Category Archives: Bible

God’s Wrath, Christ’s Peace, and the Culture Wars


Catholic theologian James Alison’s essay “Wrath and the gay question: on not being afraid, and its ecclesial shape” is not only the best explanation of the Atonement I’ve seen in a long while, but also represents (to my mind) a more helpful direction for gay-affirming Christians than merely hunting for proof-texts that support our position and explaining away those that don’t.

Alison contends that human societies constantly seek self-definition by scapegoating outsiders. When Christ, the only completely innocent person, voluntarily assumed the scapegoat role, he exposed the sinfulness of that entire system. Never again could we in good faith believe that spiritual purity depended on exclusion. If community must be founded on sacrifice, Christ was the sacrificial victim and the entire human race became a single community, united by our responsibility for his death and by his equal love for us all. Yet Alison also finds fault with the liberal “many flavors” approach to gays in the church, saying we need to emphasize not the diversity of human lifestyles but our universal brother- and sisterhood.

Some highlights (boldface emphasis mine):


I want to bring into polite adult discussion something which is not normally allowed there, but is relegated to the backroom of fundamentalist discourse, where its misuse is a mirror image of its exclusion from enlightened discourse.

In enlightened discourse, there is of course, no “wrath” in any theological or anthropological sense. There is progress, and development, and of course, on the way there is conflict. Conflict is shown as something painful, but necessary, steps on the way towards the next phase. No omelettes without breaking eggs, and similar sentiments. In fundamentalist discourse, that conflict and those “steps on the way to the next phase” are personally and cosmically significant, and victory and defeat in them are part of the mysterious workings of a divinity, certainly something far greater and more important than anything the “wise” and “enlightened” of this generation could know about. Part of the attraction of fundamentalist discourse, and this fundamentalism can be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Marxist, or secularist, is the way it allows partially self-selecting “outsiders” from mainstream culture (and we’re all such partially self-selecting “outsiders” now) to see themselves as secret “insiders” with a direct line in to What’s Really Going On.

For the Enlightened, it is perfectly obvious that there is no violence in God, if there is a God at all; while for the fundamentalist, the violence is always associated with God, directly, or through those charged with interpreting “His” (and it usually is His) message. In fact, without the violence there would be no sign of God’s activity in the world, which effectively means, there would be no God. What I would like to do is rescue the notion of wrath by attempting to show how there is indeed no violence in God, but that the phenomenon which religious language has described as “wrath” is very real, and worth taking seriously. Not only that, but it is rather important for our contemporary ability to live the Gospel that we overcome the schism between the enlightened and the fundamentalist, two positions which are, in my view, very much enemy twins, by recovering a sense of the anthropological effect in our midst of the covenant of peace to which the Scriptures refer (Isaiah 54, 10; Ezekiel 34, 25 & 37, 26). By recovering, if you like, the ecclesial shape of Christ making his covenant for us and enabling us not to be afraid.

There seems to be something odd going on when the same person, Jesus, both promises his followers:

      Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. (John 14, 27)

And yet says:

   Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. (Mt 10, 34-36; cf. Luke 12, 51)

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Jesus does warn that the effect of his mission is going to be to produce wrath, in the passage I have already quoted to you. And in fact, he then gives himself to the sacrificial mechanism in a way which the Gospel writers point to as being the way proper to the great High Priest, and he becomes the lamb of sacrifice. In fact, he reverses the normal human sacrificial system which started with human sacrifice and then is later modified to work with animal substitutes. Jesus, by contrast, substitutes himself for the lamb, portions of whose body were handed out to the priests; and thus by putting a human back at the centre of the sacrificial system, he reveals it for what it is: a murder.

Now here is the curious thing. It looks for all the world as though Jesus is simply fitting into the ancient world’s views about sacrifice and wrath. But in fact, he is doing exactly the reverse. Because he is giving himself to this being murdered, and he has done nothing wrong, he brings about an entirely new way to be free from wrath. This is not the way we saw with Achan, where the temporary freedom from wrath comes with the outbreak of unanimous violence which creates singleness of heart among the group. What Jesus has done by substituting himself for the victim at the centre of the lynch sacrifice is to make it possible for those who perceive his innocence, to realise what it is in which they have been involved (and agreeing to drink his blood presupposes a recognition of this complicity). These then begin to have their identity given them not by the group over against the victim, but by the self-giving victim who is undoing the unanimity of the group. This means that from then on they never again have to be involved in sacrifices, sacrificial mechanisms and all the games of “wrath” which every culture throws up. They will be learning to walk away from all that, undergoing being given the peace that the world does not give.

So, there is no wrath at all in what Jesus is doing. He understands perfectly well that there is no wrath in the Father, and yet that “wrath” is a very real anthropological reality, whose cup he will drink to its dregs. His Passion consists, in fact, of his moving slowly, obediently, and deliberately into the place of shame, the place of wrath, and doing so freely and without provoking it. However, from the perspective of the wrathful, that is, of all of us run by the mechanisms of identity building, peace building, unanimity building “over against” another, Jesus has done something terrible. Exactly as he warned. He has plunged us into irresoluble wrath. Because he has made it impossible for us ever really to believe in what we are doing when we sacrifice, when we shore up our social belonging against some other. All our desperate attempts to continue doing that are revealed to be what they are: just so much angry frustration, going nowhere at all, spinning the wheels of futility.

The reason is this: the moment we perceive that the one occupying the central space in our system of creating and shoring up meaning is actually innocent, actually gave himself to be in that space, then all our sacred mechanisms for shoring up law and order, sacred differences and so forth, are revealed to be the fruits of an enormous self-deception. The whole world of the sacred totters, tumbles, and falls if we see that this human being is just like us. He came to occupy the place of the sacrificial victim entirely freely, voluntarily, and without any taint of being “run” by, or beholden to, the sacrificial system. That is, he is one who was without sin. This human being was doing something for us even while we were so locked into a sacrificial way of thinking and behaviour that we couldn’t possibly have understood what he was doing for us, let alone asked him to do it. The world of the sacred totters and falls because when we see someone who is like us doing that for us, and realise what has been done, the shape that our realisation takes is our moving away from ever being involved in such things again.

