Biblical politics
Can the Bible speak usefully and clearly to contemporary political issues? There are enough examples of people who want to insist the answer is yes, and then display a powerful conviction that one or another secular slate of partisan positions is, astonishingly, completely supported by Scripture. (For a very generous review of a particularly unfortunate recent example, that apparently even manages to defend the practice of torture as Biblically sanctioned, see Krish Kandiah’s blog here…) Perhaps there is an alternative way of addressing the question: if we took a good sample of people, and mapped their political beliefs against their practices of Bible reading, would anything significant be observed? A recent sociological study seems to suggest yes, according to an interesting report doing the round on the web. A good source, by the original author, is the Huffington Post here; it references an unpublished study by a postgrad student at Baylor on the relationship between frequency of Bible reading and a whole series of political/social attitudes amongst American Christians, using a data set gathered in 2007. (Apparently – see comment 3 on this post, the original source, I think – the study is presently under journal review.) The data set (the Baylor Religion Survey, which is well-known and credible) ranked people’s practices of Bible reading on an eight-point scale: ranging from opening the Bible never or yearly, through monthly and weekly, to ‘several times a week or more often’. Assuming the reports are right, there are strong positive correlations, visible and statistically significant moving up the scale, on the following points: frequent Bible readers are more likely to believe in the importance of social and economic justice; frequent Bible readers are more likely to believe that using or consuming less is an important part of being a good person; frequent Bible readers are less likely to see a fundamental conflict between science and religion; frequent Bible readers are less likely to approve of same-sex marriage; frequent Bible readers are more likely to be opposed to abortion; frequent Bible readers are more likely to be opposed to both the death penalty, and harsher sentencing policies more generally. The most striking thing about this is that the positions apparently promoted by frequent Bible reading do not align at all with a simple left-right political division: pro-life, but also green; opposition to same-sex marriage, but also commitment to social justice and penal reform. (It is also a set of positions that I would regard as pretty normal amongst British evangelicals – perhaps we all just read the Bible a lot? [if only…]) I am sure that any particular person’s political beliefs are a complex interaction of all sorts of factors, and that the live options they perceive are largely determined by cultural context (consider how easy it is to call oneself ‘socialist’ in Europe compared to the USA); this study suggests, though, that, within a particular culture, personal engagement with the Bible does have a genuine effect on people’s political beliefs. Interesting – I will try to find the original paper and link or reference when it is...
Read MoreHow much Scripture to preach on?
It won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, virtually or in real life, that one of the (fairly few) things that annoy me about the contemporary, ‘soft-charismatic’ style of worship that represents the British Baptist mainstream these days is the relative lack of Scripture heard in the services. I’ve written elsewhere about my desire to return to, at least, ‘Old Testament, Epistle, Gospel’ patterns of lectionary reading as opposed to just reading the passage preached on. (We’re just back from holiday in the Lake District, which allowed us to return to the delightful little fellowship at Hawkshead Hill Baptist Church. Three passages of Scripture, read and allowed to mutually interpret, during the sermon; another read and used to shape the worship. Many fellowships could learn from that…) I observe further a strange phenomenon, that in contemporary church life in Britain, the more a particular church/preacher trumpets their high view of Scripture, the less actual Scripture we hear read in their services. The reason for this is rather simple: there is an recent British tradition of ‘expository’ (meaning of scare quotes will become obvious) preaching, traceable back to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, although not much further, and presently reinforced by currently-popular neo-Reformed writings, that measures commitment to Scripture by, roughly, how slowly you preach through it. The practice of spending several years preaching through Romans or Philippians verse by verse-fragment demonstrates, it is held, a high view of Scripture because it is being taken seriously, mined slowly for all of its meaning. I confess to being profoundly unimpressed by this argument, I take it as a theologically-necessary claim that it is impossible to mine the Scripture for all of its meaning; we might get, by such slowness, everything a particular preacher has been able to discover from Scripture, but that is a rather different, and much less interesting, body of insight. And it seems like bad, or at least lazy, preaching. The preacher’s task is to determine and proclaim God’s word for this people, in this place, at this time; to do this, she must necessarily be selective. Her text might well, for instance, be significant