Survey on Faith and Art

My friend and fellow PhD colleague at Princeton Seminary, Katie Douglass, is conducting a survey on the role of faith and art in young adults as part of her dissertation project. She is looking for people between the ages of 18 and 30 to fill it out. You do not need to be either Christian or artistic. The survey consists of four parts divided into sixty questions: Demographic Information, Faith Practices, Art Practices, and Your Opinions on various issues on the arts and religion. It will take approximately 15-20 minutes to fill out.

As a bonus for taking the survey, you will have a chance to win a $100 gift card to Amazon.com.

Impossible Possibilities: On Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible

The most talked-about book of 2011 among evangelicals ought not to be Rob Bell’s Love Wins, but rather Christian Smith’s provocative and insightful attack on biblicism, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. I have a more formal, academic response to this book that I hope to write and publish in the near future. In the meantime, I want to take this opportunity to respond to Robert Gundry’s review in Books and Culture, and through that lens, to address some of the pros and cons of Smith’s book.

First, a few brief words about Smith’s thesis. The book is divided into two main parts: the first is his diagnosis, the second is the prescription. Smith argues that the position of biblicism is an impossible reading of scripture. By “biblicism,” he means “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability” (viii). He elsewhere identifies a “constellation” of ten assumptions or beliefs that constitute biblicism (4-5):

1. Divine Writing: the Bible is inerrantly identical with God’s own words;
2. Total Representation: the Bible communicates the totality of what God has to say;
3. Complete Coverage: all issues are contained in the Bible;
4. Democratic Perspicuity: any rational person can correctly understand the text;
5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: the meaning is available through a plain, literal, face-value reading;
6. Solo Scriptura (vs. sola scriptura): theology can be built directly out of the biblical text with no extrabiblical texts or frameworks;
7. Internal Harmony: each texts is internally consistent with every other text;
8. Universal Applicability: the teachings contained in the Bible are universally valid;
9. Inductive Method: all Christian teachings can be learned by deriving them directly from the text taken in isolation; and
10. Handbook Model: the Bible functions as a handbook for every aspect of Christian life.

Smith’s central claim is that this biblicist program is impossible to fulfill, and he demonstrates it through what he calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” The argument goes something like this:

1. biblicism requires that the Bible’s teachings constitute a unified, coherent worldview for the entirety of Christian faith and practice (#2, 3, 7, 8, 10);
2. biblicism further requires that these teachings are accessible to any rational person, apart from faith and apart from any religious tradition, who reads the text with care (#4, 5, 9);
3. ergo, biblicism states that everyone ought to be in agreement about what the Bible teaches.

While (3) is obviously false, Smith piles on the examples of pervasive pluralism ad nauseam. He supplements his case with numerous additional problems, including the arbitrary ways biblicists relativize certain passages, the ineluctable need for extrabiblical concepts, and the way biblicist practice deviates from biblicist theory. The conclusion is clear: biblicism, as defined by Smith, is theological nonsense. It has no ground in scripture itself and is thoroughly self-defeating.

In the second part of the book, Smith presents his response to the problem. He doesn’t give a solution—though it occasionally reads like one—so much as present possible aspects of or avenues toward a more responsible evangelical hermeneutic. The primary suggestion is to adopt Barth’s christocentric hermeneutic, that is, to make the gospel kerygma of our reconciliation in Christ the lens by which we understand God’s word for us. Smith even affirms the need for a “canon within the canon” (116), to which I can only say: yes and amen! He even has a section titled: “Learning from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics” (121-26). Other suggestions include, for example, accepting ambiguities in scripture, refusing the temptation to harmonize, distinguishing dogma from doctrine from opinion, rejecting epistemological foundationalism, embracing elements of speech-act theory, and broadening the notion of biblical authority. All of these are good suggestions, though they fall short, in my opinion, of the kind of robust theological hermeneutic that evangelicals need.

Before turning to my own critiques, let’s take a look at Robert Gundry’s huffy response in Books and Culture, published under the title, “Smithereens!” To call this a review is being a bit generous. It has no intentions of being an honest analysis of Smith’s argument. Gundry opens by saying the book will “sizzle before it fizzles,” and then he goes on to talk about why it should fizzle. The reader of this review who hasn’t actually read the book might be misled into thinking that Gundry actually surveys Smith’s argument fairly, but this is false impression. Gundry spends all of three paragraphs describing Smith’s diagnosis of the biblicist dilemma, while spending the next 15+ paragraphs criticizing his “solution” to the problem. That’s not to say a three-paragraph summary isn’t potentially valid; Smith’s criticism of biblicism is indeed very simple. But it gives the impression that the point of the book is to give a systematic answer to biblicism, when this is most definitely not the case, as the book states explicitly. As Smith put it in his response to Peter Leithart, “In short, the first half of my book needs to be addressed and answered directly for its main critical argument. The second, constructive half of the book might be temporarily ignored, as far as I’m concerned.” Gundry asks: “How then does Smith propose to solve the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism?” But this completely overlooks Smith’s qualification at the start of the second half: “The ideas in the following pages do not offer a fixed package of solutions to the problems raised in previous chapters” (97). Suffice it to say that Gundry’s piece is an untrustworthy guide to the book purportedly under review. It is a very smug essay, full of the self-congratulatory “gotcha” moments that one finds in the writings of reasonably intelligent people who dismiss works critical of their views by distracting their readers from a book’s forceful and valid insights. Readers are advised to judge Smith’s work for themselves.

