Reading the Bible: Right, Left, and Ancient

“The prevalent doctrine about Scriptural inspiration largely determines the use men make of the Scriptures.” –Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision 

Austin Farrer's Glass of Vision

I recently re-read a book that has meant a lot to me for over 20 years. The book is Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision, originally delivered as a series of lectures at Oxford in 1948. As I re-read the quote above, I remembered one of the many reasons the book has meant so much to me: its ideas about how to read the Bible helped me find a path between typical options on the Christian Right and Left, a path which draws inspiration from the ancient church.

[The quote above is found on pg. 37 of the freshly published critical edition. I was recently asked to lead a faculty colloquy in a series of them at our seminary. Several faculty members were asked to share about a text that was formational for them – I eventually chose this text. My frustration about not being able to find my old copy of The Glass of Vision quickly turned to excitement when I discovered that a new critical edition of it has recently come out – and that our library had it! It contains both The Glass of Vision and six fabulous essays on it by some of the many people who have likewise found it to be a very generative text. Robert MacSwain, ed., Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision With Critical Commentary (Ashgate, 2013). Apparently The Glass of Vision has become a trusted go-to text for the program in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews – something that helped motivate this new critical edition. In our faculty discussion, our President, Tim Brown, also shared how Farrer’s ideas have meant a great deal to Eugene Peterson, a pastor and theologian who has deeply influenced many at our seminary.]

For those who don’t know Austin Farrer, he taught at Oxford from 1935 to 1968 and was friends with C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers. He even delivered Lewis’ last Eucharist to him before his death.

Back in 1948, he wisely took an ancient path that diverged in certain ways from two other paths that he labeled “verbal inspiration” and the “liberal Enlightenment.”

Right

Many on the right in Farrer's day, and still today, understand that the Bible was “verbally inspired” by God. While not everyone agrees precisely what that phrase means, Farrer appreciated that when such a view was [and is] held, “men nourished their souls on the Scriptures, and knew that they were fed” (37). (A current influential version of verbal inspiration is found in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_Inerrancy) While I also appreciate the high view of scripture and its authority such a view entails, I have a difficult time making it “fit” with all the different ways that scriptural texts were produced. Nor does the flat picture of the Bible that results from it seem to “fit” all that well with the contours of Scripture itself – the way we seem to be closer to the center of revelation as we climb up Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, and the Mount of Transfiguration and the Hill of Golgotha in the Gospels.

Left

About the other end of the spectrum, Farrer writes, “Liberal Enlightenment claims to have opened the scriptural casket, but there appears now to be nothing inside—nothing, anyhow, which ordinary people feel moved to seek ….” (37). When I first read that statement, Farrer gave words to my own wonderings about historical methods of engaging Biblical texts. While they interested me and I found much value in them and still do, I and many others had difficulty making them “fit” with commitments to God’s providential work in giving us the gift of the Bible and my own experience of being fed by God in, under, and through the words of Scripture. Not that historical-critical work is "wrong" in principle—it is just insufficient for a full account of how and why these texts are Scripture.

Ancient and Future

But Farrer also showed me that those were not the only two games in town. He writes, “In taking up the topic of Scriptural inspiration, we should like to attach ourselves to the thought of the ancient Church …” (37).

While I do not have time to unpack Farrer’s view of inspiration, the way that “images” and “master-images” feature in it, and the way this fits so well with the ancient “four-fold” method of biblical interpretation —you should read the book!— I do want to point out two things.

First, the recovery of “ancient” ways of reading scripture, since Farrer wrote in 1948, and since the time I first read Farrer more than 20 years ago, has become what I think is one of the most significant theological happenings in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. This recovery/movement goes by many names, one of them being "the theological interpretation of the Bible." To get a sense of what is happening, this 2011 article by Timothy George in First Things is as good a place to start as any:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/03/reading-the-bible-with-the-reformers

In it, he points to a book my colleague, Todd Billings, wrote, a wonderful book-length treatment of this recovery and movement into the future, The Word of God for the People of God. He also points to a ground-breaking commentary series that I was privileged to participate in, the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series. Here’s a link to my commentary (and some reviews of it) on Numbers: http://www.brazostheologicalcommentary.com/volumes/numbers/

Second, in the midst of the fragmentation of the Church and constant fighting between Right and Left on the many issues that confront us today, I think that recovering ways of thinking about the inspiration of Scripture and the resulting ways of reading Scripture, ways similar to what Farrer suggests, can be a tonic for the Church. I think that this “ancient-future” way of reading scripture will do much to help us read the Bible together and find greater unity. It, and the many movements and figures associated with it or that fit well with it (“postliberalism,” “postconservatism,” “narrative theology,” Lesslie Newbigin, Robert Webber’s “ancient-future” vision, "the Scripture Project") are to my mind wonderful guides for the Church into fruitful and life-giving paths.

