or in the decadent response of Wilde; the rest of us saw hope gassed and gunned down on the plains of Flanders. Through the twentieth century, hope was always an achievement, and generally hard-won (in the political sphere, few got this like Obama on his first campaign trail). But the Enlightenment myth lives on: if we overthrow tradition, we can replace it with something that will, inevitably, be better… …I don’t believe that. The Enlightenment myth lives on in politics more sturdily than in most places, perhaps because politicians have to be in the business of selling hope. Reforming this, changing that, will bring massive transformation; the society is basically good, and only a few easily-adjusted antiquated structures prevent that basic goodness being displayed. We know enough to make things right… …I don’t believe that. And this unbelief is, for me, Christian. There is nothing so deceitful as the human heart, the prophet declares, and all our attempts at self-salvation and self-justification fall apart and fail. The idea that, given a tabula rasa, we will be able to build the Kingdom of God (or any other given utopia) is a dangerous delusion. My standard current example of this point is the upper House of the Westminster parliament, the House of Lords. Until a recent ‘reform’ it consisted of members who inherited their seats, essentially by virtue of being ancient landholders. I have read an attempt to justify this theologically (Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State), which was surprisingly plausible if one allowed it its axioms, but I take it that any reasonable person will regard the old constitution of the House as indefensible. So, what do we do? Reform it of course… …the recent history of House of Lords reform has followed two routes. One has been the stuffing of the House with party appointments – some career party politicians; some party donors; a very few people of some independence and some real merit (I have the privilege of knowing, and working with, one or two of these). The other route has been removing the hereditary peers and offering a series of abortive plans to replace them by some form of election, all of which have failed, because there is no consensus on what a reformed upper House should look like – in particular, there is a basic tension between a public desire for a House that will hold the lower House and the executive to account, and a partisan desire to have a relatively supine...

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‘This Day in Baptist History’

The Centre for Baptist History and Heritage at Regent’s Park College, Oxford has launched a couple of interesting new projects which both invite contributions. One is called ‘This Day in Baptist History’ which intends to build into an interactive calendar of Baptist events. The beginnings of the calendar, and the invitation for contributions, can both be found here. The other is an invitation to submit visual church histories at a popular level. A couple of examples and the call for submissions are here. Both projects could be very rich and useful if they get substantial contributions; it would be good, in particular, to see contributions from beyond the UK-USA axis that Baptist narratives so often turn...

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Of a Covenant and a Referendum: A (Baptist) Theological Reflection on Scottish Independence

At the bottom of our village is a wood containing two monuments, symbolically separated by a wall. One commemorates Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews, and is erected on the spot where he was murdered by Covenanters in 1679; the other commemorates six Covenanters, almost certainly not the murderers, who were nonetheless killed in revenge for Sharp’s death. The Covenanters, for non-Scots readers, were militant Presbyterians who gathered illegally and occasionally resorted to violence in the face of the attempt by the London regime to impose episcopal church order on the Scottish church. I knew little of the Covenanters before moving up here; my first encounter with their story, as far as I recall, was in a short narrative recorded by way of a preface in a book, Hamish MacKenzie’s  Preaching the Eternities, which I had been given as a gift by a member of my first church when I moved on. He highlighted this narrative to me when he gave me the book; it told of a Scots minister at the time of the Covenanters, who was visited by an angry group of his peers who demanded to know why he did not ‘preach up the times’; Who does preach up the times? he enquired, to be told that they all did, all of them. ‘Well then,’ came his reply, ‘you must forgive one poor brother who can preach only Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’ The story moved me, not because I knew the context, but because at least one member of my church had identified this confession sufficiently with the ministry I had conducted amongst them to make the gift of the book seem appropriate. Knowing more of the Covenanting cause now, however, I genuinely wonder which side of the debate recalled in the narrative I would want to have been found on. The Covenanting cause was just and important: as a Baptist, the protection of freedom of conscience is close to the heart of my ethical convictions, and this was precisely the issue the Covenanters struggled, often died, and sometimes killed for; I hope I would not have been prepared to kill an Archbishop – or anyone else – but I hope I would have found the courage to stand and perhaps suffer with them in their struggle. Thankfully, the current discussion of the question of English involvement in Scottish rule is very unlikely to involve the shedding of blood; this does not exempt the churches from attempting to think Christianly about the question, the more so as each of us who are members of a Scottish church, in common with all other residents over the age of 16, will have the right and responsibility to vote in the referendum when it comes. I have seen a number of comments recently to the effect that the churches in general, and perhaps we Baptists in particular, have been inappropriately silent on this question; I do not know whether this is true, but here for what it is worth is my attempt at moral reasoning. Like everyone else, I approach it from a particular context. First, I am, as already noted, a Baptist; alongside a deep conviction concerning freedom of conscience (and not unrelated to it) my tradition also sits fairly lightly to questions of nationhood: we look to governments to preserve certain freedoms, but otherwise are unexcited about the powers of the magistrate; lawmakers will not enact holiness, and so their existence and deliberations are not of first importance to us. Second, I write as someone born in England and presently resident in Scotland. As such, I have no particular sense of Scottish identity – we have been here long enough that I sit down to watch the Calcutta Cup with mixed loyalties each year, but that is as Scottish as I get. I know that I reside here to some extent as a foreigner, and that there is an immigrant’s duty to conform to the culture that has welcomed him, and a Christian duty to pray for the peace of the city, or polity, in which one happens to reside. Third, I am a resident of the St Andrews area. This is relevant in two ways: on the one hand, St Andrews and environs is, because of the university and tourist industry, much more cosmopolitan than most similarly-rural parts of Scotland; we are an international community; our local village school, which all my daughters have attended, has fewer than eighty pupils who are nevertheless at any given moment drawn from six or more nations. On the other hand, St Andrews is just far enough outside the ‘central belt’ (the Glasgow-Edinburgh corridor) to...

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