Where Gundry is wrong, he is dead wrong. He seems to endorse deriving universal ethical laws from the Bible. He finds it suspicious that “Smith repeatedly cites the fate of the unevangelized as an open question and refers again and again to the gospel of God’s reconciling the world to himself through Christ but says nary a word about divine judgment and the lostness of unbelievers despite the apostle Paul's declaring that for their salvation people have to believe in Christ.” Why do conservatives persist in making mercy and judgment antitheses in God, as if God is bound to the kind of antinomies that govern creaturely life? Not surprisingly, he is appalled to hear Smith question the dogmatic status of the “penal satisfaction” theory of atonement: “Sorry, but victory without the penal is pyrrhic.” But this only confirms Smith’s point, that evangelicals have illegitimately elevated what are doctrines at best into infallible dogmas. Gundry is also wrong to side with Van Til against Barth, but that goes without saying.

One of the snarkier moments occurs when Gundry claims to show how Smith employs in his own book the very Scottish commonsense realism and Baconian inductivism that the latter criticizes. “Welcome to Scottish commonsense realism and Baconian inductivism redux,” Gundry writes. “Thanks to Smith they've made a comeback.” This is one of the worst “gotcha” moments in the review, since it is both factually wrong and misses the point. First, to demonstrate that Smith is employing these very methods, Gundry would have to show that his approach actually claims to achieve a purely objective (non-subjective) truth about the world. But Smith nowhere claims such a thing. Gundry equates these methods with an extremely broad scientific method of examining data. If Gundry were correct, then every scientific study would have to be committed to a Baconian philosophical framework, which is of course ridiculous. Not only is Gundry’s attempt at a comeback factually wrong, it is also useless. Simply showing how these methods might be found in the book says nothing about the validity or invalidity of these methods for biblical interpretation. Gundry admits as much when he adds, “To say so is neither to deny nor to affirm his thesis.” Okay, so what’s the point? There is only one point: to distract from the real argument of the book with a banal observation meant to impress the Books and Culture reader (Gundry must assume such readers are not very intelligent), so that he or she forgets Smith was trying to make a serious observation.


But even broken clocks are right twice a day. Some of Gundry’s blows actually hit their mark, and it would be unfair not to point out where he’s right. But let’s be clear: Gundry provides nothing to undermine Smith’s critique of biblicism in the first half of the book. The review’s criticisms all pertain to the “solution” that Gundry thinks Smith is trying to propose. On that, Gundry is quite right to question whether a “christocentric hermeneutic” would really curtail pervasive interpretive pluralism. “You also have to ask whether a christological reading doesn't produce its own such pluralism,” he says. Gundry essentially makes this one point again and again in different ways. The ancient creeds “haven’t put a stop to pluralism outside biblicist circles any more than inside them. Nor has a strong teaching office. Not even pronouncements of the Roman Catholic Magisterium have stopped it among theologians, clergy, and lay people of that communion, not to detail disagreements among Roman Catholics on the Magisterium itself.” And later, he responds to Smith’s point about Christ being present outside of scripture by asking, “are these extrabiblical presences of Christ any less subject to pervasive interpretive pluralism than is biblicism?” All of this is quite true, and I’ll come back to it later.

Gundry is also entirely correct to question Smith’s claim that his recently becoming Roman Catholic is “only partly related to the issues raised here” (xiii). While it is true that the critique and the constructive suggestions are both valid for evangelical Protestants, it is certainly suspect when a book like this appears the same year that Smith publishes another book with the title, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in 95 Difficult Steps (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). It’s hard to read The Bible Made Impossible and not feel like it is a covert argument for why evangelicals should become Catholic. For instance, at one point Smith says that American evangelicals need to “spend the time needed to think matters through carefully, creatively, and in interaction with the larger, longer Christian tradition. . . . The last thing American evangelicalism needs is more autonomously impulsive reformist action and more organizational and identity fragmentation” (96)! Combine this with his concluding remark about the need for “a stronger hermeneutical lens and ecclesial teaching office” (177; emphasis added), and you have the basic building blocks for a conversion to “evangelical Catholicism.”

As true as these criticisms are, they are not by any means the most important points to raise in objection to Smith’s book. First, Smith’s diagnosis, while generally on target, fails to zero in on the real source of the biblicist dilemma. He admits that not everything on the long list of biblicist characteristics falls under his critique. And he often appears to confuse issues that need to be differentiated more sharply, giving the impression that kitschy books like Gardening with Biblical Plants can be placed alongside the “Three/Four/Five Views on X” that Smith rightly sees as more problematic for biblicism. Second, the constructive suggestions that he provides, while helpful, do not nearly go far enough. He acknowledges this, but that’s not sufficient. We need something more robust. But it’s more serious than that. Not only do they stop short; they also go in the wrong direction. Let me explain.

