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...
Read More’Shadows and Broken Images’: thinking theologically about femaleness and maleness
I’ve been reading Megan DeFranza’s new book, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God (Eerdmans, 2015). In response, I want to argue that our best way of thinking through an adequately postmodern account of human sex-difference might come from reflecting on medieval commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences.
Read MoreHoly-daying, Kingdom Living, and Secular Space
We are recently back from holiday; we spent two weeks at Le Pas Opton, a Christian holiday camp in France owned and run by Spring Harvest. We were there because I was speaking one week; I don’t suppose we would have thought to book an explicitly Christian holiday otherwise. I thoroughly enjoyed working with two wonderful people, Cath and Rach, from Sound of Wales, who led worship powerfully and sensitively the week I spoke, and getting to know some of the guests. A few days before we went, I found myself in London with a meeting cancelled, and so met up with an old friend, Lincoln Harvey, who teaches doctrine at St Melitus College (and, incidentally, is the one person you simply must follow on Twitter if you have any theological interest at all). We talked about many things, including Lincoln’s excellent book, A Brief Theology of Sport. The argument of the book is, to me, recognisably Augustinian: sport, for Lincoln, is the paradigmatic (he suggests the only, which I resist) wholly secular pursuit, and as such is a profound mark of the graciousness of God’s creative activity. That is, in playing sport, we are not serving any higher end; the game ends with winners and losers, but nothing further results; the playing of the game has no purpose beyond itself. Sport is, fundamentally, gratuitous. This makes sport fundamentally secular (in the Augustinian sense): it serves no purpose beyond itself; it also makes sport gratuitous in another sense: sport is an indicator of God’s grace in creation. That we can spend time playing/watching sport, engaging in activity that is purposeless, is a demonstration that in creation we have, and can trust that we have, all that we need and more. I had not thought about what might make a holiday ‘Christian’ before arriving at LPO. (On arrival, we, and all the other guests, were presented with a bottle of local fizzy wine, which quickly disposed of one, dystopian, picture…) There was a full programme: morning activities for everyone; an early evening celebration for adults – although a number of teenagers also came to it the week I was speaking at least; a wide range of optional afternoon and evening events. The programme was all very optional, and geared to the fun: wine-tasting; pool parties; sports and crafts. The emphasis was on the gratuitous nature of holidaying: we were there, essentially, to do those things which had no purpose beyond rest and enjoyment. I had prepared some talks on prayer and had planned to run a catchphrase: ‘no guilt trips – we’re on holiday!’ through them; this, it turned out, fitted the context perfectly. Tim and his team worked to create a place for people to come and rest and enjoy – and if they wanted to take in a bit of bible teaching or join in a worship session, they were welcome to, but it was neither expected nor required. Arriving with Lincoln’s reflections on sport in my head, I quickly realised that this fitted my unformed idea of what a ‘Christian holiday’ should be perfectly. God is good, and so there is time and space to rest and enjoy. There is no need to connect holiday with purpose; trusting in God, we can dare to take time and space to relax, to rest, to enjoy. Kingdom living includes space for recreation, as well as its more fundamental space for re-creation. To make tasting wine the end of life is to miss God’s great purposes, of course; but to construct an account of life which has no space for tasting wine (or football, or photography, or …) is to miss God’s great goodness just as thoroughly. The event on the programme that stood out to me when I glanced through it was an afternoon session: supervised play for toddlers, with parents given a voucher for cheap drinks in the bar; it instantiated this vision perfectly. The role of the site, and the role of the site team, was to do whatever was necessary to make space for rest and enjoyment for the guests, because when it comes to holidaying, that is what Kingdom living looks like. Three things struck me about the guests I met, each testimony to how well Tim and his team had worked to make this vision live and sing: first, the number of guests who came back year after year: clearly, people found something at LPO that worked for them as holiday. Second, the number of guests who were in Christian leadership of one form or another (this surprised me; if we should be invited back at some point in the...
