A Question of Origins

We are intrigued by genealogies. One of the features of Post-Enlightenment thinking that dies hardest is the belief that if you can explain how something came to be you have explained the thing itself. If you can trace the development or the evolution perhaps, of your object of study, you can claim to have understood it. This of course was famously exemplified by Darwinian science; but we can see the same "quest for origins" paradigm in the theology of the nineteenth century. The "Quest for the Historical Jesus" and the developments of source and tradition criticism are examples of massive intellectual endeavours which aimed to illuminate the text of the Bible by reconstructing the "real" world behind it. The documents were sifted, segmented and reconstructed. However, as in dissecting a lab rat, putting the parts back together somehow leaves you with something not quite a rat, or in this case, a text.

There were - and are - two assumptions behind the process, of course: that the earlier stream in the text is more authoritative, and that the church of the first two centuries distorted that authoritative picture. The depictions of Jesus in the gospels, for example, serve the purposes of the communities for which they were written, and tell us more about them than about the historical Jesus. Secondarily, then, the history of the early church becomes a significant matter, because if you can unpick their additions and distortions - and add back in some of which they suppressed or overlooked – then you have a chance of glimpsing the face of the authentic Jesus, the real carpenter of Galilee himself. In particular, Paul is blamed with making Christianity into something that Jesus never intended it to be. (See AN Wilson, for one author who follows this tired strategy).

But the first years of the church are a valid object for historical study in their own right. This is because they, too, represent a miracle. How was it possible that, in the short space of a three centuries, the Christian faith could go from being a tiny Jewish cult to becoming the dominant religion of the Empire? Augustine of Hippo used to use the miracle of the survival and expansion of the church as a pillar of his apologetic method. Nineteenth Century German historian Adolf von Harnack, in his monumental The History of Dogma, sounds rather at a loss to explain this success: Christianity grew with "inconceivable rapidity"; there was "astonishing expansion." He wrote "Christianity must have reproduced itself by means of miracles, for the greatest miracle of all would have been the extraordinary extension of the religion apart from any miracles." Answering this question, the question of the success of the church, is foundational for understanding the development of Christendom and thus the whole culture – ethics, law, politics and art – of the Western world, as well as crucial to understanding the historical Jesus.

Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy

Of course in thinking about heresy (see previous post), it is worth thinking about what orthodoxy is. Rowan Williams has a very influential view which he established in his book about Arius: that heresy actually arises from the attempt to go further than our talking about God ought to go; that it results from rationalism - any 'attempt to clean up or rearrange Christian language which results in a major reduction of available resources of meaning.' It usually results when theologians value 'conceptual economy and precision over richness of symbolic resource' (as Higton puts it) 'when they make the attempt to tie things down too neatly, to control the various and excessove language of worship and devotion too closely.'

So, orthodoxy for its part is actually a refusal to go further in explaining, a deliberate drawing of the doctrinal circle in a wide rather than a narrow way. It is a victory for poets over bureaucrats: for those who want language that generates new possibilities of meaning over against those that would close them down and specify and deaden. The Nicene formulae (and their later Chalcedonian counterparts) refuse to explain how their may be a Son and Father who are equally God; or a person who is God and man. For Williams, then, the job of doctrine is to teach us silence as well as to circumscribe and guide our speech. Orthodoxy becomes then the steel framework around which Christians in each generation must build and rebuild, with considerable effort and not a little pain.

Now, parts of this vision strike me as problematic and a kind of postmodern retrojection back on the 4th century (he does this, bizarrely in my opinion, with Cranmer as well!) It could easily be caricatured as a very Anglican, very English approach to doctrine - i.e., the English are happy for minimalist view of the role of laws and constitutions because so much of their culture proceeds by convention and agreement. Notably, in the US, the opposite is true: laws and conventions have to do what they say on the packet. Americans (and other colonials!) find the vagueness of the English not liberating but rather frustrating, and a little dishonest (it isn't, but that is how it is perceived). Williams (showing his Hegelian colours) does rather focus on the agonising process of deliberation as an end in itself over against the decision/s of any such debates, too.

BUT: there is also something very appealing about Williams' notion of orthodoxy too. Earlier, for example, in talking about the atonement we struck an attempt to exclude the very old and certainly biblical idea of sacrificial substitution from an orthodox understanding of the atonement; and on the other side, Vanhoozer's warnings about rationalism and reductionism as tendencies in evangelical theological thinking. Both pitfalls are avoided if orthodoxy is practiced as Williams would have us practice it, certainly.