A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • The Bible as fallen and redeemed

    Kenton Sparks’ Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture cuts to the heart of how Christians understand revelation and the truth of the Bible. This is a more popularly pitched version of an argument that Sparks, a professor of biblical studies at Eastern University, made in his book God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. The issue is: How can the Bible be a revelation from God and normative for Christian faith and practice when it contains passages that depict God in morally horrifying ways and ethical commands that seem downright evil, not only by modern standards, but by standards embedded in the Christian tradition itself?

    Sparks argues, correctly I think, that this presents a more difficult issue than biblical “errancy” regarding history or science. It’s relatively easy to make peace with the idea that the Bible did not adhere to modern standards of historical accuracy and that it was not meant to teach scientific cosmology or biology. However, the “texts of terror” threaten to undermine what Christians claim is the central message of the Bible: a revelation of God’s gracious character, will, and purposes for humanity and the world.

    The touchstone example Sparks uses is the story of the Canaanite genocide recorded in the book of Joshua. How can the God who commands Joshua to slaughter men, women, and children be the God of limitless compassion that Christians claim to believe in? Some of the church fathers dealt with these passages by adverting to allegorical interpretations: they should be interpreted as referring to our internal spiritual warfare against our sins, for example. Sparks argues (again, correctly, I think) that such readings will seem strained to modern readers. Instead, he says we should frankly admit that such passages are not part of God’s word, at least not directly.

    To articulate his position, Sparks draws an analogy between the “problem” of the Bible and the problem of evil as it’s usually discussed in the Christian tradition. Briefly, theologians–however much their specific approaches may differ–have generally maintained that creation is good but fallen and that the source of sin and disorder is in humanity not God. The Bible, Sparks says, is part of the fallen creation–it is not perfect or inerrant but reflects human sinfulness. “Scripture is a casualty of the fallen cosmos” (p. 66). But just as God uses fallen human beings to advance God’s purposes, God uses the Bible–taken as a canonical whole–as a medium for revelation. The Bible is both human and divine discourse.

    The inevitable question, though, is how we are supposed to distinguish the divine message from those parts of Scripture that reflect human error or sin. Sparks offers several responses to this: first, Scripture sometimes corrects itself, as in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, where he relativized certain parts of the Mosaic law; second, we should read individual passages in the context of the whole sweep of the biblical narrative and message; and third, we need to read the Bible in light of the ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit, the revelation of God in the natural world, the Christian tradition, and our own experience. Sparks emphasizes that most passages of the Bible admit of a surplus of meaning and we should be cautious in thinking we’ve arrived at the one true interpretation. He also points out that a key test of Christians’ Bible-reading is whether it leads to Christ-shaped lives.

    Sparks identifies, at least to some extent, as an evangelical, and much of what he says may not seem particularly controversial to mainline Christians, who generally admit that the Bible is a humanly conditioned document. But mainliners have not always been clear on what their positive doctrine of Scripture is; Sparks’ book clearly articulates a position that is honest about the text while also maintaining a “high” view of the Bible’s authority. Such a position should in principle be acceptable to a fairly broad swath of Christians, from fairly conservative to fairly liberal. My one complaint is that Sparks is vague (as he himself admits) on how he understands the Bible’s inspiration, as well as the closely related concept of revelation. For example, is the medium of revelation the text itself, an overall message or regula fidei derived from the text, or the events that the texts witness to? But on the whole, I’d recommend this book as a sane and balanced approach to a difficult topic.

  • Small government

    “On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.” — James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 78

  • Literalism vs. inerrancy

    I’ve been reading The Scope and Authority of the Bible by biblical scholar James Barr, and in it he clarifies something I’ve been thinking for a while. Barr wrote a well-known book on fundamentalism, and one of the essays in Scope… deals with fundamentalism.

    The point Barr makes is that, contrary to what is often said, fundamentalism doesn’t mean reading the Bible “literally.” Rather, its distinguishing mark is a doctrine of inerrancy that is frequently at odds with a literal reading:

    It is often said that fundamentalists are ‘people who take the Bible literally’. This however is a mistake. Fundamentalist interpretation concentrates not on taking the Bible literally, but on taking it so that it will appear to have been inerrant, without error in point of fact. Far from insisting that interpretation should be literal, it veers back and forward between the literal sense and a non-literal sense, in order to preserve the impression that the Bible is, especially in historical regards, always ‘right’. . . . It is the inerrancy of the Bible, especially its truth in historical regards, that is the fundamentalist position, and not the notion that it must always be interpreted literally. (pp. 77-8)

    We might think, for instance, of the strained attempts to “harmonize” the four gospels or to assemble the eschatological passages of the Bible into a coherent “end times” narrative.

