The 10 most pressing issues for evangelical theology today

With a dash of hubris (why not, it's a Monday morning) - here are the issues on which I think evangelicals have some work to do. Not that individual evangelicals don't hold strongly to some of these - it is just that either the 'traditional' view is under challenge, or that there is a lack of consensus among evangelicals. This list is, like all lists, meant to provoke and challenge of course - it is meant (and I hope will be received!) in that spirit.


1 - scripture
How is inerrancy best to be understood and expressed - if indeed it is the most appropriate and useful word to express and uphold the highest possible commitment of the authority of scripture? Can we move beyond the use of the word as line in the sand and actually articulate what we mean by it in the midst of a post-biblical culture? Can evangelicals actually have a mature discussion about this? (I really like what The Gospel Coalition is doing with this, actually)

2 - God
Now that the 'openness of God' distraction has been overcome, there still seems to be a tension between the position known as 'classical theism' and the more 'biblical personalist' position. How are the attributes of God to be addressed, then, by the biblical Christian? Does classical theism help or hinder?

3 - election
Election is always a tough one. Double or single? Have new readings of Paul made a difference to what needs to be said about Israel? What is the purpose of the doctrine of election, dogmatically speaking?

4 - the atonement
Even between those who would agree that penal substitution is an indispensible part of the Bible's teaching on the atonement - what place does it have within the whole scope of the Bible's teaching? How does it relate to other elements?

5 - justification
The debate between Wright and Piper over imputation reveals some faultlines. Imputation seems a necessary corollory of an evangelical testimony to justification by faith. But what are its exegetical foundations? And will 'union with Christ' prove to be a more fruitful model to explain this teaching? (with much good work to come from Moore's own Con Campell)

6 - anthropology

I think theological anthropology is right at the missional cutting edge, and the more thinking evangelicals can do about it the better. That is not to fall prey to the temptation to collapse theology into anthropology, or to get distracted by all kinds of anthropologically interesting byways, but to give a full and rich account of the meaning and purpose of human life lived under the hand of the God who is mindful of man (to steal from Psalm 8).

7 - sin

Sin is a corollory of the doctrine of man... Once again it is a missionally urgent task to give an articulation of sin that is as full-orbed as we can make it. This is one instance where 'biblically faithful' and 'culturally aware' are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The mute incomprehension of our contemporaries as they hear contemporary preachers talk about sin highlights the problem... The answer is not in their hearts of course. The word of God is better than we think it is.

8 - philosophy & theology

Evangelicals seem genuinely undecided about this as a group. Is philosophy good, bad, or indifferent? A friend, or a foe? Is a philosophy-less theology simply naive? or is a philosophy in addition to theology a blasphemy? What have we to say about thinking?

9 - apologetics

A connected issue, then, is that of apologetics. Ought we to do apologetics at all? Many evangelicals have invested very heavily in apologetics. But to what end? Are the models of apologetics - evidentialist, presuppositionalist (does anyone actually understand what the heck presuppositionalist apologists are saying?) - enough for the needs of the day?

10 - church
Evangelicals have always prided themselves on being ecclesiology-lite. They have achieved far more in terms of ecumenical co-operation than other forms of Christianity as a result. Ecclesiology is secondary. However, there are numerous settings where this needs to be revisited, given the rapid realignment of denominations and the retreat of Christendom. So you see some pretty heavy church-speak from evangelicals these days: the Nine Marks ministry says some pretty particular things ecclesiology-wise. The Federal Vision movement is likewise (though very different) heavy on sacraments and covenant/church talk. This is not an isolated trend.

11 - hermeneutics
I don't mean hermeneutics in the sense of perspectival readings etc, but in the sense of asking the question: what makes the bible a unity? In what does a richly theological reading of Scripture consist? There are some very exciting developments on this front, building on the work of a previous generation - biblical scholars now collaborating with theologians on the matter of scriptural interpretation.

Biblical 'data'... no more!

Every now and again I catch myself using the language of 'biblical data'. That is, I suggest that some or other conclusion can be drawn 'from the biblical data'.

I think this language, while not strictly speaking wrong, is badly misleading. And I hereby resolve not to use it!

How come? Well, 'data' is a word that comes to us from the world of scientific empiricism. It implies a set of raw, uncollated information that lies dormant until the scientist can put into some sort of order and therefore draw conclusions. Or, 'data' is a list of entries of unfiltered informationinto a computer programme which then has operations performed on it to turn it into something meaningful.