Now what is terrible about this is that it makes it impossible for us really to bring about with a good conscience any of the sacred resolutions, the sacrificial decisions which brought us, and bring all societies, comparative peace and order. The game is up. And so human desire, rivalry, competition, which had previously been kept in some sort of check by a system of prohibitions, rituals, sacrifices and myths, lest human groups collapse in perpetual and irresoluble mutual vengeance, can no longer be controlled in this way. This is the sense in which Jesus’ coming brings not peace to the earth, but a sword and division. All the sacred structures which hold groups together start to collapse, because desire has been unleashed. So the sacred bonds within families are weakened, different generations will be run by different worlds, give their loyalty to different and incompatible causes,
the pattern of desire constantly shifting. All in fact will be afloat on a sea of wrath, because the traditional means to curb wrath, the creation by sacrifice of spaces of temporary peace within the group, has been undone forever. The only alternative is to undergo the forgiveness which comes from the lamb, and start to find oneself recreated from within by a peace which is not from this world, and involves learning how to resist the evil one by not resisting evil. This means: you effectively resist, have no part in, the structures and flows of desire which are synonymous with the prince of this world, that is to say with the world of wrath, only by refusing to acquire an identity over against evil-done-to you.
Read the whole article here.

Would Jesus Discriminate?


The website “Would Jesus Discriminate?” offers a provocative new take on some familiar Bible stories. Using textual and historical analysis of the original Greek text, the authors claim that certain New Testament episodes are really about gay characters, such as the eunuch baptized by Philip in the book of Acts. I’m cautiously enthusiastic about this project. I’d like to believe that there are positive stories about gay people and relationships in the Bible, but there are two things that make me hesitate. First, I don’t have the scholarly background to know how plausible these readings are. Second, it would be a shame if we went overboard and read a sexual component into all stories of intimate friendship (e.g. David and Jonathan), as our pop-Freudian suspicious culture is wont to do. Anyhow, click the billboards on their site and let me know what you think.

Bishop Schori Interviewed by Bill Moyers


The PBS program Bill Moyers Journal yesterday interviewed Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA and the first woman to lead a national Anglican church. Schori is an interesting figure. As the interview shows, her background as an oceanographer gives her an appreciation of the diversity of God’s creation. Science also shapes her historical awareness that tradition and expert opinion always evolve in response to new data, and that somehow the enterprise (be it science or religion) can continue through change without losing legitimacy. Moyers’ leading questions got on my nerves; he persisted in framing the issues as us-versus-them, seeming not to hear Schori’s primary emphasis on reconciliation, coexistence and patience.

The transcript and video are both available on the site, along with background material on the conflict over homosexuality in the church. I may be asking too much from television, but I wish the cultural issues didn’t always upstage the theological ones in coverage of the Anglican schism. Apart from her brave stance on gays’ and women’s equality, what does Bishop Schori believe about God, Jesus, the atonement, grace, salvation…you know, those things that were actually important enough to have more than six Bible verses written about them? What are the different positions on these topics within the Anglican Communion, and how do those divisions track the pro-gay/anti-gay split, or not?

Some quotes from Bishop Schori:


“The incredible wonder of God’s creation and the incredible diversity of God’s creation. Things that come in different sizes and colors and shapes and body forms are all part of that incredible diversity of creation that’s present below the waters where we never even see them. And the Psalms tell us that God delights in that.

“My faith journey has been, as a scientist, about discovering the wonder of creation. That there– there’s a prayer that we, in the Episcopal Church use after baptism that prays that the newly baptized may receive the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. The kind of work that I did as a scientist was a piece of that, just a small piece.”

****

“Religion is at its best, I think, an invitation into relationship. It’s not necessarily a set of instructions for how you deal with every challenging person you run across in the world. It has that at its depth, but it– does not give one permission to say, “This person is out, and this one’s okay and acceptable.” And I– it continually invites us into a larger understanding of that relationship.”

****

“I do believe [homosexuality is] a moral issue because it’s about how we love our neighbor. It’s about how we live in relationship to God and our neighbors. When I look at other instances in church history, when we’ve been faced with something similar– the history in this country over the– over slavery. The church in the north . Much of it came to a different conclusion than the church in the south– about the morality of slavery.

“And neither side was comfortable with the breadth of understanding that could include the other. In practice, the Episcopal Church didn’t kick out the Confederate part of the church. They kept calling the roll during the Civil War, and when the war was over, they welcomed them back. But in the– in the heat of the moment it’s pretty tough to live with that kind of breadth that can include a position that seems so radically opposed.”

****

[On the Christian tradition’s difficulty in affirming sexuality:] “I think part of it’s our Greek heritage. You know, our tendency toward dualism, that– you know, one part of a human being or a male human being– exemplifies spirit and– a female human being is somehow lesser and– demonstrates the flesh. “With our long-development of an anthropology that says that heterosexual male is a normative human being. We’re– we’ve only begun in the last 150 years to really question that.

“And I believe that the wrestling with the place of women in leadership, particularly in public leadership, is directly related to the same kind of issue over the position of gay and lesbian people in leadership, in public leadership.”

Resolving Realities: GLBT Christians, Love, and Law Versus Grace


David at Resolving Realities makes one of the more thorough arguments I’ve seen for why same-sex love is compatible with Biblical authority. I particularly appreciate how he goes beyond reinterpretation of specific verses to lay out a theory of Christian sexual morality. As the comments thread demonstrates, he wisely refrains from claiming that his is the only plausible reading of the text, merely that the pro-gay reading is one reasonable interpretation and therefore should not be a litmus test for whether you take the Bible seriously (as it has become in the Anglican Church’s present schism). Some highlights (boldface emphasis mine):


It is stunning to me that some Christians are willing to site Levitical mandates as a source of morality. If one desires to give Old Testament law, there is simply no way around justifying the commands, for we see even our Lord declaring, contra the Mosaic code, that “nothing that goes into a man can make him unclean”. Both Christ and his apostles explicitly freed us from the law. Some people try to distinguish between ‘moral’ and ‘ceremonial’ laws, but a clear test for determining members of each category must be presented, for the Torah itself makes no such distinctions. Because of the textual evidence (or lack thereof), and because I am uncomfortable adding distinctions where Scripture sees none, I do not buy the theory that there is a moral/ceremonial distinction to Mosaic law, and I have yet to hear a strong case for such a view. The breaking of any of the myriad laws is lawlessness. If these Levitical commands on male intercourse are binding, so is the Levitical command against menstrual intercourse, and all the other commands on any subject. I cannot explain all of the Mosaic code, and indeed much of it puzzles me, but I do not believe that it was not meant to be a static law given to all people for all time, and as people under Christ we are not to run to it as our guide.

