Thoughts on Theology and Theory

Three or four chance conversations over the past few weeks have raised the subject of ‘Theory’, or critical theory, in ways that have made me think about how I do theology. I’m going to argue here that there are good gospel reasons for theologians to be open to theory, and that these are particularly compelling for B/baptist theologians.

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Sex, death and marriage

In case anyone is interested, this is the paper I gave at an ETS panel on theological methodology for discussing marriage; many of the arguments have or will appear in print elsewhere, but I’m not going to publish this, so it may as well be here.   And I say to you, that whoever puts away his wife  – except on account of porneia – and marries another woman commits adultery. [His] disciples said to him, ‘If that is the way it is for a man with his wife, it is not a good idea to get married!’ Mt. 19:9-10 (my tr.) This retort from the disciples fascinates me, as does its neglect in recent commentary and ethical reflection. Let me pose my question straightforwardly: can any of us here imagine Christian leaders in our own context responding to a description of a Christian sexual ethic by asserting it is better not to marry? If, as I presume, the answer is no, it might be worth us asking why there is this difference: what did the disciples know that the we don’t, or what do we know that they didn’t? Jesus has been challenged over the famous, if probably apocryphal controversy between R. Shammai and R. Hillel; he responds by citing Genesis, affirming marriage as a creation ordinance intended by God, and so not to be broken by human beings – ‘what God has united, let no-one untie’ (6b). They cite Moses’ stone tablets; he cites their stony hearts – a concession, but it was not so at the Beginning and now at the beginning of the End it will not be so again. Matthew’s Jesus then offers an exception – porneia[1] – and so offers a much more liberal reading than we discover in Mark or Luke; the disciples still however, recoil at the strictness of the interpretation – so hard it would be better not to marry at all. Jesus responds with the strange saying about varieties of eunuchs, and then turns to play with some children. Someone – a rich young ruler, on Luke’s telling – arrives and leaves, sorrowful, and we hear about camels and needles’ eyes, and Peter’s protest about how much he has given up already. There are some textual variants, mostly apparent assimilations to the similar text in Mt. 5:31-32; none of them change the force of the teaching, or the strength of the disciples’ rejection. So how might this be read? Badly, would seem to be the general answer amongst us moderns. Some commentators – France (TNTC) for example – assume the disciples cannot mean what they say: ‘[w]as this a serious suggestion, or were these words spoken with a wry smile which the printed word cannot convey?’ Well, Jesus took it seriously, speaking of Kingdom castration with his next breath. Morris (Pillar) is equally weak: ‘[t]he disciples envisage problems in maintaining the marriage relationship with this hanging over their heads. They probably had no intention of making use of the provision for divorce, but they found it comforting that the provision was there in case of need.’ Hagner (WBC) does a little better, at least acknowledging the plain meaning of the disciples’ objection: ‘[t]he risks … were too great in their estimate’. But the risks of what? He says ‘becoming inseparably linked with an unsatisfactory wife, in whatever way’. Is that really it? ‘Unsatisfactory’? I think we need to recall the strength of the Jewish commitment to marriage at this point, and insist that whatever worries the disciples, it is a bit stronger than this. Hays[2] offers something more plausible: for a man to renounce the right to divorce would be, he comments, ‘startling … within Matthew’s patriarchal cultural context’, but it can, he suggests, be placed alongside renunciation of anger, turning the cheek, loving the enemy, as a principled embrace of powerlessness which is a mark of the Kingdom. Older readers listened to the text more carefully. Calvin makes two fairly characteristic moves in his commentary on the harmony: he blames the devil, and he is surprisingly feminist.[3] For the latter, he criticises the disciples for not thinking about what wives have to endure – all assumed in the day that wives had no right of divorce, of course – ‘why do they not consider how hard is the bondage of wives?’ he asks. And he answers ‘devoted to themselves and their own convenience, they are driven by the feeling of the flesh to disregard others, and to think only of what is advantageous for themselves’. Warming to the theme, he asserts ‘it is a display of base ingratitude that, from the dread or dislike...

