The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice

The Reading Church

Scriptural Authority in Practice

a lecture given at St Mary Islington, 27 April 2009, at the launch of his book ‘A Conversation Waiting to Begin: the Churches and the Gay Controversy’ (SCM Press, 2009)

an extract was copublished in the Church Times, 1 May 2009

by The Revd Professor Oliver O’Donovan FBA

The authority of Scripture is emerging once again as a topic for theological reflection after a long eclipse. From a variety of recent literature I may mention the valuable little essay by Professor John Webster, Holy Scripture, as well as the more complex study by the young American theologian, Telford Work, Living and Active. [1] This follows a century or more during which theological discussion of the bible was led by a self-consciously scientific-historical and literary-critical line of questioning which deliberately abstracted from normative considerations. That tradition left us a handful of hugely important discoveries, a fair collection of helpful insights and a huge mountain of over-confident speculative rubble. But it also taught some indispensible reading disciplines, for it encouraged an attention to the text as close, perhaps, as at any time of Christian history. In reaction to that school of scholarly enquiry there arose a doctrinal and apologetic way of talking about Scripture, one driven by the pastoral need to secure the church’s respect for it as the revelation of the mind and purposes of God. Attributes of divine perfection were ascribed to Scripture, the negative epithets, “infallible”, “inerrant” etc., playing the same role as negative epithets do in the doctrine of God. The problem was not that these epithets could not be persuasively argued for on their own terms, but that they had no more to say about the authority of Scripture than did the scholarly tradition they challenged. They offered an icon of revelation for us to wonder at and worship, but no sense of how it could and must direct and shape the lives we have to lead. “Authority” is a term of practical reason, and it needs to be discussed within a context of practical reason.

Theology is no longer stuck in those opposed positions. Let me point to one small but interesting straw in the wind, blowing from a direction where the most old-fashioned views on Scripture are commonly supposed to prevail. The “Jerusalem Declaration” issued last June by the GAFCON conference included the following brief clause: We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading. [2] I have not seen any public remark on these words; yet I should have thought they merited serious interest. To anyone not tone-deaf theologically it must be clear that the key, even the tune, has changed. Where have the negative epithets gone to? In their place GAFCON has combined a formula of Reformation origins that speaks of the function of the Bible in salvation with a new statement about the practical requirements Scripture lays upon the life of the church. The categories in which this second clause is phrased betray a debt to the so-called Yale-School of the seventies, a title usually invoked for the trio, Hans Frei, George Lindbeck and Brevard Childs, a diverse trio which has left, in fact, anything but a school. What we have from them is a series of discussions that raise from different angles the question of the normativity of text within community.

The no-doubt banal observations I want to make today take up this question from a particular angle. The five verbs of the Jerusalem Statement, “translated”, “read”, “preached”, “taught” and “obeyed”, no less than the famous five verbs used about Scripture by Thomas Cranmer in his Collect for Advent II, “hear”, “read”, “mark”, “learn”, “inwardly digest”, which, no doubt, they self-consciously complement, circle around the single verb, “read”. Where Cranmer follows a line of thought back from the act of reading to the inner life of the individual reader, the Jerusalem Statement follows a line forward from the act of reading into the liturgical, teaching and moral discipline of the church. I would like to reflect on reading in a way that ties these two complemetary lines of thought together: a church which is shaped in any measure by the authority of Scripture will be a reading church.

At a certain juncture in Israel’s history –perhaps in the so-called “Deuteronomistic period”, beginning in the late seventh century BC - Israel’s scribes and prophets were swept off their feet by the importance of reading. The opening verses of the first Psalm bear witness to the discovery: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. The twice-daily recitation of the legal text will shape the career of one who is to be successful in life. A legal text, because for Israel, with its conscious identity as the community of the divine covenant, the legal text was the paradigm of all texts, and legal literacy the paradigm of all literacy. Whereas elsewhere in the Mediterranean world this period saw both lawmaking (it is the age of Dracon, Solon, Lycurgus and Cleisthenes in Greece) and new literature, in Israel the two innovations are remarkably combined. It was the declared ambition of the editors of the Deuteronomic code that each Israelite home would have its lawtexts inscribed on the doorpost, each Israelite would carry a text around on the hand and the forehead and would learn to recite and rehearse it, so becoming a living expression of the law, circumcised in the heart, not dependent, as they ironically comment, on legal counsel that must be sought either from the heaven or from beyond the sea. The word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart. Delicately the Psalmist contrasts the independence of mind enjoyed by the reader with the subjection to social influence of those whose culture is formed laterally, by those living around them. These walk in the counsel of the wicked; they stand in the way of sinners; they sit in the seat of scoffers. Taking practical advice from those who know their way around, observing current practice carefully and repeating commonplace judgments, they pass effortlessly from a flurry of occupation (walk) to a condition of static complacency (sit). The reader, on the other hand, from rooted stillness grows like a fruiting tree, motionless attention to the text yielding energy and life for others to benefit from.