    By contrast, Barr says,

    It is the critical interpretation of the Bible that has noticed, and given full value to, the literal sense. In this sense, as Ebeling and others have noticed, the critical movement is the true heir of the Reformation with its emphasis on the plain sense of scripture. It is precisely because of its respect for the literal sense that critical scholarship has concluded that different sources in (say) the Pentateuch, or the gospels, must be identified. . . . Characteristic conservative treatments, as I have shown, depart from the natural meaning of the texts in order to force upon them an apologetically-motivated harmonization which will evade the fact of the contradiction. (p. 78)

    In short, fundamentalism, Barr says, refuses to take the Bible as it is, but instead presents a homogenized version that fits safely into a preexisting theological scheme. (The appeal to the “original autographs” is another example of rejecting the Bible we have for an idealized one.) It’s noteworthy that the doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t arise directly from anything the Bible claims for itself, but has usually been imposed on the it as a conclusion from a theological argument about the kind of Bible God must have produced.

  • Wesley on religious experience

    Theodore Runyon is a theologian, now retired, from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Among other things, he’s published a book on John Wesley’s theology (which I blogged about a bit a while back) as well as several articles on Wesley.

    In his book Exploring the Range of Theology, which collects articles he’s written over several decades, Runyon uses Wesley to retrieve the idea of “religious experience.” For much 20th-century theology, particularly that which was influenced by Barth, religious experience was disdained. This was largely because of the fear that it would lead to spiritual flights of fancy and subjectivism. After all, since everyone’s experience is different, how do you evaluate its validity?

    Runyon argues that, while Barth et al. may have been justified in their distrust of experience, particularly in light of the “German Christians” who supported the Nazi regime in Hitler’s Germany, they may have gone overboard in disparaging it. Following Wesley, he maintains that a religion without an experiential aspect will eventually dry up–neither right doctrine (orthodoxy) nor right practice (orthopraxy) are enough to sustain it. We also need “right feeling”–or what he calls “orthopathy.”

    Wesley, he points out, strongly affirmed the importance of actually experiencing the assurance of God’s love and of being empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works and grow in love for one’s neighbor. Neither a rote orthodoxy nor a determined adherence to the moral law, he believed, could generate a such a living faith. And it was the birthright of every Christian to tangibly experience the Holy Spirit in her life.

    However, Wesley was no subjectivist and at many points had to defend the early Methodist movement against charges of “enthusiasm.” Religious truth isn’t produced by the feelings or experiences of the self. Rather, those feelings are the testimony of the Holy Spirit acting in response to the proclaimed Word, which, in good Lutheran fashion, Wesley insisted comes from outside the self. Wesley was an empiricist in the Lockean tradition, and he believed that everything we know comes from without. But he was also a bit of a Platonist in that he thought that human beings had “spiritual senses” that allowed them to perceive spiritual realities. But because of the Fall, these senses were dormant and had to be “activated” by God’s gracious activity. When we respond to the preaching of God’s love in Christ, the Spirit is that power within us that allows us to assent to it and which sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts. It is a personal, experiential response to a reality outside the self. “Genuine experience of God is therefore not my experience alone, it is the experience of the Other into whose life I am taken by grace” (Runyon, “Orthopathy: Wesleyan Criteria for Religious Experience”).

    Runyon also discusses other criteria that Wesley used to test religious experience. These experiences should transform us–Wesley believed, with Luther, that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, but he also believed with the Catholic and Eastern traditions that it is to be imparted to us. They should have a social effect–the goal of Christianity is not to create holy solitaries; the Gospel should propel us to share the God’s love and minister to the needs of others. They should be reasonable, measured by the norms of the Bible and the experience of the believing community. They should be sacramental in that the feelings associated with religious experience convey, or point to, a reality beyond themselves rather than being made into ends-in-themselves.And finally, they should be teleological–that is, they put us on a path toward the goal of the Christian life, or what Wesley called “Christian perfection.”

    These criteria, Runyon concludes, “assist in evaluating the legitimacy of claims to religious experience, while at the same time recognizing the importance of the experiential dimension for genuine faith and discipleship.” Borrowing from Kant, we might say that faith and discipleship without experience is empty, but experience without faith and discipleship is blind.

