Scripture
I got a disappointed blog review a week or so ago, linked to below, that saw Unapologetic’s emphasis on emotion as a kind of vote in favour of subjectivity as such: my subjectivity, my subjective feelings, given priority over truth, and specifically over Biblical truth. ‘Spufford elevates emotions at the cost of Biblical authority in a manner I can’t endorse.’ This isn’t the first time the book has got this reaction. It’s been a fairly steady minor theme in readings of it by some conservative evangelicals, both in Britain and in the United States, and often those who take it this way feel the need to sound a kind of warning. Beware, they say. Something unsound, perhaps even toxic, is being passed off as Christian here under cover of pleasing eloquence. Fellow evangelicals who liked the book – Christianity Today endorsing it as a Book of the Year, for example – are being seduced by a product fatally accommodated to the tastes and prejudices of secular culture. Prime symptoms being the book’s dismissal of Hell, indifference to Heaven, mockery of literal readings of Genesis, and view of homosexuality not as a sin in itself but as a value-neutral domain of human experience within which both sin and virtue can be manifested.
Probably the most passionate and best-expressed response along these lines came from a pastor called J Michael Rios in two blog posts last November here and here, repeated as Amazon reviews of the book, in which he set out, clearly as a form of epistemological clean-up duty, to expose Unapologetic as idolatrous insofar as it took self rather than scripture as the measure of things. ‘Spufford concludes that the Bible is incorrect because it doesn’t conform with his novel perception of what is particularly wrong with the world.’ Or, spelled out most fully and eloquently as the argument continued in the comments section of his blog:
It is fundamentally God’s business to make God known. Now, the Christian scriptures are the historically authoritative place where this revelation is given to humans, and of course the Incarnation of Christ (attested to by those Scriptures) is the apex of divine self-revelation… Now, if God is really God, then I and my impressions about what is and is not appropriate for reality take a distinctly secondary place. Hell is a reality in the teachings of Jesus, therefore it doesn’t really matter what I am able to conceive regarding Hell. And if I take my idea of love and apply it to God in definition, then I’ve not allowed Him to define it for me. In turn, I am worshipping not God, but my own personal idea of God–which is what I think you are doing, and what Spufford has done, and why his book is so terrible. This all may sound subtle, but it is in fact the heart of a legion of idolatries.
I think Michael Rios is wrong, of course, but I found this extremely useful in its clarity, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it ever since, but haven’t had time until now. What interests me here is our genuine and solid disagreement about what scripture is and does, beneath what I naturally take to be misreadings of my intentions with Unapologetic. There is a real faultline of understanding here. I deliberately set out in Unapologetic to report with as wide a sympathy as I could muster what the whole map of Christianity looked like, as well as my own particular spot on the map; and I made as big a thing as I could of the imperative to recognise the brotherhood and sisterhood of all believers no matter how wide may gape our disagreements of theology and practice, because we are united by our common membership in the body of Christ. I didn’t want the book to be dismissable as a piece of sectional pleading for a special ‘liberal Christianity’ (though I certainly am a liberal in US political terms, if not something altogether wilder-eyed). But nevertheless my arguments for the plausibility and urgency of faith are heavily influenced by the terms on which faith is plausible and urgent to me. Disagreements between Christians ought never to mean we cease to assume each other’s good faith, each other’s undoubted membership in the common body. But some disagreements are really quite serious. Michael Rios thinks Unapologetic is ‘unutterable rot’. I think his view of scripture verges on being an idolatry in itself. (Can you treat the word of God as an idol? Yes you can.)
Let me get the misreadings out of the way quickly, first. None of what he says about the book acknowledges any of the context in which I was writing, and from which followed the rhetorical strategies I chose as I tried to discharge the old unchanging apologist’s task of making Christianity persuasive. An irreverent manner is not necessarily a proof of irreverence in the author. It can be a calculated response to a culture of irreverence, in which anything that seems to need to be kept exempt from irreverence is thereby automatically seen as too weak and unconvincing to survive contact with it; in which, therefore, only propositions which are demonstrably still standing after irreverence has had its full chance to do its scouring work will be seen as deserving of respect. Based on that little checklist of issues – hell, Genesis, gay sex – Pastor Rios is very sure that my aim in the book must be to accommodate, to suck up, to defer, to soften and modify and diminish the challenge of Christianity to the culture. Actually my aim is to get that challenge heard, to find for the reader, by turning the culture around and around in the hand, the crack of doubt and uncertainty in it through which news from elsewhere may enter, and start a process of change which may ultimately split its priorities wide.
Like almost all North Americans, Pastor Rios is not very good at imagining – really imagining, deep down – the European version of normality in which religion has almost no existing reserves of legitimacy to draw on, in people’s minds. American advice about evangelism comes across as almost hilariously inappropriate in the European setting. It presupposes a world in which newcomers to towns naturally seek out a church to go to, in which talk of discipleship causes people to reach spontaneously for their chequebooks, in which strangers in elevators offer openings to quick-witted ministers by musing aloud about the state of their souls. None of this applies in the situation for which I wrote Unapologetic, and it goes without saying that an appeal, of all things, to the authority of the Bible will likewise get no traction.