In order to think the thoughts of another person, to grasp the world as another grasps it, all one has to do is to listen to the spoken word. Speech is potent for good or ill, and therefore Christ says, Take care how you hear! Reading is a kind of hearing, yet it does not hear voices around us or speak directly to us. The voice the reader hears is from another place and time. As we read the historical and geographical dimensions of the world are opened up to us. There are, of course, texts so nearly and newly produced that the reader treads, as it were, on the writer’s heels: the e-mail darting to and fro, the hastily produced news report, ephemeral writing of every kind which reproduces and concentrates the riot of voices ringing in our ears already. We may reasonably doubt the value of such immediate texts as this, and join Plato in complaining that writing is inferior to speaking, since it cannot answer our intelligent questions but only repeat sulkily what it said before. The real value of text lies in its power to set us at a distance from the hubbub and to open up wider prospects for the intelligence. It is this that we call “serious reading”. Reading is serious to the extent that it exploits the power of text to span history. Much hermeneutic theory has taken immediate communication as the paradigm for all communication, and so assumed that difficulties in reading increase with distance of time and circumstance. In my view, the opposite is the case. New literature is more elusive. Not yet detached from ephemeral communications, the importance it may have for future generations is not at once apparent. Literature is quite different from music in this respect, which, as a performing art, always depends in part on immediate effect for its communicative power. With literature communication is constituted essentially by distance, whether historical, cultural or simply philosophic. The poetry of Ossian, supposedly a traditional Highland bard, was widely admired by the eighteenth century reading public on its first publication in English, but it lost all interest when it became established that the “translator” had, in fact, composed it. One might have thought the aesthetic values of the text would be unaffected by this knowledge, but no: they were not separable from the mediation of cultural distance, and when that was proved fraudulent, the aesthetic values vanished into the air.

The art of writing, Leo Strauss insisted, is an art of concealment, not of making plain. It aims at postponing the encounter with some truth. Perhaps he had in mind the prophets of Israel who, like Isaiah of Jerusalem, committed their oracles to writing to be sealed and kept by their disciples, a privileged communication with posterity awaiting their time. Jeremiah, in compiling his collected works, meant them not for Jehoiakim, who tore them up and burned them, but for those who would read them seventy years on, when God’s purposes were ripe for accomplishment. What was written in former times was written for our instruction, wrote Saint Paul, and what was true of prophecy in particular is true more generally of all texts. The writer wraps his truth in bulrushes and pitch and sets it afloat on the river of history; the reader, like Pharaoh’s daughter, picks it from the reeds and hears its cry. If we will not read seriously, we shall miss the instruction of former times, prisoned in the villagy parochialism of our little moment in civilisation. The text has its purpose beyond its own age and circumstance, and no text can be interpreted merely by careful evocation of the moment in which it arose. Interpreters who reduce the meaning of written words to a note about their provenance, merely misunderstand them. But neither is the text interpreted by what our age makes of it. The fact that the reader stands alone before the text and its claim does not make the reader sovereign, licensing any imposition on the text that fancy or the need of the moment may dictate.