  • Schleiermacher on the dispensability of the cross and resurrectoin

    In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argues that, contrary to appearances, the cross and resurrection of Jesus aren’t actually essential to Christianity. His reasoning for this surprising conclusion is consistent with his overall method, but for that reason highlights some of the concerns that Christians of a more orthodox bent might have with it.

    For Schleiermacher, redemption means being brought into “living fellowship” with the Redeemer. This is because, according to him, Jesus had a perfect “God-consciousness”–that is, he was fully aware of his absolute dependence on God, and this gave shape to his life in the world. The rest of us, by contrast, have a more partial or fragmented experience of God-consciousness, and so we fall into sin. However, by entering into the church–the community that was founded by Jesus and takes its bearings from the portrait of Jesus contained in the New Testament, we can come to share that perfect God-consciousness. When we enter into this “living fellowship,” the God-consciousness of Jesus becomes the core of our selves and, gradually, it comes to predominate–overcoming our sinful tendencies.

    In Schleiermacher’s account, the cross is not necessary because salvation doesn’t require some act of atonement, either on our part or on God’s. Instead, our guilt is removed when we come to have the Redeemer’s perfect God-consciousness. In effect, our identity “in Christ” becomes our primary identity, so we are no longer defined by the “old Adam” and its sins. No guilt-atonement is necessary.

    The resurrection isn’t necessary, he argues, because our situation has to be essentially the same as that of the first disciples who knew Jesus when he walked the earth. But they were able to be saved by entering into fellowship with Christ before his death. While we enter into that fellowship by means of the image of Jesus presented in the New Testament and mediated by the church, it is the same kind of relationship that the first disciples had. Otherwise, ours would be a wholly different faith. But this implies that the resurrection can’t be essential to our redemption. l think Schleiermacher is a bit ambiguous at this point (or possibly I’m misreading him), because I don’t see how we can enter into a “living fellowship” with Christ now, unless he’s alive in some sense. And that would seem to make the resurrection essential at least as a means by which fellowship with the Redeemer is made possible for succeeding generations.

    More fundamentally, though, Schleiermacher’s account shows how focused his overall theology is on the interior life of the individual. For him, redemption is not a public, historical event, but one that takes place in the subjective consciousness of each person. By contrast, the New Testament seems to portray the cross and resurrection of Jesus as epochal events that objectively changed not only our situation before God, but also constitute a turning-point in the cosmic story. Not just human beings’ self-consciousnesses, but their bodies, and indeed the entire cosmos, are to be redeemed from bondage to sin and decay.

    You could argue that Schleiermacher’s account is a defensible “demythologization” of the language and imagery of the Bible and that it provides a more “existential” understanding of the Christian faith by dispensing with supernatural and/or metaphysical beliefs that many people no longer find plausible. But many Christians would protest that the public, embodied nature of our salvation is an essential aspect of the Christian message.

  • Francis Spufford’s speech to religion’s cultured despisers

    This essay from Francis Spufford has been getting flagged quite a bit in my little corner of the Internet. Spufford is an English author who writes mostly non-fiction (his recent book Red Plenty was the subject of a book event at Crooked Timber this summer). Spufford’s essay seems to be a summary of his new book Unapologetic, a defense of Christian faith that carries ths subtitle “Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.”

    Since I’ve been deep in Schleiermacher recently, this set off some bells for me, and indeed Spufford’s argument, at least based on the article, does seem like a sort of updating of Schleiermacher’s argument for thinking of religion as an essential aspect of human nature which is rooted in a particular kind of feeling.

    Spufford writes:

    The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.

    As Scheleirmacher said in his Speeches, religion is a “taste for the infinite,” and in The Christian Faith he defined it as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Doctrine, for Schleiermacher, is an elaboration of this feeling, but the feeling–piety–comes first and is more basic. Theology takes this as its starting point–it doesn’t try to “prove” God’s existence. (Schleiermacher does allow that philosophy may construct arguments for God’s existence on its own terms, but this has little to do with the life of living faith.) Like Spufford, Schleiermacher didn’t deny that religion makes truth-claims, but its living heart is feeling.

  • How “liberal” is Schleiermacher?

    Before I started reading him, I had some preconceptions about Schleiermacher, owing in large part to his reputation as the father of “liberal” theology. But the more I read him, the more convinced I am that those preconceptions were wrong.

    First, I had assumed that Schleiermacher built his theology on the foundation of a “generic,” supposedly universal human religious experience. Yet he’s quite explicit that Christian dogmatics is essentially a reflection on the specifically Christian experience of being redeemed by Christ. The famous “feeling of absolute dependence” is, it seems, an explication of this experience, not a more foundational concept from which it is derived. It does seem that Schleiermacher regarded human beings as having an innate capacity for religious experience, but the content of Christian religious experience is not derivable from this.