It would be heard as saying in Europe, and I suspect would be heard as saying in the deep secular zones of the United States, ‘I have here a magic book, different from all others. How do I know it is a magic book? Because it says so, right here in the book itself.’ For those who are radically unconvinced, who feel no lingering cultural deference to our book, such an appeal is totally ungrounded, hanging preposterously in mid-air with no visible means of support. To persuade someone like that to take the Bible seriously, you need to offer them a reason that makes sense to them now, where they are at present; either a reason from outside the Bible, within their own experience, or from inside the Bible, but one which does not depend on an authority claim. Unapologetic is designed to make you want to go and read the Gospel, when you have no reason to read it because it is the Gospel (and may in fact be positively put off by its cultural standing or its associations). It is designed to make you realise that the traditional concept of sin is a powerful tool for everyday self-understanding. All that stuff about the HPtFtU is a way of getting people to hear the old truth, not to substitute for it some new truth of my own whimsical devising. I wish – said he plaintively, fighting back a sob of self-pity – that these very basic, essentially conservative functions of the book might be acknowledged. It is supposed (at best) to start a relationship with historic Christianity for the reader, not to complete one, or to stipulate how it should develop.
But. As Michael Rios correctly deduces, I do not believe that the Bible is God’s direct, inerrant utterance, in which He reveals Himself to us unmediated, on His terms and His terms only. I do not believe that, as he says elsewhere in his blog post, by speaking disrespectfully of people who take Genesis literally, I am distancing myself ‘from questions of value’. (A hundred and fifty years after Darwin and Lyell, creationists are not doing something faithful that is worthy of respect. They are wilfully bringing the rest of us into disrepute, and tarnishing the gospel, and they should just stop it.) I do not believe that the Bible is a single book, providentially through-composed by God to lead by foreseen and inexorable stages to the arrival of Jesus, who can be assumed to endorse every preceding word of it that He does not specifically abrogate. I do not believe that God’s genuinely direct self-revelation in Christ, His literal and incarnate presence with humanity in first-century Palestine, is rightly to be considered as being of a straightforward piece with His self-revelation in scripture; I do not think that the living Word is the ‘apex’ of all the printed words in the black, leatherbound volume. I do not believe that because - among the other ways we know Him - we know Christ through the gospels, the gospels are Him. The map is not the territory. The gospels are only His biographies. It is Him we are to worship, not the book. To mistake one for the other is to risk making of the book not a golden but a verbal calf.
I believe that the Bible is the faithful and irreplaceable record of a people’s evolving understanding of God, inspired at every step by the Holy Spirit but with that spirit, breath, ruach, pneuma at every step working the bellows of particular human lungs, moving particular human tongues, acting through (and therefore being filtered by) noisy, imperfect human minds, who could no more catch and report the whole of God’s intentions than time can embody eternity (except in one stable in Bethlehem). I believe that what we have between the black covers is a library scarred and buffeted by human agendas and historical contingencies, capable of being faithfully understood (as it is by all pious Jews) as meaning something quite different from what I and Michael Rios think it does. I believe it contains, yes, all that is necessary for salvation, but also puzzles, horrors, mistakes, quantities of history embodying no particular message, and (as Robert Capon once put it) Grandad’s favourite recipe for gravy. I believe that it is, at every stage, an imperfect human rendition of God’s self-disclosure, and that is why He needed to come Himself, to perform some very non-textual business among us, to our perpetual good. I believe that it is authoritative but never complete. I believe that the Psalms, by which my own faith lives, give me the singing voices, anguished and jubilant, lost and found, of long-ago people who like me faced towards God as best they could. I believe that St Paul, being human, was quite capable of turning in mid-phrase from reporting eternal truth to going off on a private rant about women wearing hats.
But do I believe these things because I have some pre-existing preference for the muddled, the complicated, the partial, and therefore the permissive – for a scripture which lets me pick and choose as I see fit? Well, no-one in the history of Christianity has read scripture without imposing a pattern of interpretation on it, and without thereby opening up for themselves rich possibilities for projection, for finding what they want and ignoring what they don’t. So, to that extent, yes of course: I read with a beam in my eye, and no doubt, woolly liberal that I am, I seize many small chances to remake Christ in my own image. But everyone does that. The school of interpretation that Pastor Rios is recommending as the plain meaning of scripture, gloriously exempt for my wibbling liberal subjectivity, is just that, another intepretation, dependent on a pattern of simplifying emphasis laid upon the huge mass of the text; shared and taught and mutually reinforced among conservative evangelicals, and no doubt seeming less individual and ‘subjective’ as a result to each individual interpreter; yet, still, an interpretation, just bolted very tight and close on to the words.
For me, the test of reverence towards scripture is whether I am willing to be surprised by it, to be told what I did not expect and did not (probably) want to hear. For me the test is whether I allow it to be true that, as the Zimbabwean gospel acclamation we have started to sing in my wife’s parishes has it, ‘It is God’s word that changes us’. Paying attention to the contingency and muddle and complicated mediation of the text can be a discipline of attention, a cultivated willingness to hear God speak. And when I need His unmediated presence, I stand at the sanctuary step and meet Him in bread and wine.
4 Notes/ Hide
- steveareno liked this
- spiritualityofdogwalking liked this
- littlewicketgate liked this
- unapologetic-book posted this