Both Smith and Gundry, if I’ve understand them correctly, are opposed to pervasive interpretive pluralism (hereafter PIP). Though I must admit that it’s not entirely clear for either one. Certainly Gundry thinks that Smith is against PIP, and he seems to share Smith’s concern about this problem. But is Smith opposed to it himself? Throughout the book he refers to PIP as a problem for biblicism. To use analytic terminology, PIP is a defeater for biblicism. The question is whether PIP is a problem as such for Smith. I agree with Gundry that this is the general impression from the book, and it seems to be confirmed by the conclusion, where Smith says that “biblicism collapse[s] under the weight of the pervasive interpretive pluralism that biblicism itself generates” (173; emphasis added). This is one of the many slips in the book. It is a factually erroneous statement. If biblicism generates PIP, then it would have to be as early as the biblical text itself—more than that, as early as human civilization! If anything, biblicism is a (failed) response to PIP, not its cause. Gundry goes so far as to suggest that PIP might be caused by too much nonbiblicism in the past—as if everyone would agree with his paleofundamentalism if only ancient Christians had been more biblicist!—but that’s equally as erroneous.

The real issue is the assumption by both that PIP is a problem at all that needs to be “fixed” or curtailed. What is perplexing about Smith’s book is that he fails to draw the logical conclusion that PIP itself needs, in some sense, to be embraced. For surely this is what the book leads the reader to expect at numerous points. For instance, he rightly affirms, over against the pursuit of pure objectivity, the active role of the reading subject in the interpretation of scripture: “How else could humans possibly know truth, other than to involve themselves as personal subjects in the discerning and understanding of it?” (114). He seems to acknowledge in these pages the fact that subjective involvement is a universal feature of interpretation. But if that’s the case, then PIP is simply the natural consequence of allowing everyone to read and interpret scripture—which it is. Consequently, on Smith’s own terms, the only way to combat PIP is to fully submit one’s subjectivity to the normative authority of an ecclesial magisterium, or to keep Bibles out of the hands of the laity. Put simply, if Smith really thinks we must overcome PIP, then his argument necessarily requires that one “become Catholic (as I have done) or Eastern Orthodox.” However, if he’s only concerned about moving past biblicism—and thus embracing PIP within a postfoundationalist christocentric hermeneutic—then many of these problems disappear, including the basis for most of Gundry’s criticisms.

Pervasive interpretive pluralism is not a problem to be fixed; it is a fact to be accepted, even a blessing to be embraced. Smith comes so close to making this very point, but he holds back. He has an entire chapter on the need to accept the Bible as it is, with all its ambiguities and complexities and contradictions. He writes about the need to embrace the subjective nature of all interpretation. It ought to follow that PIP is itself something to affirm as part of the creaturely relation to God. This is what Smith should have argued in his book. Not only that PIP is a defeater for biblicism, but that we need a hermeneutic which embraces the radical multiplicity and heterogeneity of our interpretations.

As helpful and insightful as Smith’s book is, it falls short of what the book could and should have argued. Throughout the book he criticizes the “handbook” attempt to derive universally-applicable ideals and principles from the biblical text that will govern every aspect of our life. And yet there is no corresponding suggestion that our understanding of scripture ought to embrace the plurality of historical contexts in which scripture is read and interpreted. Opposing biblicism is one thing; affirming a radically open hermeneutic that gives a positive place to “pervasive pluralism” is something quite different. The pieces are in place for making this move within Smith’s book. A christocentric “canon with the canon” is indeed the correct starting-point. One only needs to recognize that that which remains “outside” this inner canon are the multiplicity of cultural-historical contexts and conceptual forms. If christocentricity constitutes the “inner” canon, then a kind of pneumatocentricity must constitute the “outer” canon. Put differently, the kerygma of Jesus Christ establishes the unity, while the cross-cultural movement of the Spirit establishes the diversity. Together, we have the theological basis for a hermeneutic that embraces pervasive pluralism without resulting in a vicious relativism.

Announcement: Analytic Theology Fellowships & Grants for 2012-2013

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, with support from the Templeton Foundation, announces the following fellowships and grants available for the 2012-2013 academic year:

Analytic Theology Cluster Grants

These grants fund interdisciplinary seminars or reading groups. Each funded seminar or group has two leaders – one theologian and one philosopher – and up to eight additional participants. The leaders must be faculty members. We will award up to five Grants with a maximum $15,000 budget per grant. For details visit the Analytic Theology Project website. To apply to be a leader send a 500 word letter of intent and budget to analytictheology.project-at-gmail-dot-com by February 15, 2012. Full proposals will be invited on a competitive basis. (Prospective participants apply to leaders after funding is secured.)

Analytic Theology Summer Stipends

These stipends provide $5,000 to fund summer research in analytic theology. Successful applicants in year one or two will automatically receive an award in year two or three if they meet the following two conditions: (a) they intend to research a project in analytic theology during the second summer, and (b) their previously funded project has been swiftly accepted for publication at a peer-reviewed journal. For further details visit the website. All materials must be received by February 1, 2012.

Analytic Theology Course Awards

These awards provide funding for the development and implementation of courses, or course segments, in analytic theology at divinity schools and departments of theology and religious studies. The project expects to award five applicants with $15,000 each: $5,000 for the applying faculty member, and $10,000 for the host institution. See the website for more information on the course award program. Applications are due March 15, 2012.

Analytic Theology Post-Doctoral Fellowships

These are one-year fellowships for the 2012-2013 academic year. They provide a funded leave of absence to be spent in residence at a center for research on philosophy of religion or philosophical theology. These fellowships are open to faculty who teach in theology, religion, or divinity programs. Applicants must outline a research program that leads to scholarly publications in analytic theology or to new programs of study. Fellows receive a $60,000 stipend plus $15,000 for expenses. For details, including sample topics and application requirements, see the theology fellowships overview on the website. All materials must be received by January 15, 2012.

