It is (finally) sunny, the birds are singing, and I’ve just finished work on my half of the the Modern Theologians Reader. Picture a very large pile of photocopies, all carefully marked up, and sheets and sheets of endnotes packed with the fruits of days hunting for bibliographical and biographical details: all tidied up and ready to send to my co-editor. Joy.
Restart
Well, after a long gap, I’m back. A small part of the gap was caused by an update to WordPress that broke Chris Goringe’s handy ‘Greekify’ plugin that I use to display the Greek text in posts – which in turn broke the display of the whole blog. Chris has now sorted that out (though you’ll notice that at present you can’t get lexical/grammatical info by hovering your mouse over Greek words). Chris deserves a medal, but instead will get a plug for his new blog: Playful Reading. In his own words:
I hope you will find here a series of short ‘playful readings’ of the Bible. You might think of them as interpretations, or retellings, or as an abuse of the text; whatever. I present them in the spirit of play, not believing them to be The Truth, but believing that the inspiration of scripture goes deeper than any of our hermeneutics, that the Breath of God is deeply enough embedded in the Biblical narrative that something of God can emerge from whatever angle you read, and that the complexity of the narrative is more true than any single reading.
I’ve also finished off a couple of projects that have been hanging over me, and absorbing all the attention that might otherwise have gone on blogging. I finished the SCM Core Text in Christian Doctrine – rather belatedly (and with a very different arrangement from that described in the old blurb on the Amazon page). It should be out in December. And I’m nearly done on the reader for The Modern Theologians that I’ve been editing with David Ford – although I don’t imagine it will see the light until late next year.
With all that out of the way, I have an itch to get back to my stalled thinking on Mark, as well as anything else that crops up. I give it, say, five weeks before I stop posting again.
Dawkins’ and Grayling’s wilful ignorance
I don’t normally trouble myself with Richard Dawkins’ diatribes against religion, I must admit – but some of the response to his latest book has been fun. Terry Eagleton has written a review in the LRB which is a good read. Along the way, he says of “card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins” that
If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.
A.C Grayling – another of those rationalists who switches his considerable brain off when it comes to religion – replies in a letter the next week:
Terry Eagleton charges Richard Dawkins with failing to read theology in formulating his objection to religious belief, and thereby misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one’s time to address what is built on those premises (LRB, 19 October). For example, if one concludes on the basis of rational investigation that one’s character and fate are not determined by the arrangement of the planets, stars and galaxies that can be seen from Earth, then one does not waste time comparing classic tropical astrology with sidereal astrology, or either with the Sarjatak system, or any of the three with any other construction placed on the ancient ignorances of our forefathers about the real nature of the heavenly bodies. Religion is exactly the same thing: it is the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers, which (mainly through the natural gullibility of proselytised children, and tragically for the world) survives into the age in which I can send this letter by electronic means.
Grayling, like Dawkins, does not see that if they make claims about what the ‘premise’ of religion is, or the claim that religion is “the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers”, they would do well to check that those claims are true – that they have got the premise at least roughly right, and that they have made half-way respectable claims about what “religion” is. Until they can be bothered to do that, they will continue talking culpably misleading nonsense.
Grayling also launches an attack on another thing Eagleton says. Eagleton wrote:
Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.
In Grayling’s hands, this becomes:
God does not have to exist … to be the ‘condition of possibility’ for anything else to exist.
Grayling is a well-informed philosopher, and I would suspect him of deliberate dishonesty at this point if I didn’t know that his brain reboots in safe mode every time he encounters religion. Eagleton had said “in one sense of that word”, and you don’t have to know very much about contemporary discussions of medieval philosophy to know that there can be an intelligible debate about the different grammars possible for existence claims, and the strange things that happen to that grammar when one tries to speak about the existence of the ground of the possibility of the existence of any and all particular things – strange enough that for some ways of using the word “exists” it would be truer to say that the ground does not exist than that it does. This may all be mistaken; it may even be nonsense – but one might actually have to argue about it to prove that point. Grayling is another Johnson, thinking he can refute Berkeley by kicking a stone.