Writer and reader pursue their complementary arts in solitude – but in solitude not for its own sake, but for the sake of an encounter of minds. Each undertakes his part in faith, believing in a gracious providence that fore-ordains readers for long-dead writers, and blesses readers with instruction from across the years which may be understood. Each reaches out longingly towards the other, for this encounter is a good for both parties. What was written in former times was written for our instruction, that by patience and the comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope. The patience that endures the span of history, the comfort that belongs to the community of thought, yield hope for the coherence of time and for the fructifying of God’s long purposes. We do not commit our moral destinies to the reading of any text, unless we hear in it the rumour of a promise, a promise lurking in the past and waiting to be made good for us, “upon whom”, as Saint Paul remarks in another place, “the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). These ages are ages of waiting that the text has undergone.

But this encounter is no negotiation between equals. Neither writer nor reader can ignore its strictly non-reciprocal character. To the writer the reader is, and must remain, an unknown and indeterminate quantity. No writer can be spared the risk that there may be no reader, after all, or no faithful reader, at least, who will read with understanding. Thoughts, words and intentions so painfully committed to paper or papyrus or electronic disk may yet be blown away in the dust of textuality. To the reader, on the other hand, the writer is always a prior and unnegotiable quantity. No reader can refuse the position downstream of those thoughts, words and intentions. Free movement of thought, creative improvisation, demurral, disagreement or downright disapproval must all be set aside. What has become fashionable to call a “strategy” of “reading against the grain” is simply a battle to suppress the text. Once undertaken, such a battle will, in the immediate instance, be won, since the text lacks resources to resist the violence offered it; but the victory is at the cost of the reader’s being no reader, after all, merely a learned illiterate. More temptingly, perhaps, the reader may feel invited to improve the text, to overlay it with well-disposed reflections, or to cover up for its naiveté or deficiencies. An interpreter may sometimes do such things, but they are hazardous, putting the successful meeting with the author at risk; whether they can be done at all will depend on whether the interpreter has first read widely and deeply. For the text is more than its surface, more than the tensions and incongruities that any casual reader can pick up at a hasty glance and which may play deep roles in the text’s own structure and rhetoric. Acts of reading that refuse the text patience invariably miscarry.

What we have said so far has been about reading and texts as such. We can see that a certain claim for authority is already implied. We do nothing to disturb the logic of the reader’s relation to a text when we raise the question of the text’s authority, for reading and authority are mutually implicated from the beginning. The authority is not unlimited, to be sure, and leads on, as all right authority does, from command to authorisation, from narrowing the scope of our freedom to enlarging it. Having submitted for the duration, the reader has to take up the task the text has presented with the strength the text has offered. The moment of passivity turns to activity; the receptive mind becomes critical; it judges what it has been given, and how much it can be of help. But criteria for this judgment do not arise unbidden from within the reader’s own mind; they are formed by other reading of other texts. Each text is subject to the judgement of its peers. And in reaching that considerate judgment the reader becomes aware of an implicit hierarchy of texts, some texts offering resources of understanding to shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of others. Behind the book are the books.

And behind the books? Here we are brought face to face with the logic of a canonical text, and with the canonical text a kind of reading that corresponds to it, not wholly different in kind from that which we apply to other texts, but a heightened, focussed form of reading. It is a reading in faith - not as opposed to reason, but as a founding moment of reason’s exercise, the acknowledgment that sets reason free to interpret and criticise all else - , and it is a reading in love. As faith focusses upon the unique centre of the text itself, love reaches out to the perimeter that the text illumines. Saint Augustine was not wrong to think that at the centre of the centre, at the core of the core-text, lay the twofold law of love, from which point all roads lay open. “Here is our physics... our ethics... our logic!” he exclaimed.[3] Here, too, we can add, our history, social theory, our access to reading the world the way it is. Is not the whole enterprise of serious reading, in fact, a search for such a “first text”, a text to illuminate all texts? Does it not have in view a central, normative text that sheds light not only on itself and its reader but on all texts, and on the enterprise of textual communication as a whole, revealing its purpose and making the illegible legible? In the dark ages the study of the Scriptures in the monasteries encouraged the transmission of classical literature.

