The Manchester Passion
I have just discovered that a video of the whole of this is online. It was broadcast live Good Friday 2006, a modern-day passion play set amongst the streets of Manchester, and using music from the city’s club scene to convey the story. Even for a live outside broadcast, the sound was sometimes not great, and the decision to do some vox pops interviews was regrettable, but the whole remains still the single best piece of religious broadcasting I have seen – imaginative and thought-provoking. Odd bits of the setting are powerful (Jesus, arrested, is dressed in the orange jump-suit of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner) or funny (check out the kebab van owner at the last supper reading the Da Vinci Code!), but it is the surprising and powerful selection of music that makes it. Beginning in the Upper Room and at Gethsemene, Jesus sings to the disciples ‘Love will tear us apart’ (Joy Division) and James’s ‘Sit down’ (‘Those who fear the breath of sadness – sit down next to me; those who find they’re touched by madness – sit down next to me; those who find themselves ridiculous – sit down next to me – in love, in fear, in hate, in tears, in love, in fear, in hate, in tears – sit down…’) Judas (played by Tim Booth of James) throws his thirty pieces of silver into a busker’s pot as he sings ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’ (The Smiths); the Virgin Mary (Primal Scream’s Denise Johnson) sings a series of linking songs – Oasis’s ‘Cast no shadow’ (‘Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say, Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay … As they took his soul, they stole his pride…’); M People’s ‘Search for the Hero’; Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’) expressing her feelings about her Son as He travels to His death. There are a couple of stunning duets – Jesus and Judas throw New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ back and forth: ‘And I still find it so hard, to say what I need to say, but I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me, just how I should feel today…Tell me how does it feel, when your heart grows cold…’ And Jesus and Pilate share, improbably but brilliantly, in Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’, singing at each other in unison lines like ‘I don’t think anybody feels the way I do about you now…Just maybe, you’re going to be the one who saves me…’ The effect is no doubt much more powerful if the Manchester lyrics are somewhere in the soundtrack of your childhood and adolescence, as they are for me, but even without, this was a powerful and thought-provoking translation of the gospel narrative into a contemporary setting. The end is astonishingly moving, even watching it again, knowing what’s coming (probably if you know the Stone Roses’ back catalogue better than I do you would have guessed in advance, but…) It’s an hour. It’s worth it:...
Read MoreHow new is the ‘new perspective’?
I am no expert on the ‘new perspective on Paul’. I’ve read the obvious things – Sanders, Dunn, Wright, &c., although not Doug Campbell’s new book yet – and routinely use commentaries that presume or argue for the position; I’ve even preached and taught in ways that broadly assumed the correctness of the NPP; but I’ve never given the arguments the time or attention they no doubt deserve. I have long harboured a suspicion, however, that at least a part of what is going on under the headline is a comprehensive and massive exercise in deconstructing a straw man. From Sanders down to Campbell, the NPP writers have had in their sights an account of pauline soteriology (‘justification theory’) claimed to be dominant in the West from Luther down to today, which needs to be overthrown. Now, it is obvious that this involves a historical claim – that a certain characterisation of soteriology has been normative – alongside an exegetical claim – that this characterisation is inadequate. The first claim is a proper subject for someone who is interested in historical theology and, to the extent that I understand what is being said, I find it profoundly implausible. It was reading Francis Watson’s review of Doug Campbell’s book that emboldened me to go public on this suspicion. Francis starts with an overview of the new perspective: ‘[d]issatisfied with the traditional Protestant privileging of the so-called “doctrine of justification by faith”, a number of scholars have subordinated justification to participation or union with Christ…’ That was roughly what I had thought was going on, but I trust Francis’s judgement much more than my own on this issue, and so I will proceed on the basis that this is an adequate summary of one part of the