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If [Romans 1:26-27] is to be used to condemn homosexuality (or homosexual behavior, pick your lingo), one absolutely must accept the verse’s etiology (i.e., cause) of homosexuality. Paul clearly states that not only the actions but the desires of the people he’s talking about exists because of idolatry and (apparently) heterosexual immorality. For verse 26 begins, unambiguously, with the words ‘because of this’, directing the reader’s view upward to the actions described before. In fact, this brief stint on homosexuality is part of a passage that has nothing to do with sexuality, but a spiral of godlessness in the context of idolatry. To insist by reason of ‘face-value’ interpretation that this passage condemns all people engaging in homosexual sex, and yet not to accept the verse’s face-value cause of such a thing – that is, idolatry and immorality – is the height of selective biblical literalism. And those of us who are gay can tell you that we have not (most of us) engaged in idolatry nor in immorality leading up to the discovery of our orientation. It just is….

If we wish to interpret Romans 1 as condemning all gay people unambiguously (rather than those who, in worshipping idols and engaging in sexual immorality are given over to all sorts of sexual behavior, both natural to them and unnatural), we must also insist that every gay person is the way they are because of idolatry and immorality. You cannot claim Romans 1 condemns homosexual behavior, without recognizing that it also condemns the desire, and you must abandon all thought of biological or even psychological causes of sexual orientation outside of the context given in this passage. To be sure, Paul has nothing positive to say about the matter, and the thought of sanctioned homosexual relations probably did not occur to him, but when we come to Scripture we must come to it in context.

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[Another] thing we must understand in developing a sex ethic is what principles we are basing our morality on. There are a lot of rules in the Bible, but what does the Bible have to say about the principles guiding morality?

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”(Matthew 22:37-40)

Here, then, is the source of all morality. But what about all the rules given, and what about our understanding of law and righteousness?

“All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’ Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, ‘The righteous will live by faith.’ The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, ‘The man who does these things will live by them.’ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’

“Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.”(Galatians 3:10-13, 23-25)

This is the Bible’s morality: love. And do not think it is a light thing, or that it is a good feeling one may get at the end of the day. Love is summed up in Christlikeness.

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:10)

So our call to love – at whatever the cost to ourselves – is the ultimate source of all ethics. As both Paul and Jesus say, all the law is summed up in the command to love. If we wish to put forth a regulation to God’s children, we must first be sure, absolutely sure, that this regulation flows from the law of love, which lies – vast, mysterious, wild, untamed, and unknown – at the very heart of God.

Strangely enough, I have heard people say, and even tell me to my face, that the Biblical injunction against homosexuality has nothing to do with love: that love does not enter into the question, but it is just a matter of design, or what God has intended for human sexuality. Can there be any less Christian reasoning for a law? How does this reconcile with the New Testament as a whole? Simply put: it does not. This is an argument from man’s religion, and it is opposed to the grace of Christ and the New Testament understanding of law.

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Where then does that leave me? What is in bounds and what is out of bounds? This is tough, but before I go on to enumerate my sex ethic more clearly, let me return to the question so often posed: what about bestiality and pedophilia?

We saw that sex is a unifying experience, and if this is true, bestiality and pedophilia are not only logical contradictions but also lack the love I spoke of earlier. Because sex is unifying, it must unite two beings that are capable of being united. Both members must be able to contribute and receive from the relationship on all levels of intimacy. This includes mental, emotional, and sexual ties. A child does not know what sexuality is, and neither is a child capable of relating mentally or emotionally on the level of an adult, and so pedophilia takes two objects which are by nature not relatable and attempts to unite them. Pedophilia also, in its true form, loses the desire for its object of affection once it matures, and thus violently and necessarily breaks the command of love. I do not speak of particular age limits (three thousand years ago quite large age gaps between a husband and wife were much more accepted, and Scripture passes no condemnation of it), but of the pathological desire to sexually have that which is helpless and immature. Though it is a hazy line, and different cultures assign that line to different ages, it does nevertheless exist. A man may teach a child, for that is what the child needs, and so love the child, but a man may not love a child as a spouse, for the child
is not in nature comparable to an adult.

Bestiality is much the same, for a man can, after a fashion, love his dog, but he cannot expect his dog to fathom the rich sublimity of Chopin or his favorite well-versed poem or a story contemplating the divine. The union that runs between souls must necessarily bring together two beings that can relate along the varying levels of understanding that run within the other. To the human, containing the very image of God (though corrupted), nothing short of human will do. Otherwise the two are unable to relate. Both the perversions of bestiality and pedophilia are self-contradictory, and reduce the ‘lover’ to a mere seeker of personal passions, and the ‘beloved’ to an object or toy; they are naturally predatory. Reciprocity, and thus oneness, is lost, and sex is reduced to a collection of stimulated neurons, beginning somewhere in the nether regions and terminating somewhere in the brain.

But with two human beings, it is indeed possible for the two to sharpen each other, to sustain each other through a broken world such as ours, and to come to a deeper understanding of humanity and each other and the nature of self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness. For this is where sexuality leads us: to love, which we see exemplified in Christ – a love that puts its object of affection above itself and before itself. And so far as the relational, emotional, and intellectual unifying of two beings into the creation of a new and communal One, there is nothing lacking inherently in homosexual couples that their heterosexual counterparts have. The ‘complimentarian’ nature of heterosexuality is simply (and wonderfully) a physical difference, and not necessarily a spiritual or relational one, unless we begin to claim that the souls of women and men are fundamentally different before God. No two people are the same – we are all somehow Other to all our neighbors – and it is the working of Otherness into Oneness that is where the difficulty, and the triumph, of union lies. I am not trying to indicate that such a union is easy, nor that it is always a simple matter to turn one’s thoughts and actions to Christ in the face of a seemingly overwhelming and more immediate spousal relationship, but I am presenting the goals and ideals of such a union, its functionality and appropriateness, and the path which it can ideally take in the sanctification of the two.