The real impasse in the debate over Rob Bell

Mark Galli’s book, God Wins—a response, obviously, to Love Wins—was the topic of discussion last week. The book has been available on Kindle for a few weeks, though it doesn’t appear in print until August 1. In it, Galli explains why he thinks “love wins” is an insufficient understanding of the gospel, because it bypasses the question of God’s judgment and wrath. Hence, “God wins.” One almost wants to ask Galli whether he’s forgotten 1 John 4:8. But that’s a cheap shot. Since I haven’t read the book yet—and since I’ve already written a few thousand words on Galli in my series responding to his deeply misguided and misinformed review in Christianity Today—I defer to the recent blog posts by Roger Olson, a man I highly respect and deeply admire.

Olson, a friend of Galli, wrote about God Wins on July 7. There he made a number of ambiguous remarks that were clearly an attempt to praise the qualities of the man while criticizing the claims of the book. He begins by stating that “Mark is a serious evangelical scholar with an irenic approach to controversial material.” He then goes on to say, “I get the sense that Mark felt things that I did not feel and that I felt things Mark (and others) did not feel.” And later: “I think that may be because Mark is a member of a denomination struggling with rampant liberalism in which conservatives (by which here I mean people who value traditional, orthodox, biblical Christianity) feel embattled. I, on the other hand, have been beset by fundamentalists and aggressive neo-fundamentalist heresy-hunters.” The rest of the review is just filler: Mark is a great guy, but he’s approaching this book from a perspective I do not share. Translation: his criticisms of Love Wins are not really about Bell; they are instead about Galli’s own issues within his ecclesial context.

Olson followed up that review of God Wins with another post on “Why I defend Rob Bell’s Love Wins (and other controversial books).” In this fascinating post, Olson puts forward the claim that what is really driving a book like God Wins is the whole Calvinism-Arminianism debate. He then states:

I think SOME evangelical Calvinists are so allergic to both Arminianism and liberalism that they tend to lump them together and not see their differences.  There’s something in American evangelical Calvinisms’ DNA that makes it see a trajectory from Arminianism (or anything like it) to liberalism.  I deny that trajectory and, in fact, tend to think it is the other way around (if anything): Calvinism leads to liberalism.

Olson compares Love Wins to the books related to the open theism controversy. He observes that the attacks made against both by Calvinists are the very same arguments used by Calvinists against Arminianism. What happens in these debates is that the particularities of open theism and Bell’s “open eschatology” (if I may put it thus) are lost amidst polemics about divine sovereignty and human free will. In Olson’s words, “the crux of the debate has to do with two different interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:4,” and “the deep, inner logic of the attacks on Love Wins” are rooted in “Reformed assumptions about God rather than out of Arminian assumptions about God.” Olson then makes a very interesting comment that warrants further reflection:

Simply to respond that God Wins is to raise some questions from the Arminian side.  In what sense does God win?  Does God get everything he wanted?  Does God want hell–antecedently as well as consequently?  If you say no, then why does hell exist?  It has to be because of free will and that has to be because of God’s loving self-limitation.  If you say yes, then that raises a host of questions about God’s goodness.  There don’t seem to be alternatives.  Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly “win” in every sense, right?  But love can still win IN THE SENSE that love wants free response and not coerced or programmed response.

There is much here worth examining in detail, but in the interests of brevity, I will summarize my thoughts with the following points. These are not meant to be exhaustive. They only hit on some of the key issues for the sake of further discussion.

1. The Calvinist-Arminian debate is an old one, but it seems blissfully unaware that there are serious alternatives to this rather stale binary opposition. It might seem a bit obvious, since it’s been suggested many times before, but a really compelling alternative is that of Karl Barth. Why? Well, it all comes down to understanding what we mean by freedom. The problem with both Calvinism and Arminianism is that freedom—whether the freedom of God or the freedom of the human being, respectively—has been defined in the abstract. The Calvinist freedom of God (i.e., the absolute sovereignty to determine the elect and the reprobate) and the Arminian freedom of humanity (i.e., the free will to determine one’s eternal identity in response to the gospel message) are both known prior to and apart from how God has actually exercised freedom in the person of Jesus. In other words, both are metaphysical conceptions of freedom. They are abstract notions not determined by the concrete particularity of God’s self-revelation. Now it may be that both sides simply don’t care; they like their metaphysics and cling to it tightly. That could very well be the case. But it’s important to point out just what is being assumed on both sides. In both cases, Christ is not definitive for what divine and human freedom means theologically.

2. Of course, to lift up Barth as a possible solution to the debate is not new, nor is it very persuasive to hard-core adherents of both positions. I suspect Calvinists and Arminians want their abstract conceptions of freedom, not because they care about the debates over metaphysics but because they are both deeply afraid of what it mean to go a different route. To put it directly, both Calvinists and Arminians are afraid of universalism. Calvinists need an abstract divine freedom (that is, an abstract decision of predestination) because their commitment to irresistible grace and the efficacy of God’s election means that a divine freedom determined by Christ’s reconciling promeity would result in the salvation of all people. Arminians need an abstract human freedom because their commitment to God’s universal desire for all to be saved (see Olson’s reference to 1 Tim. 2:4 above) would mean, again, that all humans would be saved were it not for our ability to thwart God’s will. But maybe—just maybe!—the problem is the presupposition by both sides that the salvation of all people is absolutely prohibited as a possible option in theology. Maybe our abstract commitments to a non-universalist eschatology and to certain notions of what freedom means for God and for human beings are at the root of the problem. Maybe we should let the reconciling mission of Christ determine what we can say about freedom and eschatological consummation.