    Second, I was under the impression that Schleiermacher regarded doctrines as mere “expressions” of subjective religious experience without cognitive purchase on reality. This now seems completely wrong to me. It’s true that he says that dogmatics is an elaboration of Christian religious experience, but this seems to mean that dogmatic theology should make statements that, ultimately, derive their authority from Christians’ experience of redemption in Christ. We might put it this way: Christian dogmatic theology is the collection of statements about God and the world that must be true if Christian religious experience is valid or veridical. This method actually seems quite similar to the one used by many of the early church fathers–the debates over, for instance, the two natures of Christ were driven by considering what must be the case for Christ to be our redeemer. This is not “subjectivism” in some pernicious sense; rather, it roots theological reflection in the Christian experience of being saved by Jesus.

    Both of these points seem closely related to the overall purpose of Schleiermacher’s dogmatics: he’s writing theology for the church, not as an exercise in free-floating speculation. In many ways, he seems close to some of the “post-liberals” who have so stridently criticized the liberalism Schleiermacher is said to have inaugurated. That said, I’m only through the first volume of The Christian Faith, and I’m not at all confident that I’ve fully grasped what Schleiermacher is doing. So consider these some provisional thoughts.

  • Miracles according to Schleiermacher

    Schleiermacher treats miracles in part 1, section 1 of The Christian Faith under the more general heading of God’s creation and preservation of the world. He argues that the “interdependence” of finite beings in the world is fully compatible with each thing’s dependence on God at each moment of its existence. God is not one finite cause among others, but of an entirely different order of causality. God undergirds the entire order of nature, but does not appear within that order as one cause interacting with others. This seems similar to the traditional Thomistic distinction between “primary” and “secondary” causes.

    He then goes on to argue against the conception of miracles as events that violate, interrupt, or overturn the causal order of finite beings (or what he often calls the “interrelatedness of nature”). That is, he denies that a miracle is a direct act of God that bypasses or dispenses with finite causality. Rather, God acts in and through finite things. Schleiermacher makes the familiar argument that if God had to intervene in nature to achieve the divine purposes, it would be a sign of a defect in God’s ordering of the world. “It follows from this that the most perfect representation of omnipotence would be a view of the world which made no use of such an idea” (47.1). He also maintains that such events would “destroy the whole system of nature” (47.2) in that they would break the link between past and future events. For Schleiermacher, such a view of miracles undermines the feeling of absolute dependence of every thing on God because it shows that the order of nature does not reflect God’s will–since God, by hypothesis, has to intervene in order to make the order of the world conform to his will. Moreover, Schleiermacher points out, we have no way of knowing that any purported miraculous event doesn’t have some deeper natural explanation that we’re simply not aware of.

    “In this way,” he concludes,

    everything–even the most wonderful thing that happens or has happened–is a problem for scientific research; but, at the same time, when it in any way stimulates the pious feeling, whether through its purpose or in some other way, that is not in the lest prejudiced by the conceivable possibility of its being understood in the future. Moreover, we free ourselves entirely from a difficult and highly precarious task with which Dogmatics has so long laboured in vain, i.e. the discovery of definite signs which shall enable us to distinguish the false and diabolical miracle and the divine and true. (47.3)

    Schleiermacher’s view strikes me as very Reformed (not surprising, consider that he was a Reformed churchman). After all, if God orders everything that happens, why would God need to act outside of ordinary means to bring about his purposes? But it also makes me wonder how much the “feeling of absolute dependence” is itself filled with content that is specific to Reformed Christianity. Suppose instead we took the signature Christian religious experience to be something like “a feeling of being absolutely valued, or loved”: would that, using Schleiermacher’s method, yield a different understanding of God’s omnipotence (and thus also of miracles)?

    Even still, I think Schleiermacher’s argument has merit. For example, many miracle stories in the Bible don’t seem to require us to view them as all-out suspensions or violations of the causal order. Often they seem to involve God working through created means (such as the faith that is deemed to be required to make some of Jesus’ healings efficacious). Schleiermacher also seems correct that an event can have religious significance without us being able to say definitively that it occurred “outside” the causal nexus. In fact, it’s not at all clear how we’d ever be in a position to make that judgment definitively.