How Things Fit: About the Title

“Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right, 

and the eternal fitness of things?”—Henry Fielding: Tom Jones, book iv. chap. iv.

Welcome to this blog! Let me tell you about its title.

“How things fit” seems fitting to me as a title. It fits for at least three reasons.

Things

First, it’s a riff on How Things Work, that book with all those wonderful cutout illustrations of technological devices like washing machines. That book seeks to open up the many technological “black boxes” of our world to the view of the average person – or at least the average curious person. One of my primary motives as a theologian is to open up the hood of this mysterious, wonderful, and sometimes dreadful world and to see what makes it tick. I want to know how everything, from physics to theology to the latest Broadway or off-Broadway play, all fit together (or how they don’t!).

I used to be a seismic engineer a long time ago, and the same kind of curiosity that made me love learning engineering eventually drew me into theology. I’m interested in how a deep and generous orthodox Christian faith fits with … well, everything I’m interested in: scripture, the Jewish roots of Christianity, philosophy, art, science, worship, and lived Christian experience in today’s culture. Those are some of the “things” I’ll be writing about and hoping to open up to view.

Fit

Second, the idea of “fit” seems just right to me as a way of describing what kind of knowledge I’m searching for. As I write in this blog and as I write elsewhere, I hope to maintain a certain proper humility blended with a proper courage in the kinds of claims I make. You see, I realize the image I used above, of “opening up the hood and looking inside,” has problems. The “machine” metaphor is so modern, so Enlightenment. God does not fit inside the machinery of this world. God’s relationship to the creation is much more complex. Nor is the world best described as a machine. Nor is theological knowledge like a car owner’s manual.

The world is not a machine-like “closed causal nexus” but rather a fascinating mass of energy systems held in existence by the love and patience of our elusive yet present and active God. It follows that our ideas about knowledge should fit the kind of world we live in and the kind of creatures we are – and so I feel much more comfortable with the idea of “fit” than more modern understandings of firm, certain, and necessary knowledge contained in univocal propositions. Can our words and propositions fully capture a bird in flight? … the smell of coffee? But some words are more fitting than others.

[As an aside, the notion of “fit” was part of certain strands of 18^th c. moral philosophy – and yet to many it seemed like an old-fashioned leftover of the past. In fact, it is being mocked in the comic novel, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, in the quote above. It is a pipe-smoking old-fashioned philosopher aptly named “Square” who says those words! “Fittingness” is also an important aspect of Thomas Aquinas’ theology, who seeks to find how God, God’s activity, the created order, and our words, actions and knowledge all fit together. In contrast, modern understandings that God’s will and proper Christian beliefs can be fully captured in theological propositions still form the imaginations of many (most?) in the evangelical and Reformed worlds. But there is a more excellent way! The ancient phrase—adequatio intellectus ad rem—that pre-modern understanding of knowledge which says that we seek to make our intellects “adequate to” or “fit with” the things we talk about—that seems flexible enough and yet bold enough for our late-modern or post-modern situation.]

How

Finally, I like the combination of informality and seriousness the title suggests. One of my hopes is to put the things I’m learning, thinking about, and writing about in accessible language–while still trying to stretch people a bit! How I write is important. I experience my own thinking as a ceaseless movement to and fro between more technical discussions and the language(s) and experiences of our twenty-first century American culture. In my day-to-day life, I find myself moving between devotional readings of scripture, technical theological writings of people like Karl Barth and Henri De Lubac, and the bleachers of Black River Public School where my kids go to school and play soccer – and I want my own faith to be stretchy enough to make sense of it all. I want to test each part in light of the others and to make connections between them. I want my writing to reflect that. I want to make the insights and arguments that excite me in my theological work accessible to people who are not “in the guild.”

Welcome

So, welcome to this blog! I hope to write a new post every two weeks. I hope to start from either things I am working on theologically or things I encounter in the church or culture around me and then relate them to each other. I hope this will spur you on in your journey of faith and understanding. I hope it will start conversations. I hope you’ll like it.