The Scriptures are not in this sense 'data'; nor is the theologian in the position of the scientist or the computer. There two particularly important reasons (at least) why this is the case:

a) the Scriptures are writings which already have a large degree of interpretational activity going on within them. The writers of the Bible are not presenting to us 'just the facts': they are unafraid to admit that this is their 'spin' on things.

b) the language of 'data' prevents us from seeing the sequential, historical nature of the Scriptures. Each piece of scriptural 'data' is not of equivalent standing to the next. It has its place in the testimony of the scriptures to the God of Abraham who is also the God of Jesus Christ.

Theology as repentant humility...

Theology is an act of repentant humility…This act exists in the fact that in theology the Church seeks again and again to examine itself critically as it asks itself what it means and implies to be a Church among men…The Church, too, lives under the judgement of God, as does the world. So, it cannot be otherwise but that the Church must critically examine itself, not according to its own wishes and standards but according to the standard which is identical with its basis of existence which is God’s revelation, which, concretely, is the Holy Scriptures. It is this constant and ever-recurring necessity and demand for self-examination of the Church by the standard of the divine Word which is the peculiar function of theology in the Church.

Karl Barth, ‘Theology’ in God in Action (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1936), pp. 44f

Reading the Bible in the old South Africa

Richard Burridge, who wrote a remarkable work on the genre of the gospels, has a new book called Imitating Jesus - An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. While I have yet to discover what he means by 'inclusive' - a word that normally makes me reach for my gun, because it is a such a loaded term - I have been impressed by his determination to recover the role of the Bible, and of the Biblical Jesus, in ethics. He relates the problem to the apartheid era in South Africa, when genuine Christians prayerfully earnestly and intelligently reading their Bibles decided that it supported racism. Does this mean that the Bible ought to be rejected, because it is open to such uses? By no means: though merely appealing to the Bible does not guarantee good reading of it.

Interestingly, he quotes CESA Bishop Frank Retief's submission, made in 1997, to a hearing of 'Faith Communities'.

...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society...We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle...Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us....The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today...It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society... p. 397-8

I have met Bishop Frank and heard him speak, and I find this an impressive and moving statement. But, Burridge asks, what gives him and others (and the rest of us) confidence that we aren't making similar mistakes now?

Burridge gives an analysis of how the South African churches got into this mess - and notes on the one hand a lack of self-criticism and on the other a theology which overlooked the central place of Jesus for all Christian ethics. Could a church that was actually prioritising Jesus - the Jesus of the gospels, but also the Jesus of Paul and the other authors of the NT - have allowed itself to lapse so badly? Make no mistake, there was some sophisticated theological and exegetical work done in the theological faculties of South Africa in the apartheid era... but, says Burridge, the voice of Jesus was strangely silent even so.

So, argues Burridge, if churches want to avoid falling into the group-think which has resulted in such terrible misusing the Bible, they need to practice self-reflection and self-criticism as a matter of course. And also, they ought to pay attention to Jesus.

[Note: to any South African readers - I am only here reporting from Burridge. I cannot know and do not pretend to know what it was to live in those times and to be a Christian in those times. Nor do I know what it is to live as a Christian with this as a legacy - though Australian Christians have made their own mistakes of course.]

Introduction to the Bible: some notes II

Some further thoughts on discussions we had last night.

1. If you want something really good to read, D. Clines' The Theme of the Pentateuch is pretty good, though a little pricey I notice.
His basic thesis is this:

The theme of the Pentateuch is the partial fulfilment—which implies also the partial non-fulfilment—of the promise to or blessing of the patriarchs. The promise or blessing is both the divine initiative in a world where human initiatives always lead to disaster, and a re-affirmation of the primal divine intentions for man.

This is a pretty good summary. Notice how, as we suggested last night, the first five books of the bible propel us forward into the future. They suggest that more is to come: though there is a partial fulfilment, there is still much of what God has promised left outstanding.

2. We talked a bit about 'covenants': Noah, Abraham, Moses/Israel, David, (Jeremiah). Could you also call the Garden of Eden a 'covenant' arrangement? Certainly, the structure of a covenant is there, with an act of sheer grace - creation - followed by a stipulation which is really a designation of the freedom of Adam and Eve to carry out their task within the parameters that God sets and under his protection. What do you think? An old teacher of mine, Bill Dumbrell, in his excellent book Covenant and Creation reckons that this is a covenant pure and simple. (You might also see his truly excellent book The Faith of Israel, which gives a great summary of every OT book. )

3. The question was raised: 'since the human situation appears to degenerate so quickly after Noah's time, what does the flood achieve?'

It's a fair enough question. First of all, I would say that the little story about the angelic love affairs with human women suggests an almost demonic condition of the pre-flood world. This infection of the lineage of humanity was broken by the flood. So, in that sense it could be argued that the flood provided a decisive break but also a continuity of God's plan. (NB - is this what is meant by the 'spirits in prison' in 1 Peter 3:8? Could be!)