  • Schleiermacher on the historicity of the creation stories

    In the part in The Christian Faith on creation and preservation, Schleiermacher takes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) modern-seeming approach to the biblical creation stories. He argues that the doctrine of creation is intended to safeguard two points: (1) that everything that exists other than God is ultimately dependent on God and (2) that God was under no “external” constraints in creating, such as being limited by some pre-existent “stuff.”

    Consequently, Christians have no religious stake in any particular scientific or speculative account of the origins of the world. Schleiermacher notes that

    further elaboration of the doctrine of Creation in Dogmatics comes down to us from the times when material even for natural science was taken from the Scriptures and when the elements of all higher knowledge lay hidden in Theology. Hence the complete separation of these two involves our handing over this subject to natural science, which, carrying its researches backward into time, may lead us back to the forces and masses that formed the world, or even further still. (Christian Faith, 40.1)

    He concedes that the “Mosaic” account of creation was accepted as historical by the Reformers, but notes that the various Protestant confessions do not commit the church to that view. He also observes the allegorical interpretation of the “six days” was offered by the Jewish philosopher Philo and that “there always survived a somewhat obscure but healthy feeling that the old record must not be treated as historical in our sense of the word” (40.2).  Even if it was conceded, however, that the account in Genesis was historical, “it would only follow that in this way we had attained to a scientific insight we could not otherwise have acquired” (40.2). This would not be an article of faith in the proper sense, because it does not provide a greater elucidation of the feeling of absolute dependence.

    Schleiermacher takes this route in part because of his separation of philosophy and natural science from religion. Religion is rooted in the experience of absolute dependence, and everything related to dogmatic theology is an elaboration of that experience, as it occurs in the community of faith. But even if we don’t go all the way with Schleiermacher here, we can still agree that what faith says about the dependence of the world on God is a different kind of claim from the theories offered by science about the world’s origin and development.

  • Schleiermacher’s “natural heresies”

    For reasons that aren’t entirely clear even to me, I started reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith recently. And the weird thing is, I’m really enjoying it. Schleiermacher is (in)famous as the “father of modern theology” or sometimes “the father of liberal theology”: he tried to re-establish Christian faith on a basis that took into account Enlightenment critics but also went beyond the narrow and sterile rationalist constraints that some Enlightenment thinkers tried to place on religion. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, is not based in thought (philosophy) or action (ethics), but a kind of experience, which he famously described as a “feeling of absolute dependence.” As I read him, this isn’t a purely subjective experience, but a clue to or an apprehension of an objectively existing relationship between the world and God, albeit one that we only become aware of in relation to ourselves. This experience is both the “datum” of religion and something which it is the goal of the religious life to cultivate.

    This root religious experience, however, never comes to us “pure” so to speak. It always appears in a concrete form, which is conditioned by social, cultural, and historical factors, among other things. So, for Christians, the core religious experience is the experience of Jesus as our Redeemer. Everything in Christian theology flows from this. (This experience is always received within a “communion,” or church. Schleiermacher was no religious individualist.) According to Schleiermacher, Jesus possessed a perfect “God-consciousness”–which for him seems to mean something like an unwavering experience of this absolute dependence on the source of being. As Christians, we “catch” this God-consciousness from Jesus by being part of the church, and gradually we come to share in it more and more fully. (I’ve only just finished the–128 page!–introduction to The Christian Faith, so a lot of the details haven’t been worked out yet. But I think this is the general gist.)

    One interesting thing that falls out of this account of the “essence” of Christianity is that Schleiermacher is able to explain what he calls the four “natural heresies” that tend to arise throughout Christian history. If the core of Christian experience is that of Jesus as our Redeemer, then this implies that (1) we are in need of redemption, (2) we can be redeemed, (3) Jesus is sufficiently unlike us that he can be our Redeemer, and (4) Jesus is sufficiently like us that he can be our Redeemer. So, according to Schleiermacher, your four modal heresies are those that deny one of these four propositions:

    –“Pelagianism”–we don’t need redemption as such, though we may need someone who can show us how to be a little better.

    –“Manicheism”–creation is so corrupted/wicked that it is essentially irredeemable.

    –“Nazaritism” or “Ebionitism”–Jesus is just a human like us, so does not posses any special quality that can redeem us.

    –“Docetism”–Jesus only appeared to be fully human, and so is too unlike us to provide the kind of redemption we need.

    Schleiermacher is careful to point out that these are idealized types, and may not be perfectly instantiated in history. But he thinks that identifying them can help further clarify what the essence of Christianity consists in. In any event, I found the discussion enlightening.