Our commitment to Christian truth at the moment relies too heavily on the authority of the evangelical magisterium - the men and women, the pastors and theologians, the writers and teachers, who run the glasshouse. There is a strong tendency to suppose that the truthfulness of Christian beliefs can somehow be guaranteed by dogmatic statements about inerrancy. The fall-back position is that a doctrine such as the virgin conception of Jesus is true because it is in Scripture and the truthfulness of Scripture is guaranteed for us by the simple fact that it is sacred text, the revealed Word of God.
This mentality needs to be abandoned. The truthfulness of a statement cannot, in the end, be dogmatically established. Although we may choose to commit ourselves to a belief in faith, that commitment does not make the belief any more or less true. We should accept, then, that the truthfulness of the doctrine depends on whether the event actually happened or not – just as we understand the truthfulness of a newspaper report to depend on the correspondence between what is written and what happened, not on assurances given to us by the newsagent or paper boy that the report is absolutely reliable. The fact that in practice we are not in a position to determine exactly how Jesus was conceived is beside the point: at issue here are the standards and methods and expectations of truthfulness that we bring to the text.
We should be wary, therefore, of treating the Bible as a privileged text, immune to the probing of rationalism. The practice of historical criticism, particularly with regard to biblical studies, has been and remains highly flawed, partly because of the limitations of knowledge, partly because of the cultural and ideological biases built into academic research. But this does not alter the fact that it is dishonest to attempt to conceal the real or apparent deficiencies of Scripture under a cloak of presumed inerrancy. It is a prerequisite of the process by which we seek to establish truth that we allow a witness to be cross-examined.
This will inevitably entail some sort of downgrading of Scripture. This is not an easy prospect for evangelicals to contemplate, but a fundamental re-evaluation of how the Bible functions as the Word of God is necessary if we wish to establish intellectual integrity. There are several problems with the privileged status that we accord Scripture.
First, we are forced to employ two different standards of rationality as we move between secular and sacred texts. We may question Josephus’ accuracy but not Luke’s. This can look very much like intellectual duplicity.
Secondly, the bright aura of sacredness around the text makes it difficult to read it properly. What began as the product of ordinary human writing – the struggle to capture thoughts, events, statements that for those involved in the process disclosed something special about the activity of the God of Israel – has been transmuted by the infallible alchemy of religion into something exceptional, something sacred, something quite distinct from ordinary human discourse, something that partakes of divinity. But we have rather different expectations of a sacred text than of ordinary human speech - and so we tend to read it differently.
Thirdly, there is the tendency for faith to centre itself around the written word as, in effect, a sacramental object (leather-bound, gilt-edged, carried ostentatiously into church) rather than around a personal God who has made himself accessible to men and women through the Spirit.
It would be more realistic and more truthful to regard the texts of the New Testament as what they actually are – a disparate and not entirely coherent collection of ancient writings, produced by the earliest followers of Jesus of Nazareth, which do not in principle escape the contingencies and limitations to which all such historical documents are subject. I would argue that such a ‘deconstructed’ view of the Bible would serve as a more reliable and effective witness to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ than this essentially artificial conception we have of it as a dogmatically certified sacred text. Evangelical scholarship is currently in a much better position to affirm the trustworthiness of these writings as a witness to the God-filled character of the life and death of Jesus. There is less need now for the support systems of dogmatism.
An emphasis on the historicality of the Bible, and of the New Testament in particular, will require us to take much more seriously its contingency?the intimate involvement of the texts in the historical circumstances in which they were produced. This has implications at several levels. Perhaps most importantly it will mean coming to terms with the restricted historical role of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah as the nation approached a crisis of divine judgment. More generally it will necessitate a consistent endeavour to uncover the meaning of the text in the original context before attempting to read off the page a Word of God for believers today. We may find as a result that certain aspects of biblical teaching have more limited historical application than has generally been recognized. The Bible may become at first a more distant, less familiar, book, but this is only because we have begun to approach it from a different direction. In the end, it will become a more truthful book.
This must affect the way Christians think generally. Popular expressions of Christian faith need to be reoriented away from a largely ideological commitment to a set of beliefs towards an historically conceived commitment to the person of Jesus and the outworking of the kingdom of God. The current evangelical enterprise consists largely, and mostly subconsciously, in bringing about and maintaining conformity to the tenets of faith, to the exclusion of fostering a sense of direct engagement in the agenda which Jesus established. The religion of belief is substituted for the life of faith.
To approach the historical person of Jesus is to approach the question of God. There are two main issues to be addressed here. The first has to do with how we allow the historical Jesus and the historical experience of the risen Christ to mediate and shape our understanding of God. The second is more philosophical: how can we best conceptualize the revelation of God and his involvement in the world? Are the traditional ways of thinking and speaking about the ‘supernatural’ consistent with the general rationality that we employ in our domestic and professional lives? Are we forcing an unnecessary rupture in the fabric of truth? Again, the question is not primarily whether God exists and intervenes in the world but whether our discourse of divine intervention is reasonable, credible, realistic. Are we speaking about these things in a way that makes sense outside the claustrophobic glasshouse of evangelical rationality?
The same question arises with regard to the specific theory of salvation. In the unnatural environment of the glasshouse the Christian notion of salvation has evolved into a highly sophisticated myth, something not so different in style and function from the counterfeit Gnostic myths that flooded the spiritual market in the early centuries of the Christian era. I call it a ‘myth’ not because I regard it as untrue but because, like much of Christian discourse, it has become detached from both its historical and experiential referents and taken on a life of its own. A myth is a story that fails to connect with reality.
This ‘myth’ of salvation is embodied in an elaborate set of arguments and propositions, the result of centuries of abstruse theological reflection and disputation, which we may readily assent to and recite, but which we find enormously difficult to understand or explain to outsiders. I doubt that many people come to faith because they have been convinced by the logic of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Rather, they sign up to the doctrine, somewhat bemusedly, because they have already found some other reason to follow Christ.
Myth of this sort is not an entirely bad thing. We have to speak about things that are unseen, which cannot be empirically verified, which have their origin ultimately, we may say, in revelation. But there is an important distinction to be made?one which applies to figurative language generally – between opaque myth and transparent myth. An opaque myth obscures the reality which it purports to represent. We are expected to take its validity, its truthfulness, on trust. A transparent myth, by contrast, is much more honest about the gap that exists between what is and what is said about it. Grasping the limitations of religious language, and injecting that awareness into popular Christian discourse, will be an important part of the demolition process.
The gulf between public adherence to the tenets of evangelical faith and private doubt is too great. The problem of hypocrisy is widespread and takes many forms. It arises when the church sets for itself inappropriate and unrealistic standards for faith. When people find themselves unable to live up to these standards, they are forced either to abandon the effort altogether or to dissemble. In order to dismantle the glasshouse it will be necessary to bring the public and private dimensions of belief much closer together. We have found it too easy to keep our difficulties and doubts hidden away, whether in the depths of the individual consciousness, in our private discussions, or on our bookshelves.
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