in offering a refutation of Melchior Hoffmann’s Christological errors, and at points in history (even British Baptist history), that might have been vital. It is not now. It should be left out, so that what is vital is not obscured in the noise. Further, it has always seemed to me that (roughly) the less Scripture preached on, the more there is a danger of the sermon becoming thematic, rather than expository. I once had the misfortune to worship in a church where the preacher had been working desperately slowly through Colossians; the Sunday I was present (I never returned…) he had reached the injunction ‘Fathers, do not exasperate your children’ in 3:21, and was giving four Sundays to this verse, to examine ways in which we might ‘exasperate’ our children. (He had twenty. All beginning with the same letter.) None of this, of course, was exegesis of Colossians; the text had become the occasion for a thematic discourse on child-rearing. Earlier sermons in the series would, of necessity, have been thematic discourses on Christology, or sanctification. Such thematic sermons might be Biblical, instructive, or edifying (although the one I heard failed fairly badly on each of these criteria); they are not the mark of a commitment to the disciplined interpretation of Scripture as the foundation of the church. The church in question would have described itself as thoroughly committed to Scripture and to expository preaching, but their practice meant that there was no exposition of Scripture at all in their pulpit. I take it (whilst being aware of arguments, ancient and postmodern, to the contrary) that the task of exegesis is, roughly, the determining of the meaning inherent in a chunk of text. (And the task of exposition is the restatement, illustration, defence, and application of this meaning.) Meaning inheres in texts at almost every level, from the whole down. At one extreme, we can ask ‘what does Paradise Lost mean?’ and give a reasoned and defensible answer. Indeed, such work of precis, summary, or abstract is a standard task, set by instructors to teach students the reading and writing of English (and, I presume, other languages), and routinely engaged in by journalists, academics, and other professional writers (‘In his speech he argued…’ ‘This book claims …’ or consider the endlessly popular form of the book review). At the other extreme, how small a text-fragment may still contain meaning? The obvious answer is the sentence; after all, the grammatical function of the sentence is, roughly, to...
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 MoreNew Bibles
We are on the way back from two conferences, the Society for the Study of Theology in Durham and Spring Harvest in Minehead, of which more in another post. I wasn’t expecting my major book purchases from the two weeks to be new bibles–frankly, I’ve got several more than I use as it is… We nevertheless came back with two more, just because they seemed to genuinely add something. The first was the first sight, at Spring Harvest, of the fruit of a project I’ve known about for a while, Bible Society’s Poverty and Justice Bible. Conceived in part as an antidote to the plethora of ‘Sanctified Students’ Daily Walk Bible with Exam Helps’ or ‘Working wives’ five minute holiness devotional Bible’, this is a Bible which highlights what the text is actually about, rather than what we’d like it to be about… Something like 3000 verses are highlighted as referring very directly to issues of poverty and justice, and there are 50 thoughtful bible studies in the centre pages. The translation used is BS’s own Contemporary English Version. The other is The Jesus Storybook Bible, published by Zonderkidz (is there a viler-named publisher anywhere?!). It’s a children’s story Bible, with good re-tellings of various Biblical narratives (and other bits–it has a go at Isaiah, for instance), but with a very deliberate slant. The introduction says, in part, this: …some people think the Bible is a book of rules … But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done. Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes … but most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all… No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book or heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne – everything – to rescue the one he loves … There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. The Story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them. It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story. And at the center [yes, it’s American…] of the Story, there is a baby. Every Story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle – the piece that makes all the other pieces fit.. And so each story ends with a hint of how it is a part of the big story. The tower of Babel: ‘People didn’t need a staircase; they needed a Rescuer. Because the way back to heaven wasn’t a staircase; it was a Person. People could never reach up to Heaven, so Heaven would have to come down to them. And one day, it would.’ The birth of Isaac: ‘And one day God would send another baby, a baby promised to a girl who didn’t even have a husband. But this baby would bring laughter to the whole world. This baby would be everyone’s dream come true.’ Bibles for adults and children that suggest that the text is about Jesus, and about justice, instead of about pandering to our selfish desires and pathetic insecurities – this could be very, very...
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