argument. For the historical theologian, this statement invites the question, what is the ‘traditional Protestant’ position on soteriology? Does it privilege justification by faith, at the expense of participation/union with Christ? Let me quote Heinrich Heppe for a rapid demonstration. I choose Heppe for two reasons. First, he claims to be offering a synopsis of the major writers of Reformed dogmatics from Calvin to Schleiermacher – I could point to places where I think he twists the tradition (rarely) or over-systematises a fairly diverse witness (more common), but basically, this is a good witness to a broad swathe of Reformed tradition. Second, Heppe originally published his manual in 1861, so this is not new scholarship or a revisionist account; this is, simply, the tradition as it was received and understood. What, then, does he have to say about soteriology? He orders his account of soteriology under the classical ordo salutis taken from Rom. 8:30 – justification is consequent and dependent upon vocation, which itself follows predestination. I will pick the story up at vocation, or ‘calling’. ‘According to its real nature the calling of the elect is thus an insitio in Christum or a unio cum Christo, a real, wholesale, spiritual and indissoluble union of the person of the elect with the divine-human person of the Redeemer … At the root of the whole doctrine of the appropriation of salvation lies the doctrine of insitio or insertio in Christum … so the dogmaticians discuss it with special emphasis.’ References to Boquin, Zanchi, Olevian, Witsius, and van Mastricht follow, but he could have cited almost any of the standard manuals of Reformed dogmatics (at least of those I have read) – certainly the point is made abundantly clearly by Calvin, as scholarship has long recognised (Wendel, writing in 1950, assumes the point is standard). Justification is consequent upon union with Christ. That is the foundational claim of all traditional Reformed soteriology. Sanders, and those who have followed, certainly offered a new perspective on Palestinian Judaism, and (for me, at least – I understand that it had already been essayed elsewhere), a new way of understanding the structure of Romans, and the argument of Galatians; but the idea that traditional Protestant soteriology ought to be replaced with an account that ‘subordinate[s] justification to participation or union with Christ’? Sorry, but that just is traditional Protestant soteriology, at least in its Reformed expression (Lutheranism has not traditionally had this arrangement of union with Christ as the basis of justification). Why might this matter? Well, it is precisely the claim that the NPP calls for an overthrow or replacement of the Reformation teaching on justification by faith that has led to such vitriol and hostility from traditionalists; most recently and visibly, John Piper’s denunciations of Tom Wright. If I am right – and I repeat that I claim no expertise in understanding what...
Read MoreGood Friday poem: R.S. Thomas, The Musician
Ruth Gouldbourne, now senior pastor at Bloomsbury Baptist, introduced me to Thomas’s poetry, one of several things for which I will always remain in her debt. Wales produced more than its fair share of worthwhile poets in the twentieth century, but I’d trade all of them – not excluding Wilfred Owen – for Thomas if I had to. I bought his Collected Poems five years’ back; it is now falling apart (a fate only suffered by my T.S. Eliot; but then I had the sense to buy MacDiarmid, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge – and several others – in hb). His vision is gaunt and spare to the extreme; his genius to express religious themes (he was an Anglican priest) in imagery that belongs to an industrial age. Here is one of his takes on the atonement, from Tares (1961): A memory of Kreisler once: At some recital in this same city, The seats all taken, I found myself pushed On to the stage with a few others, So near that I could see the toil Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth Fluttering under the fine skin And the indelible veins of his smooth brow. I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers, Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis, As we sat there or warmly applauded This player who so beautifully suffered For each of us upon his instrument. So it must have been on Calvary In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo: The men standing by and that one figure, The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm, Making such music as lives still. And no one daring to interrupt Because it was himself that he played And closer than all of them the God...
Read MorePushing the atonement to the limit?