Watertight arguments
Walking around the University in the weeks prior to the start of term, I noticed on several occasions two small white vans in one of the staff car parks, doors open to reveal a clutter of maintenance equipment. On the sides of the van, in large letters: “Concept Sealants”. I’m partly comforted by this, and partly worried – I have visions of men in white overalls bursting into a lecture room where I’ve just fudged a complicated argument, glue guns and soldering irons at the ready.
The Law and the Prophets
Even scriptures that are adhered to by the most rigid of conservatives do not fully dictate their own application. There is always an ‘excess’ in application: decisions made on grounds other than unyielding continuity – pragmatic grounds, aesthetic grounds. That is not simply a failure of continuity, though, or a force that fights against continuity: this possibility of excess is also what makes faithfulness to a text possible in history.
(It is, by the way, easy to slip between talking about texts and talking about power-structures in this context, even though they are not quite the same thing. But what I have said about scriptures is true of ‘power-structures’: they are perpetuated, but always perpetuated differently. Power always evolves – though not necessarily in ways you’d like…)
The relationship between law and prophecy in the Hebrew scriptures is, perhaps, analogous on to this relationship between continuity and excess. Prophecy is the arrival of the word of God at the edges of our current obedience, showing where our obedience is no such thing and calling us to change. You could see it as the excess which makes continuity possible – which calls to new construals of the existing text, a new grasp (pragmatic, aesthetic) of what is central and what peripheral, that is needed in order to carry on. It is not that without prophecy, continued application of the text would involve no excess. No, it would still necessarily evolve over time and space. But prophecy, as it were, authorises evolution in a particular direction – or calls readers back from the direction they thought was the way forward and sets them on another. Prophecy makes obedience to the law possible as obedience – precisely at the same time as, in fact precisely because, it attacks existing obedience to the law, existing construals of the law. Without prophecy there is no faithfulness, only arbitrariness.
And, yes, to those looking back, the claimed ‘authorisation’ will in part be judged by what it made possible – by what happened, or can happen, next.
When John the Baptist is described, he is wrapped in the words of the Hebrew Bible. He is presented as a continuation, a form of faithfulness to the text. But that means (whether we think about John the actual human being, standing in the desert, or “John” the character in the gospel texts) that John will be a new way of reading the text: he will of necessity be excessive – and this is necessarily true before we have noticed the explicit liminality that marks his portrait. But when we go on to look at the details – the desert setting, the raw food, the strange clothing, the asceticism – we can see that John stands explicity for divinely authorised liminality: for that prophetic call to faithfulness which disrupts present obedience. He stands for, announces, represents a call to continuity that explicitly recognises that continuity must be excessive, and therefore must involve us in decision and repsonsibility – and precisely in doing this he stands in the prophetic tradition that has always announced this message, but of necessity stands in it differently (as all the prophets do).
So, yes, John’s liminality is the form that ‘as it is written’ takes.
And, no, I don’t know what to make of the leather belt.
Thinking
The last two posts, and Rachel’s comments, prompt an aside.
This is one of those times when an apparently clear path turns out to lead into a thicket. And trying impatiently to pull one bramble out of the way pulls several others into view. Several issues are mixed in together; it’s not quite clear that we have hit upon the distinctions or the vocabulary to sort them out; and the point of what we’re saying has become elusive.
It is at this kind of point that it actually becomes necessary to think. To work, to labour at untangling without oversimplifying. I find that my life (the life of an academic theologian!) doesn’t actually involve that many occasions when I am required, in this sense, to think. Most of the time (when I’m not absorbed in those activities in which thinking would be a dangerous distraction – like driving, or attending committee meetings…) my life involves putting myself in places where I might be called upon to think – and then waiting, listening for the call.
It’s not that we’re obviously tussling with big, dramatic profundities. Playing with big, dramatic profundities doesn’t often involve a real labour of thinking, in my experience. We’re simply trying to work out whether anything can be saved from a platitude that seemed like an obvious thing to say about a particular passage. But the labour of thought is set of by small incongruities, small rucks in the carpet.
All this is one reason for reading the Bible slowly, of course: putting oneself on a path that leads into thickets.