We need not labour the point that what sets the canonical text apart from other texts is not that it is the “best”, according to some qualitative, perhaps aesthetic, perhaps philosophical measure. It is true that the Bible contains some astonishing pieces of literature. We may gladly say of Psalm 19, as C.S.Lewis did, that it is “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.” [4] The aesthetic appreciation of the Bible should not be scorned, if only because without a sense of a text’s literary art and aesthetic values we shall not read it with full intelligence. However, aesthetic values will not point us to the authority of the canonical text, for they commend the biblical writings by placing them in comparison with other texts of the same general kind, and to speak of authority is to look beyond what is captured generically. The term “canonical” means quite simply an unmeasured measure. And properly applied to the Bible, it is attached not to individual compositions but to the corpus of writing as a whole, which forms the measure (or “canon”) by which we judge the claims of any literary or non-literary witness to disclose and celebrate the acts of God.

For Christian thought the idea of a canonical text has depended for its intelligibility upon that of a central, normative strand in history. The privileged book witnesses to privileged events. The end of the ages is not only the fulfilment of the promise of the text, but the Christ-moment which fulfils the promise of history, the moment at which history’s direction is made clear, the lurking promise of past events breaks surface in what God has done on earth through his Son. Yet we should not exaggerate a contrast often made at this point between the ancient Jewish understanding of Scripture and the Christian one. If it is true that for the ancient Jews the paradigm text was a legal text, for Christians a Gospel narrative, we must remember that the Deuteronomistic age was not only an age of law but of prophecy, and that the prophets as well as the lawyers committed themselves to writing. Furthermore, the fulfilment of history in Christ of which the Gospels speak is precisely the fulfilment of the law. One strength of Dr. Work’s book is the challenge it mounts to an over-sharp division between speaking of the Incarnate Word in Christ and the apostolic word in Scripture. The authority of Scripture rests on the words of Christ, he reminds us; but then, again, the words of Christ are already interpretations of Holy Scripture. The Incarnate Son came to teach the written law, of which not one jot or tittle shall pass away till all is fulfilled. We must speak, therefore, of God’s self-emptying into Scripture no less than of his self-emptying into humanity. It would be the worst mistake to imagine the textual form of Scripture as a kind of straitjacket imposed upon the Incarnation.

I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. In that pregnant saying law and saving-history are mutually co-involved. We must think it through from both sides:- On the one hand saving history is the history of the law-text, the history of God’s manifest will which comes to full expression in the raising from the dead of its supreme teacher and exemplar. That is, if I understand him, where Dr. Work places his emphasis. On the other hand the law contains within itself the inner logic of the history of salvation, the perfection and full realisation of mankind. It contains within itself anticipations of its evolution and transformation from old to new, from Mosaic to evangelical in the glory of the risen man. That is the emphasis I find especially in the 17^th century lawyer-theologian, Hugo Grotius, one of those figures of intellectual history who have suffered the tragedy of being persistently mis-read. [5] In the light of the history of the law-text all other reading becomes possible: the reader later in history can encounter the writer earlier in history with the comprehension of a good common to both, since the good itself is present in its history through the canonical text. Reading is a Christological business, a faith that comes by hearing the word of Christ.

All authority arises from mediation of reality. The free imagination and ranging purposes of the human mind are brought to heel by an interruption of something that simply and unnegotiably is the case. And the authority of Scripture is the moment at which the attested reality of God’s acts disturb the ideal constructions and zealous projections of human piety. Those who are anxious about the church’s weakening attachment to Scripture do not anticipate a loss of piety, but a rank growth of it; they fear the promiscuous multiplication of religious images in which history and fantasy are blended in equal measure, in which Star-Trek and Jesus are equally apt for our devotion. Attending the Eucharist as a visitor at a strange church on Palm Sunday, I was surprised to find the reading of the Gospel dispensed with altogether, and in its place a devotion in which members of the congregation stood up one by one and imagined the biographies and experiences of various objects that figure in the passion story: the tree from which the wood of the cross was made, the nails used to fasten the victim to the cross, etc. The fact that this exercise was embarrassingly insipid is, of course, neither here nor there; religious imagination has had more than its fair share of insipidity in the past, and recovered. The important point was why the Scriptural narrative was displaced from its customary place of honour in Eucharistic worship: it was to free up the religious imagination, to ensure space for the mind to wander freely through the gallery of images without being inconveniently summoned back to what has actually been told us of those events.

The practices that acknowledge the authority of Scripture in the church arm it against the greatest danger of a culture that declares itself “post-modern”, the loss of a sense of difference between image and reality. Let us follow the lead given us, then, by the demand that the Bible be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed - in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.