The stipulation I have set on my sex ethic is that it must take that drive which seems inherent to nearly all of humanity and raise it from a simple biological response to something holy before God and beneficial to its participants. And like all things, it is holy when it brings us closer to God. Simple acts of pleasure (sex) are not enough for this, and neither are simple acts of pain (abstention). It is following the earthly pleasure straight along that path of worship to its source in that infinite fountain of all pleasures that makes earthly pleasure worth anything at all. And it is following the earthly pain straight along that path of loving obedience to its termination in that infinite treasure-store of grace and freedom that makes earthly pain worth anything at all. We must not focus exclusively on the former and ignore the giver for his gifts. But we must also be careful not to focus exclusively on the latter and become ascetics, for any pleasure that God created (like sex) he created to be enjoyed and received with thanksgiving. I am convinced that any other view – a view which denounces pleasure for its own sake – presents a twisted view of God, and is even demonic. Pleasure is inherently a good thing, as it is inherently a godly thing: we must forget these silly notions of an austere and harsh Father in heaven, and instead realize that at his side are ‘pleasure for evermore’. ‘He is a hedonist at heart.’ My ethical dilemma is not whether pleasure is to be enjoyed, but in this world where indulgence and worship of the gift so easily exceeds our worship of the giver, in what context is it that the pleasure can be enjoyed without making an idol of it?

As I’ve already noted, sex by its nature forms a bond between two beings: it creates a oneness from what once was two. But the two were not wholly compatible before their union, both from their individual propensities to sin, and from neutral personality traits and conflicting interests. This is where pain comes in: that pain of altering and denying the Self for the sake of the Other, and in the closeness of union it can be quite intense. But thank God that within union a most intense intimacy is also forged by and through its pleasures (such as sex). It is in this context – the fires of a union between two bodies and two souls, and not in mere pleasure – that sex finds its redemptive and sanctifying value. It spurs the two toward a self-forgetful and self-sacrificing lifestyle, and so makes us into a clearer image of Christ, for his selflessness and his humility were the greatest the world has or shall ever see. Many of my heterosexual friends have said, after being wed, that ‘marriage is the greatest sanctifier’, and I have no reason to doubt their words. Within the pains and struggles that being in a union with another corrupted (though by no means worthless) soul, and in the continual difficult surrender of Self, it is the love and intimacy in which sex plays a part that redeems the act from good to holy.

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If we continue to condemn homosexuality, it must be on one of two grounds. The first is an arbitrary rule, based either on nothing at all or ‘because I say so’. This gives us an arbitrary view of morality and an arbitrary view of religion, both of which are wrong and unhelpful for learning the nature of God. The other option is to lift genital differentiation to an almost transcendental realm, a realm where we begin to worship the penetration of a woman by a man simply by virtue of what it physically is. This is not to say heterosexuality is not (or should not be) normal – it most certainly is, and appropriately so. But to esteem it is almost paganistic sex worship. So the claim of moral superiority of heterosexuality rests either on arbitrary values derived from some inscrutable source independent of love, or it is a sort of worship of the physical act itself.

Read the whole article here.

Book Notes: The Fall of Interpretation


The thesis of Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith’s The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic is simple and revolutionary: The necessity of interpretation — the impossibility of unmediated, perspective-free experience of a text or an event — is not a tragedy nor a barrier to truth, but an acceptable aspect of being a finite creature. Complete interpretive agreement, which history shows us is impossible, is not the only way to maintain the authority of a text such as the Bible or the Constitution. Smith argues that giving up the ideal of total, self-evident consensus will not lead to chaos because tradition and real-world experience constrain the number of interpretations we will actually find useful.

Hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy dealing with theories of interpretation. From Plato to today’s evangelical scholars and deconstructionist philosophers, there’s a common assumption that the necessity of interpretation is a fall from grace. In a perfect world, the theory goes, everyone would clearly perceive reality in exactly the same way. There wouldn’t be this diversity, uncertainty and incompleteness of interpretations.

Postmodernism contributes the insight that there is no pure encounter with the text, no alternative to our responsibility to choose among a plurality (though not, as Smith argues, an infinity) of plausible interpretive filters. So are our only choices a naive inerrancy or a despairing relativism? Not unless we are comparing our actual hermeneutic situation to a false ideal of perception unbounded by time, space, or the gap between self and object — in other words, measuring our perspectival knowledge against the direct knowledge available to an omniscient, omnipresent God.

Interpretation exists because we are finite creatures who cannot get completely beyond the space-time position where we find ourselves. Finitude creates a gap between two communicating individuals, and between myself and the object I communicate about. This gap produces the risk of mis-communication, and ensures that the sign can never capture the entirety of the signified.

Smith argues that the link between interpretation and fallenness contradicts the Christian belief that creation was originally and essentially good. To blame humans for not having a God’s-eye perspective is to say that finitude itself is fallen. In other words, we’re saying God made a mistake by creating individual humans with a diversity of cultures and experiences, instead of one undifferentiated God-being. This is unbiblical and, since it doesn’t fit reality, unhelpful. It produces hermeneutics that avoid self-awareness about their own limitations.

But wait, doesn’t the Tower of Babel story imply that linguistic diversity is a punishment for human pride? Smith daringly contends that God was restoring His intended diversity and squelching early humans’ totalitarian impulse to impose a monoculture. It makes a peculiar sort of sense: what would ever motivate God to make it harder for us to know Him? The fact that He brought pluribus out of unum suggests Smith is right that Christians should celebrate the polyphonic quality of human discourse.

Smith notes that “to say that everything is interpretation is not to say that all is arbitrary.” (p.163) The hermeneutics of the culture wars present us with a false choice between a single reading (of the Bible or the world) and an infinity of equally valid readings. Neither is actually an option for us. Interpretation isn’t infinite because reality pushes back. Our common experience in a shared world sets interpretive norms that “resist capricious construal.” (p.174) In other words, you can’t interpret your fist through a brick wall. Or, to use an example from Wallace Stevens, there may be 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, but there is also a real blackbird for comparison. “The blackbird is involved in what I know.”