3. In other words, the following claim by Olson is a false binary: “Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly ‘win’ in every sense, right?” The answer is no and no. I agree with Olson that God would be a monster for willing hell in advance. The old doctrine of double predestination is indeed a diabolic position to hold. But the Arminian alternative fares no better. Is a God who sends people to hell really much worse than a God who is impotent in the end to save those who reject the gospel (or never hear it in the first place)? The former is a God who is sovereign but cruel; the latter is a God who is weak but loving. The former is protologically monstrous, while the latter is eschatologically monstrous. But it’s unacceptable either way. If all are not finally saved, then God cannot be said to have “won.” And a God who does not “win”—who does not fully and finally accomplish God’s own perfect will—is simply not the God attested in scripture.

4. We can put the problem another way: for both Calvinists and Arminians, love and justice have been defined in the abstract, i.e., apart from God’s concrete self-communication in Christ. Thus both pit love and justice in a competitive relationship. Calvinism grounds the competition in God’s eternal predestination—so that God determines where love will “win” and where justice will “win.” Arminianism grounds the competition in the conflict between a loving God and a sinful humanity: God loves everyone, but this loving divine will is overpowered by a human refusal of this love that, according to the rules of the game, forces God to exact justice. If we begin with Christ, however, it turns out that love and justice are non-competitively related, since it is precisely the love of God for all that God’s cruciform justice serves to accomplish. Justice is simply the form that God’s love takes in the event of the cross. The notions of love and justice are not theologically meaningful independent of and prior to the actualization of God’s just love in the concrete reality of Jesus Christ. The attempt to define them in advance and then figure out how they relate theologically results in this intractable debate.

5. This whole debate also seems to take for granted the notion that eschatology refers to something “beyond death,” that is, beyond each person’s individual perishing. Maybe that’s something we need to reconsider as well.

Some rather unanalytic thoughts on analytic theology: reflections on Logos 2011

I returned on Sunday from Logos 2011, a superb three-day conference at the University of Notre Dame, sponsored by the Center for Philosophy of Religion and under the specific auspices of the Analytic Theology Project. Let me begin by thanking Michael Rea and the other organizers of the conference for inviting me to participate in the conversation. It was an honor to be there and I greatly enjoyed my time at Notre Dame.

After writing a number of tweets (#logos2011) about it, I’ve naturally been asked to comment at length about the experience. I will do so now, though my assessment here is merely provisional in nature. Larger issues raised at the conference will have to be addressed at another time. This year’s topic on divine revelation, scripture, canon, and biblical authority is a central interest of my work, and for that reason, many of the most interesting theological insights from the conference will have to wait for a future occasion. Here I only want to raise some concerns that I have about the project of analytic theology more broadly, in light of the conversations I had at the conference.

But first, let me gush about the fantastic people I was so privileged to meet. I very much enjoyed conversing with Evan Fales (Iowa), whose paper was a favorite of mine at the conference, and whose use of Leach, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss to interpret scripture is immensely interesting to me. Getting to know Tamsin Jones (Harvard) was a highlight of my time. I was also happy to meet and interact with Andrew Dole (Amherst). It was a pleasure to interact with Oliver Crisp (formerly of Bristol, now at Fuller) and Michael Rea (Notre Dame); both graciously answered my questions and Crisp especially is a lot of fun at a bar. After years of reading his work, I finally met Kevin Vanhoozer (Wheaton) for the first time, as well as his family. More recently, I have taken a great interest in Kenton Sparks (Eastern), whose book God’s Word in Human Words is perhaps the best evangelical treatment of modern biblical scholarship—a work I cannot recommend too highly. Sadly, however, I had to miss the opening session with Peter Enns, a man I highly respect and admire. The reason for this is a little long, but suffice it to say, my luggage was lost during a layover at O’Hare airport. I received it the next day around noon at our hotel, but the last shuttle for the morning session left at 11 am. I also did not have a chance to talk personally with William Abraham (SMU), who provided what was for me the highlight of the trip (see below).

Second, let me also state the obvious: for a conference organized under the auspices of analytic theology, there were very few actually analytic theology or philosophy papers. Unlike previous Logos conferences (from what I’ve heard), this conference broadened the scope of participants considerably. They also chose scholars known for their work on this particular doctrinal topic, as opposed to picking analytic scholars to speak about the topic. The result was an excellent discussion about scripture, though perhaps not as satisfying on a philosophical level for those working in analytic philosophy of religion. Since I’m not interested in analytic theology myself, I found the papers very interesting and worthwhile. Some of the papers were even critical of analytic theology, whether implicitly (Paul Nimmo) or explicitly (Vanhoozer, Abraham).

In the rest of this post, I want to raise some concerns I have about the whole project of analytic theology. I raise these as part of a good faith effort to understand what the project is trying to do. If I have misconstrued anything, I do hope those in the analytic theology circles will correct me. I view myself as a friendly critic, an outsider interested in helping those “inside” do their work better.