Secondly, the NT sees the flood as a great demonstration of the pattern and scope of God's judgement on the earth AND his plan of salvation - see 2 Peter 2 for example:

5if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others ...9if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue godly men from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment.

Bultmann on demythologisation

Our reading group has begun reading a collection of Bultmann's essays edited by Schubert Ogden: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings. It seems to me Bultmann is a figure almost completely overlooked these days by NT scholars, but becoming more popular amongst theologians. When you read his John commentary for example you can see why this might be so: Bultmann was formidibly - even incredibly - learned as a philologist and historian, but his rearrangements of the NT text are often arbirtrary, even whimsical. However, his adaptation of the existentialism of Heidegger for interpretation of the NT is quite revelatory of the human and dramatic situations under scrutiny.

At the suggestion of the editor, we began with the last essay in the book, from 1961: 'On the Problem of Demythologizing'. Of course, as good postmoderns, our first observation was just how 'modernist' he is: the world-view of the natural sciences is the given as far as he is concerned, and means that we cannot except the 'myths' of the NT as anything but naive. The job of exegesis and theology is to decode the myths and express them in the idiom of contemporary thought: 'demythologization seeks to bring out myth's real intention to talk about out own authentic reality as human beings'. Of course, there is no hint from Bultmann that this might be a 'remythologization' in its turn! Bultmann's determination is to wrestle with the vary Kantian dilemma: since God is not a fact withing the world that can be objectively established but rather must be confessed, we can only talk about him if we at the same time talk about our own existence as affected by God's act. As he says:
The statement that God is Creator and Lord has its legitimate basis only in our existential self-understanding...
This on the face of it seems a curious claim: but the statement is a statement that is believed and confessed, after all, and preached, rather than one open to the inquiries of natural scientific methods.
The peculiar thing about Christain faith, however, is that it sees an utterly special act of God in a certain historiacl event, which as such can be objectively established. This is the appearance of Jesus Christ, who is seen to be the revelation of God that calls everyone to faith.
Not too much to complain about here.

The Unity of the Bible?

All this talk in Chris Wright and Graeme Goldsworthy about 'overarching frameworks' and such makes me want to ask: in what does the coherence of the Bible lie? How can it be properly described?

Narratives cohere (often) around a central character or set of characters. Or, as in a saga, like D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, several generations of people living in the same place provide the threads of interconnection between the succesive stages of the novel. One novel I read, Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, coheres around an inanimate object (an accordian) as its finds itself in successive sets of hands. In Anna Karenina two plots are interwoven though there is little connection between them - they are connected in that the characters share in family relations of a somewhat distance kind.

Ultimately, it is the collecting of the elements together in the single work that unifies them, though usually there are more elements of formal coherence than that. Think of a painting in an art gallery: it is the framing and placing of the elements within the frame and on the wall that invites us to consider them as a unity, even if the elements of the painting are quite discordant. If they are discordant, we tend to ask why they have been juxtaposed and wrestle to discover what relation there might be or that we might find between them.

These formal coherences - often unimportant in themselves - invite the reader to consider and discover thematic coherences as suggested by the stories. Sometimes these are quite surprising, granted. Sometimes the formal coherences do not account for all the elements in the work, at least not obviously. But the human love of comparing and contrasting, and of finding patterns, makes for the most enjoyable part of engaging with narrative art forms.

The other aspect of our apprehension of coherence when it comes to narratives is of course time. We experience time in narratives through emplotment. No matter how many post-modern novels cut and paste their narratives, the narrative form relies heavily on a succession of events and invites us to consider (or tells us) what the relation between the events consists in. EM Forster famously wrote: 'The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.'

The canonical Bible has a coherence in a formal sense in the first instance in that it traces the history of Israel with its God in a roughly chronological order. The New Testament claim is that it continues and indeed completes this history. However, there are things that are collected within the lists of Law, Writings and Prophets that are not obviously part of the main succession of events. Very few clues are given as to why Job, for example, has been placed within the canon: which is for us readers an invitation to consider what it does contribute. It is almost as if it has been placed there by intuition: (from the human side) by an editor not quite knowing what he was yet looking at but sure that what he had was of inestimable value, and recognising in it the divine voice.

I suppose what I am leaning towards saying is this: the formal unity of the Bible consists of the collecting of these books together as Scripture; and its relation to salvation-history. The Bible describes a series of events that were connected to one another over time, in place, and by a people connected intergenerationally. This formal unity allows then for multiple strands of thematic coherence to be discerned, some of which are more prominent and others less so, and which have complex relations to one another. Of course, some of these coherence is quite obvious, as the authors of scripture deliberately cite each other, and play with and develop - even critique - the themes and other content of other scriptural books. This is also why it is inadequate to read any passage of scripture without due consideration to its relationship to salvation-history and without relation to how the particular themes within it are treated and developed within the canon.