Most of Smith’s book is taken up with tracking the false ideal of un-interpreted text through the writings of Augustine, Gadamer, Pannenberg, Heidegger, Derrida, and sundry other philosophers and theologians. If this is too “inside baseball” for you, I recommend Smith’s shorter and more readable Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?

Like many books that debunk a widespread belief, this one could have used less de-construction and more re-construction. The final section describing Smith’s alternative “creational hermeneutic” is tantalizing but too brief. The book would have vaulted from good to great if it had analyzed controversial Bible passages to show how his method can help the church live with diversity of opinion. The Anglican Communion needs you, Jim! Call your office!

Common Ground for a Schismatic Church


Episcopal preacher Sarah Dylan Breuer, who blogs over at Sarah Laughed, has suggested this list of core beliefs to remind both factions of our divided communion that our similarities in essential matters may outweigh our differences. The comments below her post offer worthwhile additions, mainly emphasizing human sin and the necessity for grace. Other commenters note with dismay that some liberal churches within ECUSA now reject the very idea of collective agreement on doctrine. Sarah’s list:


Jesus is Lord. Jesus and the God who created the universe are one.
The Old and New Testaments were inspired by God, and are useful for teaching and Christian formation (a la 2 Timothy 3:16-17).
Jesus of Nazareth was an actual historical person who was born of Mary, gathered disciples and taught, healed, and confronted evil powers in ministry the first-century Roman province of Palestine, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate’s authority.
Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Christ of God.
The God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. I know some Christians struggle with this, but I believe this was a bodily resurrection, and the tomb was empty (and John Dominic Crossan never persuaded me that there was no tomb).
Jesus’ disciples met the risen Jesus — some had visions, some corporeal encounters (though Jesus’ body was different in some ways — e.g., he didn’t seem to need doors to be opened or unlocked to get into a room), but in all cases reported in the New Testament it was Jesus they met.
I think the list of canonical books in the New Testament is a good one. There is no non-canonical gospel that I would have liked to see in the canon, and no book currently in the canon that I’d exclude if I could.
I believe that the kingdom of God was inaugurated in Jesus’ ministry, and that Jesus will come again to realize fully his work among us.
I believe that the God of Israel has chosen Jesus, the Christ, as judge of the nations.
I believe that Jesus is really present in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
I believe that Jesus is really present wherever people gather in his name.
For what it’s worth, I hang my hat on the Nicene Creed and Romans chapters 6-8.

Whatever our list of essentials, we have to decide when it is worth splitting the church over differences in interpretation. Are we all worshipping and loving the same Lord as revealed in Jesus? Then maybe this marriage can be saved. But if some of us define Jesus as “God incarnate who died for our sins” and others define him as “a good role model in a world where we must save ourselves through good works,” then the whole project may become too incoherent for us to pursue it under the same roof. The gay/straight division has become a proxy for so many deeper theological divisions that it does not correlate with at all — perhaps because fallen human beings would rather fight about morality than come together in our need for grace. 

Chabad.org: Living a Life Through Faith


Life coach Chaya Abelsky shares her thoughts on the Hasidic website Chabad.org on what it means to live a life inspired by faith. Excerpts:


Faith is not a relinquishing of responsibility. It is not an excuse for inaction that allows us to say, “The situation is out of my hands, G‑d will look after it.” On the contrary, it is only when we push ourselves to the limit of our own abilities that we begin to experience true faith. Faith is the confidence of knowing that having reached a point at which we can honestly say we have done all that we can, that everything else – all that is not within our own control – will look after itself.

But this confidence we experience is not faith itself, it is a result of faith. Faith is more than just a mind set. Faith is not merely something inside us, an emotion we experience like joy or satisfaction. Faith reaches out beyond us and transforms the world around us. When we approach the world with faith, it is a power that flows from a deep well within each of us. A power that flows outside ourselves and actually orchestrates the events of our world the way we need them to be.

There is a Yiddish expression that goes “Tracht gut vet zein gut” – Think good and it will be good. It is explained in our deepest mystical teachings that our thoughts can change the world. The expression “Think good and it will be good” is not just a way of saying “Hope for the best” or “Stay positive”. It is a profound teaching about the impact of our thoughts in creating and shaping our world. Faith in a positive outcome is the beginning of the solution.

Given what appears to be a hopelessly impossible situation, faith is the power to wrestle with the force of opposition that blocks what we need to accomplish. Fighting against impossible odds with our intellect alone almost inevitably makes us closed and bitter. We shut ourselves away from others in our despair. But faith is the power to remain positive and open in the face of the most stifling adversity….

Opposition is not simply something negative. It is a sign that the outcome will make a difference. The greater the forces that fight against what you are seeking to accomplish, the greater the result must be in tipping the scale of deeds in the world to the side of good. When seen through the clarity of faith, impossible odds no longer overwhelm us. They instead spur us on by revealing that what we are doing matters.

But why should it be like this? If G‑d loves us and wants the best for us, why make it so difficult? The answer reveals the meaning behind one of life’s great mysteries: why those who are good often suffer and those who are corrupt appear to prosper….

While G‑d could have created a world in which there was nothing that opposed goodness and kindness, we would have been missing out on G‑d’s greatest gift to us: the ability to find resources within ourselves greater than we previously realized were there….

This is why G‑d makes the lives of good people difficult. Because good people make a difference. And at the end of the day, it is their victory over the forces of darkness and despair that is the source of profound satisfaction.

Having gone to the point of breaking but still retaining strength, we discover that we are not as fragile as we imagined. We are ready to face tomorrow with even greater challenges that will reveal even greater strength in us.

Read the whole article here.

May Hell Be Empty


Apparently some in the blogosphere have been speculating, not without glee, that the late televangelist Jerry Falwell is now in the hell to which he so quickly consigned gays, liberals, and other folks outside the Moral Majority. Cautioning today against this uncharitable behavior, Hugo Schwyzer has some reflections on hell that I wholeheartedly endorse:


Do I believe there’s a hell? Reluctantly, I do. I believe there’s a hell because Scripture and tradition says there is, and because I believe God gives us the free will to turn away from Him. But I also reserve the right to believe and pray that hell is absolutely empty. I pray that every last creature on this planet will live eternally in paradise. I pray that prayer every danged day.