My general critique is a classically “continental” one: viz. that I am concerned with the apparently ahistorical and non-social conception of reason with which the analytic people appear to be working. That is to say, there seems to be a sense that theological claims and concepts can be evaluated in abstraction from the historical, cultural, and political contexts within which such claims and concepts originate and develop. So we can evaluate someone like Schleiermacher or Barth by distilling a set of propositions and deciding whether the conclusions rationally follow from the premises. While this appears quite objective, it does not properly take into account both the inherently contextual nature of these theological texts but also the intrinsically social nature of reason itself. The former comes from the fact that these and other theologians are writing within a particular tradition, responding to developments within that tradition, and seeking to speak for this tradition within a new historical situation. The latter is a larger claim that goes back at least to Hegel (see Pinkard’s The Sociality of Reason), with whom I agree. But I cannot defend that tradition of thought here. That’s not to say analytic philosophy cannot take up this Hegelian line of thinking. People like Robert Brandom and John McDowell have done just that, within an analytic pragmatism or a particular reading of Wittgenstein that socializes our thinking, speaking, and doing in the world. (One could justifiably say that the analytic tradition is divided between two different readings of Wittgenstein. By and large, those I met at Logos don’t read him the way I do.)

I bring up this “continental” argument, because I think it illuminates a lot of the disagreements and misunderstandings that I overheard at the conference. I don’t just mean the dismissal of Barth I encountered, or the statements about Schleiermacher having a God who cannot act in the world and does not love humanity. These were certainly very bad and did not inspire confidence about the future, but these are not views unique to analytic theologians; many people hold such notions out of a general lack of knowledge of these theologians and an unwillingness to charitably engage them on their own terms. The problems I am referring to are things like the incredulous stares of some at the notion that I or another person are happy to get rid of inerrancy. While it wasn’t made entirely clear, I gathered that this is because the doctrine of inerrancy is a key premise in a syllogism regarding the authority of scripture. If one dispenses with this doctrine, one dispenses with the logical argument for scripture’s authority and meaningfulness. It became clear to me that many of these analytic grad students are simply ignorant of the entire theological tradition regarding this doctrine. They’ve never read the Protestant scholastics on verbal-plenary inspiration, never studied the writings of Hodge and Warfield in their historical context, never examined the arguments Barth gives for rejecting these doctrines or assessed the cultural and historical reasons for his claims. What these philosophers of religion want to know is: is this doctrine rational or irrational? is scripture authoritative or not? The idea that inerrancy could be a culturally-loaded term, with a complex web of historical relations that have to be entangled before it can be rightly evaluated, is viewed as either irrelevant or foreign or both.

This is why I think people like Enns and Sparks—both of whom, like Barth, make a very sharp distinction between the “humanity” of the text and the “divinity” of God’s word—provoked looks of puzzled astonishment, as if they’ve heard a new language for the very first time. The analytic crowd seemed to insist that unless we could directly predicate inspiration, revelation, and authority of the biblical text (qua text, i.e. words on the page), the whole Christian game would be up. The Barthian/actualistic position—that revelation is directly identified with the person of Christ himself, and that the word of God is a christic-pneumatic event in the encounter between text and reader—got no hearing at all at the conference. I’m not sure anyone in the analytic crowd knows what to do with it. An event resists any logical proposition. It is an existential disruption, not a syllogistic conclusion. Every analytic evaluation of Barth that I’ve read ends up greatly misunderstanding Barth’s christocentrism. They seem to forget that what distinguishes Barth from someone like Charles Hodge is not the various doctrinal propositions with which each agrees; it is rather the entire nature of what theology is as a discipline: its origin, ground, and telos. Between the systematic arrangement of discrete timeless, universal, propositional facts and the contextual-historical reflection on the faith and proclamation of a particular community—between scripture as the revelation of universal truths about God and Christ as the contingent actualization of God’s being that demands ever-new interpretation within new contingent situations—yawns a great chasm.

Returning to Enns for a moment: I think at the end of the day much of this conflict comes down to a christological disagreement regarding the very nature of incarnation. Enns and Sparks could both use some greater sophistication in their use of christological categories, but their essential insight is quite sound: scripture is a fundamentally and thoroughly human document, bearing all the marks of our finitude and fallenness. But precisely as a human document, God speaks in and through it in a way that remains truthful and normative. The incarnational analogy that Enns uses helps to illuminate this very point. Jesus is not God “in spite of” his human form, but precisely “as” a human, including everything that being human implies and demands (insofar as what is not assumed is not redeemed).

However, this is where we run into problems, because we have to clarify just what we mean by incarnation. The classical Chalcedonian tradition is both helpful and dangerous in this regard, because people like Cyril of Alexandria were quite willing to instrumentalize the human nature. The divine Logos was understood to be the sole active agent in the incarnation, while the flesh functioned passively like a garment worn by God in the world. So the incarnational analogy can easily support a very instrumentalist doctrine of inerrancy, even a full-blown theory of dictation (which a couple people at the conference came very close to accepting outright, and are at least sympathetic with). A better incarnational analogy requires a better christology, one that affirms the full human agency of Jesus. The way to do so, in my view, is through Barth, Jüngel, and McCormack—where Jesus is God precisely in his historical existence, where the “human nature” is not something appended onto the “divine nature” because the human existence is precisely where divinity is ontologically located (which to the analytics appears like a collapse of the natures).