Read MoreJohn Chrysostom on 1 Cor. 11:3
One of the things that struck me in reading the Ware and Starke book was how much this sort of defence of complementarianism depends on 1 Cor. 11:3 – ‘But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God’ (NIV). Simply put, even if we could demonstrate an eternal functional subordination in the triune life, we would have no warrant to draw an analogy to gender relations apart from this single verse. But the verse cannot bear that weight: however we read it, ‘head’ is being used in (at least) two senses. Particularly if we are talking about things like authority, the Father-Son relation is just not the same as the Christ-human relation. That surely does not even need arguing… …but in case it does, here’s the argument, from St John Chrysostom’s Homily 26 on 1 Corinthians. Lucy Peppiatt put me on to the text in her (excellent) Women and Worship at Corinth (of which much more in a day or two…); I don’t know a modern English edition, so I have done a (fairly quick and dirty) translation of my own (from Migne, but I think his text is OK): ’The head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.’ Here the heretics attack us, contriving from these words to diminish the Son. But they trip over themselves! If the head of woman is man, and the head is of the same substance (‘homoousios’) as the body, and the head of Christ is God, then the Son is of the same substance (‘homoousios’) as the Father! They say that they are not trying to show here that the Son is of a different substance to the Father, but that he is subject to authority (‘archetas’ – does this argument sound familiar at all?) How should we respond? First, when we speak of the incarnate Son’s being subjected, we do not mean that the divine Son is subject – that’s just how we talk of the economy of salvation. But anyway, how are you going to prove the point from the passage? If they say the Father has authority over Christ as a husband does over his wife, then they have to say that as Christ rules over men, so the Father rules over the Son – the passage says ‘the head of every man is Christ’! Who would dream of saying such a thing? If the Father is as much greater than the Son as the Son is greater than us, this really diminishes the Son! So, we shouldn’t use the same arguments about our human existence and God’s divine existence, even if we use similar language. We have to recognise God’s transcendence – God is so great! If they don’t admit this, they end up with all sorts of absurdities – God is the head of Christ, and Christ is the head of man, and man of the woman; if we take ‘head’ in the same sense every time, then the Son will be as distant from the Father as we are from the Son – and the woman will be as far from us as we are from the divine Word, and what the Son is to the Father, we are to the Son, and the woman is to the man. Who could accept all that? If you understand the word ‘head’ differently speaking of men and women from the way you understand it speaking of Christ, then you have to understand it differently speaking of the Father and the Son too! (If you’ve not come across him, John was a great preacher in Antioch towards the end of the fourth century, and became archbishop of Constantinople; he is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar as one of the three great teachers of the church, along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus; to pre-empt the criticism that usually comes at this point, it is fairly certain that he does not say this stuff because he has been infected with feminism, or lost sight of the gospel through reading Germaine...
Read MoreReflections on a new defence of ‘complementarianism’
I recently picked up a new book arguing in more detail than I have seen before the thesis that the doctrine of the Trinity, specifically the Father-Son relationship, gives warrant for what tends to get called a ‘complementarian’ understanding of gender relations – the idea that there is something inherent in human nature and intended by God in male authority and female submission. The book is: Bruce A. Ware and John B. Starke (eds), One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015). I did not expect to agree with the various authors: not only have I taken a fairly straightforward stand against ‘complementarianism’, I have argued even more forcefully that analogies from the triune relations to human interpersonal relations are always poor; a set of essays using the latter form of argument to defend the former conclusion is, well, not something I would have written a commendation for, even if they had been foolish enough to ask me… That said, reading books with which you disagree is much more important than reading books with which you agree; if they are well-argued and adequately researched, they sharpen you and force you to refine your thoughts; sometimes they even contribute to a change of mind, and, as I often tell students, the only way to prove you have a mind is to change it occasionally… * * * It is an edited volume; inevitably the essays vary in quality. The worst are genuinely bad. Unfortunately, the nadir is the opening essay, by Wayne Grudem, which in part lists a series of fairly central points in classical Trinitarian dogma (most egregiously, inseparable operations), and then claims each must be wrong by gesturing towards a few unexamined proof-texts. Now, of course, I accept the theoretical possibility of challenging the ecumenically-received doctrine on the basis of serious and careful exegesis; I am Baptist, evangelical, and Reformed, and hold to sola scriptura tenaciously. That said, ‘serious and careful exegesis’ involves rather more than quoting an English translation of a verse and asserting its meaning is obvious; further, I have the view, perhaps old-fashioned, that one ought to understand the faith before trying to overthrow it. The reader who perseveres beyond this infelicitous opening is rewarded, however. I confess to not keeping a close eye on the literature here, but I believe that these essays move forward the present state of the ‘complementarian’ argument in this area in significant ways, not all of them necessarily helpful to its supporters. There is some good historical work (in marked contrast to the opening essay): Robert Letham notes that the doctrine of eternal generation has come under some attack – from both sides of the gender debate – recently, and offers a robust historical and systematic defence, culminating in the claim ‘ the dogma of eternal generation is the cement holding together the doctrine of the Trinity’ (121); well, no – historically that is inseparable operations (see Gregory of Nyssa, Ad. Ablab.) – but I take the point. (Eternal generation is another basic point of trinitarian orthodoxy that Grudem has rejected, incidentally.) Mike Ovey’s chapter is curious but also instructive. It is again serious historical scholarship, investigating the status of the fourth-century debates in the mid-350s, around the time of the promulgation of the famous Blasphemy of Sirmium. Ovey examines three anti-Sirmium writers, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil of Ancyra, and a number of symbolic documents of the period, including the Blasphemy itself; his claim is that in all these writers and documents, a basic submission of the Son to the Father is taught. This is more-or-less true (I think there is more to be said about Athanasius), but in danger of being misleading: the 350s are perhaps the most unsettled and unstable period of the whole fourth-century debate (which is saying something…). Hilary’s thought is rapidly developing through the decade and beyond; to treat De synodis as a mature and settled expression is just wrong. To give only the most obvious example, Ovey picks up on Hilary’s account of names, and particularly of what the name ‘Son’ means (147); Hilary repeatedly revises his theory of names – there are, for example, no less than three distinct doctrines visible in the De Trinitate (he announces a change of mind in Book VII, and visibly changes his view again in Book XII). The question of the divine names becomes vital in the final settlement of the Trinitarian controversies: in response to Eunomius’ heavily-platonised theory of names, Basil of Caesarea develops his account of theology as ‘epinoietic’, which is the decisive insight that allows the development of Cappadocian...
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