Episcopal theologian Robert Farrar Capon puts it beautifully in this sermon on the Prodigal Son:


This is the wonderful thing about this parable, because it isn’t that there was a Prodigal Son who was a bad boy and who, therefore, came home and turned out to be a good boy and had a happy ending. Then the elder brother—you would think Jesus, if he was an ordinary storyteller, would have said, “Let’s give the elder brother a rotten ending.” He doesn’t. He gives the older brother no ending. The parable ends with a freeze frame. It ends like that with just the father, and the sound goes dead—the servants may be moving around with the wine and veal—but the sound goes dead and Jesus shows you only the freeze frame of the father and the elder brother. That’s the way the parable has ended for 2,000 years.

My theory about this parable is that if, for 2,000 years, he has never let it end, then you can extend that indefinitely, that this is a signal, an image of the presence of Christ to the damned. When the father goes out into the courtyard, he is an image of Christ descending into hell; and, therefore, the great message in this is the same as Psalm 139, “If I go down to hell, You are there also.” God is there with us. There is no point at which the Shepherd who followed the lost sheep will ever stop following all of the damned. He will always seek the lost. He will always raise the dead. Even if the elder brother refused forever to go in and kiss his other brother, the Father would still be there pleading with him. Christ never gives up on anybody. Christ is not the enemy of the damned. He is the finder of the damned. If they don’t want to be found, well there is no imagery of hell too strong like fire and brimstone and all that for that kind of stupidity. But nonetheless, the point is that you can never get away from the love that will not let you go and the elder brother standing there in the courtyard in his own hell is never going to get away from the Jesus who seeks him and wills to raise him from the dead.

Out in Scripture: Revelation 21


The Human Rights Campaign publishes an e-newsletter called “Out in Scripture” that applies the weekly lectionary reading to themes of interest to the GLBT community. This week’s commentary on Revelation 21:22-27 appealed to me:


[This passage] is a word of hope for God’s ultimate and eternal blessings to those who have been faithful in spite of being excluded, oppressed or even exiled. However, that initial exclusion can be problematic to many readers. Revelation 21:27 says that “anyone who practices abomination or falsehood” (New Revised Standard Version) or “does what is shameful or deceitful” (New International Version) will not enter the city. Most members of the LGBT community know the pain of having the words “abomination” and “shame” as labels placed on them and their lives. LGBT people should not internalize these words as a particular condemnation of them. All of humanity is subject to the shame of idolatry. It is not sexual orientation or gender identity that creates an “abomination” but our raising those things of the created order to the level of “gods” in our lives.

God calls us to be good stewards of all the gifts and blessings given to us, including human sexuality. When we make idols of money, power, institutions, relationships and, yes, even our sexuality, then we are in danger of not entering the city of light — simply because we’d rather stay in the shadows.

Archbishop Rowan Williams on Hearing the Bible in Community


Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a lecture this week in Toronto entitled “The Bible Today: Hearing and Reading” which argues convincingly that Biblical interpretation must be reconnected to the church’s communal life.

This was also the dominant theme of the Wheaton conference on the ancient church fathers that I attended last week. As in the Archbishop’s lecture, the speakers there, who belonged to Catholic, Orthodox, and a variety of Protestant denominations, agreed that modern Christianity (especially Protestantism) has developed an overly rationalist and individualist approach to the Bible, isolating theological arguments from their real-world proving ground, namely the church’s sacramental worship, mutual care and service to the community. I’ll be blogging about their specific insights over the next few days. Meanwhile, here is the Archbishop, displaying the intellectual sophistication and generosity of vision that I associate with the Anglican tradition at its best. Boldface emphases are my own addition:

Not even the most tradition-bound and hierarchical Christian community has ever seriously argued that the authority of the contemporary hierarchy can wholly displace the reading of Scripture, or that the language of scripture is anything but finally normative in some sense for the community. And even the most ideologically insistent liberal is unlikely to argue that Scripture can be relegated entirely to the level of illustrative historical material about the remote beginnings of the faith (though the last century has seen a repeated swing in that direction, even if it has never quite got to that point of blunt denial). In what follows, I don’t intend to offer a novel theory of inspiration, or a set of tools that will finally settle the current debates over interpretation within and between the churches; my aim is a very modest one, to examine the practice of reading the Bible so as to tease out some of what it tells us about the nature of Christian identity itself. Because some of our present difficulties are, at the very least, compounded by the collision of theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture, and it seems imperative to work at a genuine theology of the Bible as the sacred literature of the Church. Popular appeals to the obvious leave us battling in the dark; and the obvious – not surprisingly – looks radically different to different people. For many, it is obvious that a claim to the effect that Scripture is ‘God’s Word written’ implies a particular set of beliefs about the Bible’s inerrancy. For others, it is equally obvious that, if you are not that savage and menacing beast called a ‘fundamentalist’, you are bound to see the Bible as a text of its time, instructive, even sporadically inspiring, but subject to rethinking in the light of our more advanced position. As I hope will become evident, I regard such positions as examples of the rootlessness that afflicts our use of the Bible; and I hope that these reflections may suggest a few ways of reconnecting with a more serious theological grasp of the Church’s relation with Scripture.

To begin with the simplest point: before Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public. Those of us who assume that the normative image of Scripture reading is the solitary individual poring over a bound volume, one of the great icons of classical Protestantism, may need to be reminded that for most Christians throughout the ages and probably most in the world at present, the norm is listening. Very few early or mediaeval Christians could possibly have owned a Bible; not many in the rapidly growing churches of the developing world today are likely to either. And this underlines the fact that the Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.

So the Church in reading Scripture publicly says both (i) that it is not a self-generated reality, created simply out of human reflection and ideals, and (ii) that what is read needs to be read as a communicative act, – that is, not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’. Whatever we do in private with our reading of Scripture, we must do in awareness of this public character. The Church – a familiar enough point – is in the language of the Bible itself an ‘assembly’, a ‘convocation’: an ekklesia. It declares its basic character when it represents itself as listening to the act of ‘convoking’, calling together. From one (crucially important) point of view, the celebration of the Eucharist is that representation, the moment when all are equally and unequivocally designated as guests, responding to invitation. But, since the authoritative and defining patterns of Christian practice never reduce themselves to single and simple models, from another point of view, the hearing of the Bible is that representation. As I hope to suggest later, these two basic ways in which the Church says what it is cast a lot of light on each other….

