EXPOSITORY TIMES - OCTOBER 2002

When the writer Philip Guedella was working on a book about the nineteenth century soldier and politician the Duke of Wellington, he came across a box full of the nineteenth century equivalent of cheque stubs belonging to the Duke which Wellington had apparently discarded. What people throw away can reveal a lot to a historian. Archaeologists find ancient rubbish dumps fascinating because of the insight they give into the lives of the people who threw the rubbish away. The history of Christianity could be written as the history of how long it took people of faith to discard unwanted material. To take an obvious example. The phrase in the Letter to the Colossians, "Slaves, obey your earthly masters", a piece of conventional advice in the first century took people of faith nineteen centuries to discard. This, of course, ought to make Christians of the twenty first century ask which of their conventional beliefs and assumptions future generations may regard as just as unsustainable.

In a radio programme I made with him towards the end of last year the retired Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, Jack Spong, talked to me very powerfully about the need for Christian faith today to discard doctrines which he regards as unsustainable today in the interests of the sort of clarity which he believes is essential if Christian faith is to survive the so-called acids of modernity. Those who agree with that general principle, but who, like myself, might argue with how Bishop Spong wants to restate traditional belief, should do so while entering a number of caveats, two of which can be expressed in the words of former teachers to whom I owe a great deal.

Allan Galloway who was Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow, says in Faith in a Changing Culture that Christians owe a duty to those traditional ideas, beliefs or doctrines which they are inclined to discard, to examine them with the greatest seriousness and respect. The New Testament scholar Dennis Nineham used to quote often to those of us privileged to hear him lecture the saying of Leonard Hodgson, "What must the truth be now if people who thought as the biblical writers did, put it like that?", and pass on Hodgson's criticism of the assumption that 'someone, somewhere at some point in the past, really knew the truth and what we have to do is to find out what he thought and get pack to it".

These are the sort of question marks which it is right to put against the assumption that the theologian's task is to translate the ideas, formulae, doctrines or beliefs into contemporary language and thought-forms. But there is a deeper issue at stake when attempts are made to reformulate belief in the interests of clarity. In the radio conversation I had with Bishop Spong, I put to him Kierkegaard's view that "whenever we turn Christianity into direct communication, it is altogether destroyed. It becomes a superficial thing, capable of neither inflicting great wounds nor of healing them". The Bishop said that he "disagreed with that about one hundred and eighty degrees". Most of us are uncomfortable with ambiguity and regard paradoxes as always to be reconciled and contradictions as always to be resolved. However if Jesus of Nazareth was himself ambiguous (both in his person and in the stories he told and the teaching he gave) then the attempt to find clarity in Jesus (as distinct from using words about him precisely) will result in falsification. I have never forgotten a quotation from a review of the New English Bible. I can no longer remember the book where the review was quoted, but at the time of reading it I noted that the reviewer had referred to the claim of the New English Bible to use language which was "natural, clear, simple and unambiguous". The reviewer simply pointed out that "religion is not about things that are natural, clear, simple and unambiguous".
At the risk of being accused of quoting Jesus at his most unambiguous, "Amen to that"!

Those of us who embraced the conviction of the nineteen sixties, expressed most clearly in the newspaper headline "Our Image of God must Go" over an excerpt from John Robinson's Honest to God need quietly to ponder the fact that in the past forty years Christianity has been expressed with more clarity than ever before, and the results of this have been more widely disseminated in the print and broadcast media than could ever have been envisaged, and the churches today are noticeably more empty than they were before. He who has ears to hear…….