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Amy Winehouse and breaking the Golden Rule

Maybe my mind is just less well ordered than most people’s, but for me some the moments of real intellectual breakthrough come when I find myself thinking something that surprises me, and so am forced to analyse that surprising thing to work out why I was thinking it. Whether the thing turns out to be right or wrong, or just complicated, I understand better my own instincts and assumptions as a result. One such happened last week, in an ETS panel session in Atlanta. One of the other panelists, David Gushee, closed an impressive impromptu peroration with an appeal to ‘the golden rule’ – ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you.’ I realised that I was thinking that this principle was wrong. Doubting the golden rule, of course, is one of those ethical positions that you are really not supposed to entertain. If there is a universal ethic, it is this. And Jesus says it, identifying it with the core teaching of the Mosaic law: ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets.’ (Mt 7:12) So I thought a bit about why I was doubting it, or at least David’s application of it. My analysis goes something like this: so stated, the ‘golden rule’ assumes a level of moral awareness that I am sure is not universal, and am not sure is at all common. If our instincts about what we would like others to do to us are bad instincts, the golden rule offers bad advice. More commonly, I suspect, our desires are extremely conflicted, and so the golden rule offers no meaningful guidance at all. I rarely watch movies on planes, but I had watched one on the way to Atlanta. It was the recent biopic about Amy Winehouse, which intersperses clips of her – astonishing – musical performances with the story of her life spiralling out of control, finally to her tragic death. The film portrays her essentially as a victim, thrown into impossible contexts by decisions made by her partner, her manager, or her father. The sympathetic characters were female friends from childhood, who tried to help her. In the middle of a drugs binge they would come and try to encourage her to get clean, whereas her partner would be encouraging her to try something even stronger. Who was doing the thing she wanted to be done to her? The answer is profoundly ambiguous: straightforwardly, she wanted to be high; no doubt there was a part of her that wanted to be clean. According to the portrayal in the film, what she actually needed – whether she ever wanted it or not – was to get out of the celebrity spotlight, because she was unable to cope with it and was using drugs to deal with that inability. ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you’ is not a straightforward piece of advice here… (This is, after all, the woman whose biggest hit was built around the lyric ‘They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no’…) Now, it would be possible to suggest that, because of her relative youth and her addiction issues, Amy Winehouse was considerably less rational than is normal for human beings; I suspect, however, that this is false. I reflect on my own pastoral experience, and supremely on my own life: there are questions I desperately don’t want people to ask me, whilst at the same time I know that it would do me good to face those same questions. What do I want them to do to me? I don’t know, so I don’t know what I should do to others, if I am following the golden rule. More, I remember moments of genuine intervention, such as when my fellow leaders at a previous church banned me from preaching for several months because they had decided I was neglecting family relationships too much in my desire to serve that fellowship. (We had been going through some tough times; I still don’t regret stepping up to do what I did, but in hindsight I accept that it was unsustainable, and I had reached, or gone someway past, the point where I needed to stop and pass the baton.) Did I want them to step into my life like that? No. Am I now grateful they did? Yes. Do I hope I would have the courage – and love – to do what they did to someone like me in future, despite her not wanting the...

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Ways to prove a point

One day last week we had two seminars here in St Andrews. Our weekly doctrine seminar is presently, under John Webster’s guidance, working through Katherine Sonderegger’s first volume of her Systematic Theology, entitled The Doctrine of God. It is a fascinating text, sometimes very reminiscent of (the English translation of) Barth’s Church Dogmatics in its cadences, and devoted to the bold claim that the unicity of God is the vital first word of Christian theology. That evening Oliver Crisp, who I have known, liked, and respected since we were both grad students at King’s College London, was in town and gave us an excellent paper on divine simplicity. It was a good day. Amongst many other significant scholarly achievements, Oliver is of course known for his championing, with Michael Rea, of ‘analytic theology’, a mode of theological reasoning which works by careful definition of terms and enunciation of deductive arguments, after the pattern of the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy. I have not hidden the fact over the years that I have struggled with this programme; not that I object to clarity of statement and argument – obviously (I trust!), I do not – but that it seemed to me that something important was missing from the vision and practice of theology that reduced it to merely this. In the Sonderegger text we read last week there is a comment about the proper way to respond to a classic problem in theodicy, the holding together of omnipotence and omnibenevolence in the face of the evident evil in the world. She writes: This cannot take the form of a fully deductive argument, a demonstration, as the scholastics would style it. There is none such. Rather we must rehearse what has gone before, the pattern of the divine way to usward, the sovereign Divine working … We will look at our whole response to the psalmist and the prophets, our whole exegesis and commentary, under a new framework: the pattern of exile and return, of death to Life, as confirmation of the Goodness that is Divine Power. (315; all capitals original) Now, the particular point argued cannot be explained or defended without a fairly extensive explanation of what has gone before, but the identified contrast in mode of argument is what interests me here. She contrasts a deductive demonstration – an exercise in analytic theology, I suppose – with a process of what we might call ‘persuasive renarration’. Her point will be proved, if it will, by rehearsing an extensive body of evidence against the claim that a particular interpretative motif (‘exile and return’ here) will illuminate and make sense of that body of evidence. Of course, this is a normal mode of academic argument: it is what historians do all the time, for instance. It is not, however, an analytic mode of argument, at least in the way the term is used in the schools of ‘analytic philosophy’ and ‘analytic theology’. Her point will be persuasive if a thick account of ‘exile and return’ can be shown to be repeatedly illuminating of the Biblical history. However, in the investigation what is meant by ‘exile and return’ will be nuanced – redefined, to some extent – by the application of it to the various events she claims it illuminates. Although its original definition comes in the prophetic account of Israel’s sojourn in Babylon, this is not the most telling point of definition: Egypt between Joseph and Moses out-narrates Babylon, and the paradigmatic instance of exile is Holy Saturday, when the Incarnate One lies dead in the tomb. There is no straightforward definition of exile, no deductive demonstration that this solves the problem of theodicy. Rather, there is an appeal to a pattern of narrative that is rendered plausible by its ability to interpret many other stories in the Scriptures, and that might offer a way of re-describing the theodicy problem that makes it less vicious. Oliver talked to us about divine simplicity. He proposed that we should consider a ‘model’ of simplicity – in his terms ‘a theoretical construction that only approximates to the truth of the matter’ – on the basis that this would enable us to evade some of the (many) recent analytical critiques of divine simplicity considered as metaphysical truth. He outlined with exemplary clarity what was and what was not claimed by his model, and how it enabled him to sit lightly to various recent critiques, whilst holding closely to the affirmations of simplicity in the Christian theological tradition. I pressed him – I hope gently; I agreed with pretty much everything he said – to consider that traditional accounts of divine simplicity are, precisely, merely...