I say all this because I think the lack of comprehension regarding incarnation and inerrancy is really indicative of a larger disagreement regarding the very nature of theological reasoning. This became clear at the after-dinner talk given by Billy Abraham (title: “Turning Philosophical Water into Theological Wine”!), in which he made it very clear that all Christian theology is a “spiritual enterprise,” which has spiritual formation as its rightful telos. Theology cannot escape things like diversity of tradition, historical and intellectual diversity, and the diversity of audiences. In short, the very idea of a universal rational discourse is, at least for theology, an illusion. He didn’t put it quite this way, but his point was that theology is about Christian discipleship, and discipleship involves concrete human beings within concrete historical contexts. It speaks from and for a particular group of believers, seeking to upbuild them in the faith and orient them toward love of God and neighbor. I do think most everyone in the room was on board with this, but there were some clear misgivings by some of the analytic types. The most telling moment occurred when one young man asked, “I really don’t understand why theology has to be concerned with spiritual formation at all. Why can’t it be just about logic and reason?” Abraham’s response was to the point: “Go do philosophy.” In other words, don’t call yourself a theologian, because you’re not doing theology. This particular man wasn’t the only person to raise this concern, and I suspect many people in the audience agreed with him.

So let me step back and assess what I take to be the general issue here. Is there such a thing as universal truth? Does theology trade in universally-valid propositions? Do we have access to timeless facts whose validity is universal in scope because not historically-conditioned? These are the kinds of questions that really divide the camps. I don’t want to get into how I would answer those questions here, since that would make this post even longer than it already is. For now, I’ll just say that even if there is universal truth, it’s not universal in the sense of being accessible to all—it is only truth for faith, i.e., within the context of the community of believers. The universality of truth is thus inseparable from the contingency and particularity of history.

My position thus stands in stark contrast to those in the analytic theology school, and I think there is a fairly obvious reason for this. Analytic theology is a subset of analytic philosophy of religion. According to proponents of analytic theology, this field is simply the systematic extension of the analytic philosophy of religion to every doctrinal locus. The aims of analytic theology are not fundamentally different from the aims of the philosophy of religion; there is a quantitative, rather than qualitative, difference between the two. Now the academic discipline of analytic philosophy understands its task to be the logical analysis of propositional arguments about various topics. Those who have not swallowed the Wittgensteinian, much less the Hegelian, pill—who still operate within the sphere of so-called universals—see themselves as capable of abstracting concepts from the historical contexts within which they are used; they can be analyzed apart from their concrete uses in particular situations for particular ends. A logically-justified claim has universal significance. Contrary to the “postmodern” continental tradition, everything is not hermeneutics.

For me, on the contrary, everything is hermeneutics. Every concept is culturally situated, every claim is determined by its location within history. There is no universally-valid ontology, no metaphysic that is not conditioned by a particular sociopolitical context. Now I think there are many ways of reaching this “continental” conclusion, but my reason is purely theological: Jesus Christ is the historicization of God, thus the historicization of theology. Speech about God is not speech about a universal concept of deity; it is contextual speech about the concrete reality of God in the world. This means that the very being of God is the ground for the hermeneutical nature of all theological discourse. There is no speech about God that is not essentially a matter of hermeneutical understanding. All talk of God is interpretation.

Is this an absolute divide? Are these two approaches to theology mutually exclusive? I’d like to think they aren’t, because I do want to engage these analytic theologians in constructive conversation that will be to our mutual benefit. But I am deeply skeptical. I am concerned that we have such radically different views of God, Christ, scripture, and revelation that we will never be able to move past prolegomena to actually do joint work in doctrinal reflection. I hope I am proved wrong and that my suspicions and worries are misguided. Based on the conference, however, I am left with decidedly mixed feelings.

Personally, I do not believe you can start with philosophy of religion and ever reach Christian theology. I am with Barth on this one. Or as Bultmann put it, “There is no alternative; [philosophy] must be either maid or mistress.” With Barth and Bultmann, I want the former (philosophy as maid). There are many at the conference that would probably agree with this, making theology the queen of the sciences. But exactly what they mean by this is often unclear. It seems that, in practice, philosophy is in fact the mistress—or, rather, they see no qualitative distinction between philosophy and theology, and whenever such a view is held, philosophy is inevitably the one in control.

I must reiterate again my deep gratitude for the invitation to attend Logos 2011. It was a pleasure to be there. I had some of the best conversations of the year (including some of the best drinks!). I met many incredible people, whom I look forward to seeing again in the future. I hope my misgivings are themselves misguided. I eagerly await future opportunities to discuss these important topics in more depth. In the meantime, consider me a friendly but critical outsider wishing the analytic theologians the best. There is still time to turn the philosophical water into theological wine.

Logos 2011: Revelation, Authority, and Canon

I leave on Wednesday for the University of Notre Dame as an invited participant in the 2011 Logos Workshop. This year’s theme is revelation and scripture, focusing on issues related to biblical inspiration, authority, and canon. The papers are by some of the leading scholars in the field, including Peter Enns, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Kenton Sparks. Other presenters include C. Stephen Evans, Eleonore Stump, and (to my great delight) Paul Nimmo. The papers I have read have been nothing short of excellent. I eagerly look forward to the conversation, and I’m honored to have been invited. I expect it to be a highlight of the year.

If you’ll be in the vicinity of South Bend next week and would like to meet up with me, send me an email. My evenings will be relatively free, and nothing is scheduled before 10:00 in the morning.

Christological Unity and Pneumatological Plurality: A Theological Reflection on the Church

Rachel Held Evans recently held her Rally to Restore Unity, a noble and much-needed effort to establish some healthy, humorous, and charitable dialogue among Christians. Consider this my modest and belated effort to contribute to that conversation.