Two principles emerge very directly from this, though they are not always stated clearly in the Church. The first is that when we are dealing with texts that are grammatically addressed to a specific audience, we are being asked to imagine that historically remote audience as not only continuous with us but in some sense one with us. Just as in Deuteronomy, there is an insistence that the words spoken at Sinai are being spoken ‘not to your forefathers’ but to ‘us’ here present today – to all those in the liturgical assembly at any moment in Israel’s history (Dt 5.2-5), so for the Christian –and the Jewish –believer. We, here and now, are incorporated in the audience. The second principle is that in dealing with texts that are not grammatically directed in this way, we are obliged to ask, ‘What does this text suggest or imply about the changes which reading it or hearing it might bring about?’ The Bible itself gives us a cardinal example of ‘texts’ – oral recitations in this case – clearly intended to effect change: the parables of Jesus. And the sort of change they envisage is the result of being forced to identify yourself within the world of the narrative, to recognise who you are or might be, how your situation is included in what the parable narrates.

These principles need a good deal of further filling out if we are to be able to apply them to some of the hardest interpretative cases, but they are significant and, I’d say, primary implications of the practice of hearing Scripture publicly. Both tell us that the ‘time’ in which we hear Scripture is not like ordinary time. We are contemporary with events remote in history; we are caught up in the time of recitation, when we are to reimagine ourselves. For this moment, we exist simply as listeners, suspending our questions while the question is put to us of how we are to speak afresh about ourselves. We stand at a point of origin, and, as listeners, our primary responsibility is to receive….

Among those skills we need to bring for receptivity is a capacity to think through what the initial relation between text and audience might be. I am not thinking primarily here of the way in which good critical scholarship elucidates such relations, though that is one of the underappreciated gifts of intellectual modernity – the enrichment of sheer historical imagination in ways barely accessible to most premodern readers and hearers. What I have in mind is a more basic matter, the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world ‘in front of the text’ – the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself. Elements in that text may be valid and significant, but yet be capable of partial and even distorting use if not seen as part of a rhetorical process or argument. It is always worth asking, ‘What is the text as a full unit trying not to say or to deny?’

Two contentious examples. The first of them is, as we shall see, of more than accidental importance in understanding certain things about Scripture as a whole, but I choose it because of its frequent use in modern debates about relations between faith communities. Jesus says in the Farewell Discourses of John’s Gospel that ‘no-one comes to the Father except by me’. As an isolated text, this is regularly used to insist that salvation depends upon explicit confession of Christ, and so as a refutation of any attempt to create a more ‘in
clusive’ theology of interfaith relations. But the words come at the end of a typically dense and compressed piece of exposition. Jesus has, at the end of ch.13, explained that the disciples cannot follow him now; he goes ahead to prepare a place. Thus, he creates the path to the Father that the disciples must follow; they know the path already in the sense that they know him. And this knowledge of him, expressed in the mutual love that he has made possible (13.34-5), will carry them through the devastation of absence and not-knowing which will follow the crucifixion. Seeing and knowing Jesus as he goes towards his death in the perfection of his ‘love for his own’ is already in some way a knowing of the Father as that goal towards which the self-giving of Jesus in life and death is directed. The Father is not to be known apart from this knowledge of Jesus.

Now this certainly does not suggest in any direct way a more inclusive approach to other faiths. But the point is that the actual question being asked is not about the fate of non-Christians; it is about how the disciples are to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary clearing of the way which they are to walk. If they are devastated and left desolate by his death, they have not grasped that it is itself the opening of a way which would otherwise remain closed to them. Thus it is part of the theology of the cross that is evolving throughout the later chapters of John, the mapping out of a revelation of glory through self-forgetting and self-offering. The text in question indeed states that there is no way to the Father except in virtue of what Jesus does and suffers; but precisely because that defines the way we must then follow, it is (to say the least) paradoxical if it is used as a simple self-affirmation for the exclusive claim of the Christian institution or the Christian system. There is, in other words, a way of affirming the necessity of Christ’s crucified mediation that has the effect of undermining the very way it is supposed to operate. If we ask what the question is that the passage overall poses, or what the change is that needs to be taking place over the time of the passage’s narration, it is about the move from desolation in the face of the cross (Jesus’ cross and the implicit demand for the disciple to carry the cross also) to confidence that the process is the work of love coming from and leading to the Father….

As I have said, this does nothing to settle the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment. But I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community. To move too rapidly to the use of the text to make a general point which does not require the reader to be converted is to step outside what I have been calling the time of the text, the process by which it shapes its question. It is to make the text more passive than active, and so to move away from the stance of the listener, from the stance of the Church as trying to be still enough to hear and free enough to respond to God’s summons to be his community….

A written text inevitably has about it a dual character. It comes before the reader/hearer as a finished product, and so as something that can in some ways be treated as an object. If we are not careful its written character can be misused by working with the text as if it were passive. In contrast to the event of a voice speaking, it can be abstracted from the single occasion when the hearer has no control over what comes to her or him from outside. At the same time, a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation. It is fruitful of renewed communication in a way that the spoken word alone cannot be. So to identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate. Just as the text itself contains re-reading, is almost constituted by re-reading, so that it repeatedly recreates a movement towards conversion (towards the cross of Jesus, in Christian terms), so the eternal possibility of ‘reading again’ stands as a warning against ignoring the active ‘restlessness’ of the text in summoning the reader to change. The writtenness of the text is from one point of view risky as a strategy of communication: it risks the appearance of passivity, and the re-readability of the text risks the appearance of indeterminacy. Yet from another point of view it can be seen as inseparable from the risk of the communication it itself describes as well as enacts – a divine communication that is never without human speech and narrative, never just an interruption of the created continuum but a pressure upon it that opens up to the divine by the character of its internal relations and connections, the shifting, penitent perspective of a story enacted in time. The writtenness of the text is like the sheer factuality of the historical past as the vehicle of revelation: it is something irreversibly done, but for that very reason continuously inviting or demanding….