The Mission of God VII

Chris Wright says:

How then can it be suggested that evangelistic proclamation is the only essential mission of the church? It seems impossible to eme to justify such reductionism if we intend to sustain any claim to be taking the whole Bible seriously as our authority for mission and as that which defines the content and scope of our mission. Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people... p. 306

This is typical Wright, and it is problematic in a typical way. I would never dispute that we need the whole Bible for our understanding of mission. This is what Wright has got so wonderfully right. However, Wright does not sufficiently account for the difference between the Old and New Testaments. He has over-reacted to a contemporary Marcionitism by going to the opposite extreme, it seems to me. We cannot relegate the exodus and the jubilee to a bygone era, sure: but also we cannot simply take them on board in an undifferentiated way. We are not Israel. We are the church. This basic observation cannot be overstated! Things are different: even the most ardent advocate of a third use of the law knows this. Wright gives (as far as I can see) an insufficient account of the difference.

Wright is of course highly selective in his reading of what aspects of the OT are still operative, though he keeps banging the 'holistic' drum. His version does not highlight the moral law, as forms of Calvinism do; rather, he pulls out some aspects of social justice and concerns of a vaguely left-wing nature. But it is just as arbitrary. This particularly obvious with the year of Jubilee, which is given a quite questionable amount of emphasis in this book considering its lack of prominence in the Scriptures. And I keep searching for an enunciated principle of differentiation that would account for his selectivity.

Evangelistic mission, I would argue, is deserving of particular emphasis and priority, also. But more of that later.

The Mission of God VI - 'Frameworks'

At Stowe Gardens. Simon pretends to be a tree. No-one else takes any notice.

Wright has a couple of guiding metaphors. He offers his reading of the Bible as the 'key to unlock' the Bible's narrative (is the Bible a safe that needs cracking? a door that needs opening? is it somehow closed without the key?). This sounds uncomfortably reminiscent of George Eliot's scholar Casuabon and his never-ending project to find the 'key to all mythologies'. He also repeatedly speaks of the theme of God's mission as a 'framework', or an 'overarching framework'. (Goldsworthy uses the same vocabulary). Though it isn't a framework, really (which is a structural metaphor), but, in the way Wright uses it, an organising motif. But: why do we need a 'framework'? Why do we need such intensive exploration to uncover the 'framework'? Why are there competing 'frameworks' of equal plausibility? Are we saying that without the framework, the Bible's unity and coherence is in question somehow? (Interestingly, Wright does not discuss at any length other suggestions for an organising principle, though there are many). Isn't Jesus the Christ the organising principle (at least for Christians) and all the framework that is needed? Part of the problem here is the Wright wants to make more of the OT ethically speaking than a properly Christological reading of the OT will let him.

Interestingly, Wright starts by offering his theme 'the mission of God' as one possible hermeneutical key among many. By the end, it has become THE right and correct way to make sense of the Bible. So, he is saying more than: this theme is a neglected theme and look how much of the Bible is related to it. Now he is saying 'this is what the Bible is about, and it isn't about something else'. It becomes less a book about mission, and more a book about how to read the Bible.

Further on Biblical Studies and the Bible: Brian Brock

I mentioned my surprise at the chasm between Biblical Studies and Doctrine/Ethics in terms of use of the Bible. Brian Brock in his fascinating new book writes:

No academic discpline can be posited as privileged or primary in its relationship to Scripture, including biblical studies. The only solidity to which the Christian faith can cling in its exploration of the Bible is Christ as body, head, and Word. Any concept or academic discipline that makes itself the arbiter between rival interpretations would have to be established as another axiomatic truth. p. 266

Brock opposes the development of some academic superstructure that operates like a bureaucracy through which the Bible must pass if it is to be made available for theological/ethical reflection. Actually, sometimes I feel like this: a theologian wants to use a passage of the Bible in his work. Has he filled out the right forms, and applied to the New Testament department for permission to use the passage? If so, he must wait, and only then use the passage within carefully defined parameters, subject to and with reference to the most important commentaries on the subject... Then, he must develop a sophisticated hermeneutic which meets with all our criteria.

Sigh!

Graeme Goldsworthy interviewed

A very interesting interview with my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy is here. It is great to see his work gaining a worldwide readership and having an influence on the pulpit.

Show no mercy...?

Moses says to Israel:

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.

What can a biblical Christian make of this? The word of God, or the word of Man?