What is the theological basis for Christian unity? What defines unity for Christian faith? The epistle to the Ephesians provides the best answer: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. … In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Eph. 2:13-14, 21). It is the person and work of Christ—the one crucified for us and our salvation—that forms the “ontological” ground for Christian unity. The unity of the church is located “in him.” Ecumenical peace only exists “in him.” The christology of Ephesians 2 is thus the basis for the more famous passage on unity in Ephesians 4. And we see this in other NT letters. Probably the most succinct and famous passage is Gal. 3:28, which states that all are now “one” in Christ.

But what kind of unity is this? In what sense is a theological-christological unity supposed to be evident on the level of phenomenology? It is in moving in this direction that I think most people tend to go astray. The assumption is that an ontological unity in Christ necessitates some kind of concrete, phenomenal unity on the level of corporate practice, if not also doctrinal formulation. In one sense, this is true enough; the fact that we are unified in Christ ought to translate into the actual practice of unity, as Halden and Ry have correctly argued. We need to do away with the notion that unity is something we do by finding universally-acceptable confessions and doctrinal statements, or through practicing a common liturgy of word and sacrament. Unity is not a task that we must realize. It is instead an indicative before an imperative; and there is only the latter because of the former.

All of this is a much-needed correction of a certain pragmatic ecumenical logic. And yet, I am still concerned about the very definition of “unity” that seems to be presupposed by all sides. What exactly does it mean to be unified? How does the gospel inform what unity looks like? Here is where I think the christological ontology of unity has to be supplemented by—or, rather, is actually ontologically inseparable from—a complex pneumatological repetition. In order to illustrate what I mean, I suggest we look at the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. We all know what happens. Jews in Jerusalem “from every nation under heaven” heard the apostles “speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:5-6). Biblical and theological scholars often point out that Pentecost is the Christian reversal of Babel, but this insight is worthy of further exploration.

First, whereas the Tower of Babel involved the loss of a unified language and so the loss of communication, Pentecost involves the restoration of communication in and through the diversity of human languages. Let’s reflect on this for a moment. Notice that the reversal of Babel is not a complete reversal; if it were, the Spirit would establish one common language in place of the many languages. But this is not what happens. God speaks a single message in a multiplicity of tongues: one kerygma, many contexts. What this means is that, in a certain sense, Pentecost actually blesses Babel, i.e., it sanctifies the very diversity that is the cause of our cultural fragmentation and miscommunication. Second, it strikes me that in the contrast between Babel and Pentecost, we have a perfect illustration of two kinds of ecumenical unities. Babel represents the pragmatic-anthropocentric unity forged through doctrinal agreement and liturgical participation. Pentecost represents the theological-christocentric unity established in the flesh of Jesus as the crucified one who destroyed the walls dividing one person from another, one nation from another, one denomination from another.

Third, it is particularly significant that this sanctified reversal of Babel occurs in association with the Spirit. If Christ concretizes the reality of God in a particular historical location, the Spirit universalizes this singular concretization through its infinite repetition. What’s especially important is that this pentecostal repetition is not the mere reproduction of the same. It is instead a creative repetition of the gospel in which the kerygmatic word of the cross is translated into an infinity of cultural contexts and historical situations. The repetition that God enacts, and that is consonant with the reconciling work of Christ, takes the form of a cultural diversification, a complex dissemination of the kerygma in a multiplicity of contexts. This repetition does not add anything to the singularity of Christ as the event of reconciliation; it rather bursts it open from within, enabling it to tear down dividing walls that no one—not even Jesus himself—could have known or anticipated. The Spirit turns Christ’s death and resurrection into an infinitely transposable truth-event capable of revolutionizing any situation, because in a certain ontological sense, Christ has already revolutionized every situation.

What is the practical payoff of this dense theological reflection? There are many aspects that could be developed, such as the claims that “mission makes the church” and that the gospel is intrinsically translatable. I want to focus on the nature of Christian unity. If it is indeed the case that our unity in Christ is inseparable from our being bound up in a pneumatic event of cultural translation, then this has rather dramatic implications for what it means to be part of the body of Christ. We are not dealing with a stable, static body whose limbs are all clearly identifiable as part of a single historical organism. We are instead dealing with a diasporic body whose limbs and parts are scattered and broken in every corner of the earth. It is the very confusion of Babel that is sanctified by the Spirit, because the infinitely translatable Christ is present and active in the midst of this confusion as the one who binds all the scattered remains together in his singular person—but not in a way that could be made phenomenally observable or dogmatically objectifiable. The post-pentecostal Christ cannot be definitively located; he cannot be tied down to any particular church or creed. His future cannot be directly identified with the future of any worldly institution or historical entity.

This brings us to the punch line: we correctly understand our unity to Christ only when it becomes clear that this unity is in fact irreducibly plural in nature; the unity is itself a multiplicity. We are united with those whom we do not know, and with whom we do not agree. Put more pointedly, it is precisely those who claim to be “orthodox” over against the “heterodox” who actually betray the unity that is characteristic of the Christian gospel. Those who cling tightly to their orthodoxy—whether a “sacred deposit,” a confession (such as Westminster), or a doctrine (such as inerrancy)—fail to bear witness to the pneumatological plurality that is distinctive of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. True unity is marked instead by cultural multiplicity and missionary translatability.