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Why I don’t want to win many arguments

I have had a couple of conversations with (good, close, affirming, valued) friends recently in which I have been challenged to be less generous in argument: ‘truth matters, and we need to contend for it!’ – that sort of line. I confess that this makes me uncomfortable. Truth does matter, yes; that said, my present opinions are, I am certain, not truth. I hope that, in many cases, they approximate to it; in certain core cases I fervently hope that they approximate closely. I do not, however, want to confuse myself with the One who could say ‘I am the Truth’. Because of this, there is a proper humility and a proper provisionality in the way I hold my opinions; in all things, I acknowledge that I might be wrong. As to needing to contend for truth – well, I have preached four or five times in the last couple of years on Rev. 20:7-9; I am fairly convinced that truth will win out, regardless of my best efforts. God does not need me to defend His ways and works; God calls me primarily to holiness and to witness, not to controversy. There is, certainly, a Christian duty to contend for the faith once delivered. But most of the ongoing arguments I find myself in are with Christian sisters and brothers, many of them good friends to whom I owe a great deal. With them, I don’t think I am contending for the faith, just for a particular interpretation of it. Of course, there are views that are true, and views that are false on various issues, and we need to discuss these things in the family. But if I win these arguments, someone else has to lose. And, as a general orientation, I really don’t want my friends – or my sisters and brothers who I have not yet met  – to lose. Of course, this raises the question of the limits of Christian fellowship: which issues are ‘in the family’ on this description, and which are contending for the faith? My test-case here is baptism. Baptism is the basic command of the Lord Jesus, the beginning and heart of Christian ethics, and so on. I make common cause with people with whom I disagree on the proper mode and subjects of baptism, work with them in mission and pastoral care, teach alongside them in conferences, offer them the eucharist I celebrate and receive joyfully from them the eucharist they celebrate. So, unless an issue is more important than baptism, unless a practice is more fundamental to the Christian life than the practice of baptism, unless an ethical command is more urgent than the last word of Jesus (Mt. 28:19) and the first word of the newly-Spirit-baptised church (Acts 2:38), I am not going to break fellowship over it, and so I really do not want to win an argument about it. Thus considered, there are very few things I argue about that are more important than baptism. I do not know what a mode of rhetoric that debates issues with a principled refusal to win the debate might look like; the generosity of the sort of medieval scholasticism exemplified by Thomas’s Summa Theologica is probably the closest thing I have seen, and some of the practices of discussion that my good friend Andrew Marin narrates in his Love is an Orientation also begin to come close. I do know that I want to discover or invent that rhetoric, to find ways of exploring and testing the truth of issues which place ideas in competition, but people in community. Whenever I engage in public argument, I try hard to be self-critical after the event, to test my heart and actions against the call of the gospel as I understand it. With due respect to my friends who would have me be sharper, on my best understanding of what gospel holiness looks like, I have never yet been too generous or too loving in debate – rather too often the opposite. If some of my friends call me to be less generous in argument, I believe the gospel calls me to be far more generous than I have yet imagined. I suppose that in the next few years of my life I will be even more active in public arguments than I have been so far; I pray that I will be far less willing to win those arguments than I have been up till now....

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