Category Archives: General

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.

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.

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.

Well, that was a long gap.

The main practical reason? Unbelievable quantities of work. Becoming Head of Department, preparing for an internal pilot Research Assessment Exercise, organising the 2006 Society for the Study of Theology conference. and trying to finish the SCM Study Guide to Christian Doctrine. Amongst other things.

This has meshed, however, with some deeper reasons. I tend to find that my attitude to what I’m doing, theology-wise, goes in cycles – and since October or November last year I’ve been experiencing a loss of confidence: one of those times when I’m sustained only by various habits, practical commitments, and deadlines – rather than by any strong sense that what I’m doing makes sense or is worthwhile. (It’s not depression, not even mildly: the last few months have also been amongst the most cheerful of my life, I think.) I’ll talk about some particular aspects of that in some separate posts, particularly as they affect the kind of stuff I have been doing (or not doing recently) on the blog.

I’m back from AAR, and from a Scriptural Reasoning pre-meeting. Jetlag and babylag are still holding me under, and I have a ferocious week or so ahead in order to get my timetable back under control – but I have a backlog of posts to make some time soon.

Apologies for the long gap. I’m on paternity leave at the moment, Tom having joined the family last week – and the week before that having been disrupted by preparations for his arrival. More soon…

The new edition of The Modern Theologians is out. (Well done Rachel!) And there’s a great new article in it by Jim Fodor on ‘postliberalism’, which (amongst other things) provides the best description of postliberalism I’ve ever seen. I recognise myself here very strongly:

1. Postliberal theology represents a postcritical ‘journey to regain an inheritance’ (i.e., a retrieval and redeployment of premodern sources in characteristically ‘unmodern’ ways to meet today’s challenges).
2. It self-consciously engages and reflects upon theology’s tasks in relation to its ecclesial settings (borrowing but also adapting previously unavailable conceptual tools from the social sciences, especially in their descriptive aspects…).
3. It deploys narrative as a key category … Concretely embodying scripture in ecclesially appropriate ways stands in contrast to theologies which attempt to ‘lift’ from the text certain teachings or moral truths in a manner that leaves the Bible behind…)
4. It emphasizes the peculiar grammar of Christian faith, concentrating on its scriptural logic and the regulative role of doctrine…
5. It allocates to theology a primarily corrective rather than constitutive function. Theology’s aim is to repair, correct and sustain rather than constitute Christian language-games…
6. It exhibits a distinctively Protestant flavour that is yet open to Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox inflections…
7. It espouses a non-essentialist approach to religions … Affirming and attending to the material specifics and irreducible differences among religions … helps check, on the one hand, proclivities towards supercessionism … and encourages, on the other, genuine interchange and mutual understanding…
8. It adopts a non-foundational epistemological posture…
9. It sees its primary task as descriptive rather than apologetic

I guess I’m an Anglican-inflected postliberal, on this description. Even though I wasn’t a liberal to begin with, and by some definitions turn out to be one now. But what else could you call it?

I quite like Frei’s term, ‘generous orthodoxy’ (see 1984a on my Frei bibliography) – but that doesn’t quite capture it, and in any case seems rather a self-aggrandizing name to apply to oneself. (Frei coined it to describe his teacher, Robert L. Calhoun.) And it has since become identified with Brian D. McClaren, about whom I know next to nothing.

I really want a name that manages to combine:

1. generous orthodoxy – which I tend to identify with Frei’s pragmatic, descriptive Barthianism;
2. critical orthodoxy – i.e., something with a bit more anger to it, and a stronger awareness of ‘texts of terror’ and the need for orthodoxy’s self-repair; and even a touch of
3. radical-ish orthodoxy. – i.e., whilst I can’t go all the way with Milbank, Pickstock and co., I do want something with rather more philosophy/metaphysics to it, and with a decent dash of Aquinas.

Any suggestions?

Sorry that there has been nothing posted here for a while. Several reasons:

(1) The Department of Lifelong Learning Theology Exam Board at the very end of July. A five-hour meeting with more paperwork before and afterwards than could be stuffed into an industrial shredder.

(2) The moving of the DLL Theology programme to its new home in the Department of Theology.

(3) My move from DLL to the Department of Theology, and handing over the reins of the part-time programme wholly to my colleague David Rhymer.

(4) Scrabbling to finish a couple of writing commitments that should have been dealt with a while ago: a review of three new undergraduate theology textbooks; the Grove booklet version of some lectures on Higher Education; and the editing of Serious Negotiations, a collection of Rowann William’s essays on various modern theologians.

(5) A quick holiday in Brentwood, house-swapping with Hester’s sister Ruth and her family – and visiting from there friends and family in the surrounding area.

(6) An absorbing e-mail conversation with my friend Susannah Ticciati about the metaphysics of the incarnation.

All in all, these things have distracted me from posting. There is more coming soon, though – I promise!