(What follows is a summary of a paper I’ve been meaning to write for several years now, but never got around to. If anybody is interested enough to comment, I’d be happy to know if it would be worth actually doing…) The doctrine of limited atonement seems largely forgotten by mainstream academic theology today. Actually, that is wrong – it is not forgotten, it is remembered with shame, derision, and sometimes amusement. Yet once this doctrine was seriously held by the majority of Reformed theologians. Why? They saw a theological advantage: they understood their claim about the atonement to be that it was definite, rather than limited. That is, on their scheme, Christ died to accomplish a certain fixed end, and that end is infallibly accomplished. Their basic reason for their position, however, was straightforwardly exegetical: they believed that there were Scriptures that could not be evaded that taught limited atonement. (And they believed that the Scriptures that seemed to teach universal atonement could be evaded.) Let us praise them first – rightly, they took their stand on exegesis. But I suspect that they (and their early modern Arminian opponents) gave in too quickly to the insistent demands of logic: there were seemingly-compelling texts on either side of the argument, and Calvinists and Remonstrants alike assumed both could not be right, and so sought to evade the clear teaching of one set of Scriptures. (Of course, one can believe in an atonement that is both definite and universal by becoming a universalist; this route became popular in many formerly-Calvinist traditions. The issue then becomes the need to evade the Scriptures that seem to teach clearly the reality of an eternal punishment awaiting the impenitent. Again, I suspect that exegesis too quickly surrenders to the claims of logic in these arguments.) Let me then pause at the level of exegesis: some texts seem clearly to teach that the atonement is limited in intent, and/or definite in application; others to teach that it is universal in intent, and/or indefinite in application. I take it that, for all our sophisticated advances in exegetical practice in the last three centuries, this basic impasse remains. Is there a way through it? Can we try to imagine that in fact both sets of texts are right? I do not want to propose embracing paradox, but I do want to suggest that exegetical responsibility is such that we should linger long, wondering whether the apparent logical either/or cannot be overcome, before we start our theological attempts to evade this or that part of Holy Scripture. We have learnt in the last couple of generations learnt to embrace simultaneously divergent understandings of the atonement, at least at the level of mechanism. Using language of ‘metaphor’, ‘parable’, or similar, we see differing accounts as complementary rather than competing. This is fine, however, when we are talking about simply different explanatory systems – medicine vs law court vs slave market, say. But in the case of Calvinism vs Arminianism, and particularly in the case of limited vs universal atonement, we are not dealing with incommensurate explanations, but with directly competing claims. A warm and fuzzily inclusive appeal to ‘metaphor’ will not defuse the logical problem with which we are faced. Thinking about the nature of metaphor might, however. The old story of the three blind men and the elephant springs to mind – each uses a helpful metaphor to describe the part of the truth that he has, quite literally in the case of that story, grasped. Could we begin to imagine an account of the saving work of Jesus which is in one sense universal, and in another particular, in one sense simply given by divine decree, in another made available to human response? At least on the first of these pairs, it happens that the tradition offers a minority report as to how this might work. A number of late nineteenth-century British evangelical theologians (most famously, James Orr; most interestingly, perhaps, T.R. Birks) offered what Henri Blocher and Stephen Williams have variously described as a ‘fourth view’ on the nature of hell (alongside eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, and universalism). They suggested, one way or another, that all people were affected by the death of Christ – it was in one sense universal – but that not all were saved – it was in another sense particular. The reality of the eternal fate of the unsaved was decisively different, and better, because of what Christ has done, but a binary distinction remains. This seems to me a fruitful thought, theologically. In fact, I would want to extend it further: there are accounts of...
Read MoreCulture, guilt, and Lockerbie
Local news today is full of the debate over whether Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, should be freed on compassionate grounds. He is dying of cancer, and my understanding is that it would be normal practice in Britain to allow any prisoner who is terminally ill to die at home (indeed, another very high-profile convict, Ronnie Biggs, was freed on such grounds just last week). His crime, of course, affected families and the wider community in the USA as much as in Britain. The news reports I have heard suggest that the notion that he might be freed is being greeted with simple incredulity in the USA. The breadth of condemnation from across the Atlantic is striking: it is not confined to (families of) victims, or to social conservatives, but seems to be almost universal (Democratic senators have intervened publicly, and Hilary Clinton has been reported to have been involved). Is Britain – specifically in this case Scotland – just more liberal than the USA? Actually, probably it is, but I don’t think that this is the reason for the divide in this case. Rather, our understandings of what words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ mean are culturally-determined, and somewhat different. To us, dying in prison seems a cruel and unusual punishment, and so essentially unjust; it seems that the default assumption in the USA is that sentences should be served, and so that any relaxation is unjust. My own instincts are, unsurprisingly, fairly straightforwardly British. Is this right or wrong? I don’t know; being exposed to different cultural understandings at least allows me to ask the question, though, rather than simply assuming that what I have grown up with must be right. What is the theological point here? Simply this: words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ are rather central to at least some accounts of the atonement (‘justice’ has wider theological application, of course, not least in theology proper and in discussions of providence). It is rather easy to use these words assuming that we all agree what they mean. We don’t, and if we are to understand each other’s attempts to speak adequately of the salvation of Christ, we need to realise that, and to be sensitive to...
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