We noted earlier that the celebration of the Eucharist and the reading of the Bible are the most universal ways in which the Church ‘represents’ what it is; and both sow the Church as a community committed to listening afresh to its foundational call. The gathering of the assembly for worship is not simply a human routine, however much it may come to look like that. It is, theologically speaking, a moment in which the present activity of God is assumed and responded to.

But to read Scripture in the context of the Eucharist – which has been from the beginning of the Church the primary place for it – is to say that the Word of God that acts in the Bible is a Word directed towards those changes that bring about the Eucharistic community. The summons to the reader/hearer is to involvement in the Body of Christ, the agent of the Kingdom, as we have seen; and that Body is what is constituted and maintained by the breaking of bread and all that this means. For Paul, exploring it in I Corinthians, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is strictly bound up with the central character of the community: what is shown in the Eucharist is a community of interdependence and penitent self-awareness, discovering the dangers of partisan self-assertion or uncritical reproduction of the relations of power and status that prevail in the society around. So if Scripture is to be heard as summons or invitation before all else, this is what it is a summons to. And the reading and understanding of the text must be pursued in this light. We ask what change is envisaged or required in the ‘time’ of any passage of Scripture; and now we can add that whatever change that is in particular, it must make sense in the context of the formation of this kind of community – the Eucharistic Body.

Take Scripture out of this context of the invitation to sit at table with Jesus and to be incorporated into his labour and suffering for the Kingdom, and you will be treating Scripture as either simply an inspired supernatural guide for individual conduct or a piece of detached historical record – the typical exaggerations of Biblicist and liberal approaches respectively. For the former, the work of the Spirit is more or less restricted to the transformation of the particular believer; for the latter, the life of the community is where the Spirit is primarily to be heard and discerned, with Scripture an illuminating adjunct at certain points. But grasp Scripture as part of the form taken by the divine act of invitation that summons and establishes the co
mmunity around the Lord’s Table, and the Bible becomes coherent at a new level, as a text whose meaning is most centrally to do with the passage from rivalry and self-assertion and the enmity with God that is bound up with these to the community in which each, by the influx of the Spirit, takes responsibility for all, and all for each. The context of the Eucharist, in which everyone present is there simply because they are guests by the free generosity of the host, obliges a reading of Scripture in which what is decisive is always this shared dependence on God’s initiative of welcome which removes pride and fear.

But equally, take Scripture out of the Eucharistic context and the Eucharist itself becomes different. Without this anchorage in the history of God’s creative welcome as slowly and painfully spelled out in the history of Israel and Jesus, the Eucharist can more readily be distorted into a celebration of what the community now senses itself to be or to have achieved. It is robbed of the analogy that makes it contemporary with the founding act – what you might call the ‘Deuteronomic analogy’, thinking back to the text from Deut.5 discussed earlier (‘Not to your forefathers…’),and so does not see itself as formed by a divine communication that is in fact conveyed through human history, through the record of faithful and unfaithful response. If the Eucharist is properly a covenant meal, as the founding text declares, it presupposes a connectedness with the history of the covenant people; it always has (setting aside for a moment the debates over whether the Last Supper was historically a Passover meal) a Passover dimension.

Thus Eucharist and Scripture need to be held together if we are to have an adequate theology of either. The Eucharist is the primary locus of the listening Church, the place where it shows itself to be there in response to the call of God; and the Scripture that embodies that call has to be read as leading to precisely this point, the existence of a community that embodies Christ and does so by reflecting his kenotic act. And as I have hinted already, this must be anchored clearly in a theology of the Spirit, which holds the two themes together. The Spirit, according to John’s gospel, is the remembrancer, the divine agency that makes the words of Christ contemporary. It is the Spirit that incorporates us into one community with the disciples at the Last Supper and indeed with the Deuteronomically imagined people of Israel. It is the Spirit that enables the mutual self-offering that builds up the Body and that unites the members in the prayer of the glorified Christ. It is the Spirit that connects the periods of God’s communicative action towards humanity and thus connects the diverse texts that make up the one manifold text that we call Holy Scripture. The Spirit’s work as ‘breathing’ God’s wisdom into the text of Scripture is not a magical process that removes biblical writing from the realm of actual human writing; it is the work of creating one ‘movement’ out of the diverse historical narratives and textual deposits that represent Israel’s and the Church’s efforts to find words to communicate God’s communication of summons and invitation. The Spirit through the events of God’s initiative stirs up those words and makes sense of them for the reader/hearer in the Spirit-sustained community. As Karl Barth insisted, this leaves no ground for breaking up Scripture into the parts we can ‘approve’ as God-inspired and the parts that are merely human; the whole is human and the whole is offered by God in and through the life of the Body, always shaping and determining the form of that life.

The Spirit in the New Testament, not least in the Johannine tradition, is associated in its fullness with the resurrection of Jesus; and my final point is to note the way in which Eucharist and Scripture alike have to be considered in relation to belief in the resurrection. The Eucharist itself is generally recognised as, among other things, a continuation of Jesus’ meal-fellowship with the marginal and disreputable in Israel; by this fellowship, he declares a new way of being Israel that will not restrict membership to those who can satisfy conditions but will be open to all who are ready to be welcomed by him in the name of Israel’s God. The eucharistic encounter is with the Christ who is still today actively defining the people of God simply by his invitation. Seen like this, the eucharist is not the memorial of past meals with Jesus but the reality of contemporary response to his hospitality – a hospitality once and for all established as indestructible by the cross and the resurrection, so that what was done in the ministry of Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem is done constantly in the history of the Church.

But to say that Christ’s transforming hospitality is renewed constantly in this history is also to say that Christ continues to speak in and to the community. The community exists because of God’s act of communication, as we have seen repeatedly; the resurrection is the persistence of that act. Without belief in the resurrection, our understanding of Scripture is going to be deficient at best. If it is not the present vehicle of God speaking in the risen Christ, it is a record only of God speaking to others. For it to be an address that works directly upon self and community now, it must be given to us as the continuation of the same act, the re-presenting and re-enacting of the same scriptural reality of invitation and the creation of a people defined by justice, mutual service and the liberty to relate to God as Father and faithful partner.
Read the whole lecture here.