Named and caught
In the comments to the last post, Rachel wrote:
Though at the same time John fits into certain patterns and expectations – patterns of what an ascetic/world-renouncing lifestyle should look like. I suppose he couldn’t do otherwise, as soon as he’s described.
and I then speculated that
the liminal position occupied by John [might be]… a socially functional necessity: one of the safety valves that allows the functioning of ‘ordinary life’ … John would then be an ‘interruption’ that, as it were, ordinary life used to perpetuate itself – a ruse of power, perhaps.
I went on to say something about how we might say that John escapes this suspicious reading:
The claim that something else, something other, was becoming visible even in this process by which the ordinary self-perpetuates, is fragile…
But thinking about Rachel’s point makes me realise that my response is facile. John, after all, performs his function in the Gospels in part because he ‘fits into certain patterns and expectations’, because he can be ‘described’ (‘as it is written’…). And yet clearly John is not in any straightforward sense simply the expression of that which is written: he exceeds it, simply by virtue of having concrete existence. I have that itch on the back of my neck that you get when creeping through a deserted mine, realising that one should have bought some decent social theory with you… The contrast between the activity of ‘describing in existing categories’ which perpetuates the existing symbolic order, and the eruption of the decisively new that re-makes that order, is clearly too blunt: ‘existing symbolic orders’ are always changing, always being deployed in new ways, always being inhabited differently. The contrast between the ‘process by which the ordinary self-perpetuates’ and ‘something else, something other…becoming visible’ is a childish one – all too closely related to other contrasts between inwardness and externality that I’ve been taught to eschew. I’m on the wrong track. Ho hum.
John the interruption
John was liminal, uncivilized. When people went to him, they went out: ἐξεπορεύετο . He eats wild, raw food; he is dressed as if fresh from Eden. Cooking, weaving, urban habitation – all the trappings of someone who is part of the world of ordinary, civilized, organized life are missing. John is a surd; he defies categorization. He is a disruptive element, and is to be found in the only place he could belong: in the desert. He is an interruption.
This interruption is what the continuity, the ongoing stability suggested by Mark’s “as it is written” looks like.
Literal and Spiritual (still more)
Okay, so here’s how I see it. Now that I’ve thought about it, I realise that all I’m doing is re-phrasing Hans Frei’s work on the sensus literalis – and, indeed, stuff I’ve said about him already – but, hey, originality is overrated.
Let’s say that the Bible is read within some weave of ecclesial practices, habits, institutions, worldview, ethos. Within that, over time, for readers thoroughly woven in to that context, there will be an ‘obvious’ way of approaching biblical texts – a sensus communis or ‘plain sense’.
Note that this ‘obvious way’
- will almost certainly be slowly evolving;
- won’t necessarily cover all biblical texts – simply those which feel most familiar and usable to this group;
- won’t necessarily lead to consensus about meaning: it might, instead, simply be a consensus about the kind of argument it makes sense to have about the meaning of a particular passage in this group;
- will shade off into other plain senses at the edges as this group is messily mixed in with other groups in a wider social setting; and
- may, in fact, not be a single ‘plain sense’ at all, but a set of differing approaches to the Bible which manage, at least temporarily in this setting, to reinforce one another – to be held in some kind of stable equilibrium.
Now, it is only within such a practice that we can talk about ‘spiritual’ and ‘literal’ readings – because the practices by which the Bible is approached in this ‘obvious way’/’plain sense’ will be such that the Bible is both made grist for the group’s mill, sustaining and supporting its existing shape, and also in some ways (perhaps only vestigial) allowed a certain objectivity over against the needs, desires and projects of the group. And so we’re back to ‘use’ and ‘resistance to use’, and so to my earlier discussion. The term ‘literal sense’ can be used to mean either ‘plain sense’ simpliciter, or ‘that side of the plain sense that stands in objectivity over against the readers’.
Literal and spiritual (yet again)
Okay, slight wobble:
What I seem to have ended up doing is, roughly speaking, aligning ‘spiritual’ with ‘sensus communis’, both over against ‘literal’. And yet I learnt my hermeneutics from a theologian who insisted upon the connection between ‘sensus literalis’ and ‘sensus communis’. I don’t want to give up on the latter, so I think a bit more precision may be called for. Which means I may have to think, rather than simply pontificate. Damn.
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