In a broad sense all those verbs describe the church’s reading: they unpack the successive moments of interpreting the canonical text. Preaching, teaching and obeying Scripture “in its plain and canonical sense” flow from a disciplined act of plain and simple reading – holding the book open and speaking aloud the words written there - which, because it treats the text as canonical, implies these further acts as a necessary implication. These acts do not add interpretation to reading, as though the plain and simple act was without presupposition and open to any line of reflection whatever. When we take up the task of reading, we confess that we have received this word, with all its remoteness and and all its nearness, with its immediate appeal and its strange distance; when we read it in public worship we confess that we have received it from a source we cannot ignore, from God, through the teaching of Jesus Christ and the testimony of his apostles, and that we cannot simply take it up and put it down, but read it as the church, depending on it for our identity. The other verbs, “teach”, “preach” and “obey” draw out the interpretation that public reading has already implied. Nevertheless, the listing of these moments is not merely pedantic or rhetorical, for the unfolding of reading through interpretation must happen in due order, under the command of the text and not in charge of it.

The condition, “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading”, must apply, then, as well to public and liturgical as to private reading. This contrast is not meant to put public and private reading into competition. It is simply that without a proper value assigned to the corporate exercise of public reading of Scripture, private reading must look like an eccentric hobby. No collective spiritual exercise, no sacrament, no act of praise or prayer is so primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture. It is the nuclear core. When Paul instructed his letters to be passed from church to church and read, it was the badge of the local church’s catholic identity. This is not to devalue preaching, praise, prayer, let alone sacramental act; these all find their authorisation in reading. As we know from St Thomas Aquinas, the act of breaking bread and sharing wine is not a eucharist unless the narrative of the institution at the Last Supper is read.

Here we are on classic Anglican ground. Fifty years ago Stephen Neill, in identifying the elements that characterised Anglican Christianity, named as the first of these “the biblical quality by which the whole warp and woof of Anglican life is held together...The Anglican Churches read more of the Bible to the faithful than any other group of Churches. The Bible is put into the hands of the layman; he is encouraged to read it, to ponder it, to fashion his life according to it.” [6] That these words would be wholly impossible to write today ought to sober us. For Thomas Cranmer, at any rate, the integrity of public reading bulked large among the original grounds for the Reformation. His famous Preface to the 1549 Prayer Book concentrates more or less exclusively on the need for a new lectionary, complaining that “commonly when any boke of the Bible was begon, before three or foure Chapiters were read out, all the rest were unread” and insisting that “the readyng of holy scripture is so seet furthe, that all thynges shall bee doen in ordre, without breakying one piece therof from another.” [7] A lectionary needs to give a good impression over a period of time of the whole contents of Scripture, Old and New Testaments, and the relation of its different parts. It must do justice to the various kinds of writing in Holy Scripture - law texts, love poetry, political prophecy, narrative, vision etc., and to the various ages from which the different books sprang. It must be responsive both to linear and historical continuities, respecting the natural divisions of the text, and not trying to manipulate or evade its claims by selective omission, arbitrary beginnings and endings, concentration on safe themes at the expense of challenging ones. To build a pastorally effective lectionary for congregations with more varied and haphazard worshipping habits is a difficult task, and I should have thought it deserved more of our common attention than it has in fact received.

There is another requisite for the public reading of Scripture beside the lectionary, seemingly even less attended to, and that is a public reader. A task once confined to the clergy has now largely been made over to lay members of the congregation, but far from dignifying lay ministry, this has, on the whole, merely marginalised a task on which a great deal in the act of worship depends. I confess that I know of no church that trains its readers; its reading readers, that is, for when we call people “readers” and say we train them, we have something different in mind, which is itself eloquent! When I hear a lesson read with careful thought, with pace, articulation, pause and pitch all placed at the service of the sense of the passage, I make a point of thanking the reader, since the effort made will not have been asked for and probably not appreciated. Yet many a church may stay alive by the ministry of its readers which would otherwise die by the ministry of its preachers.

We should not overlook in passing the concern of the Jerusalem Statement for translation, presupposed already in any act of public reading among those who do not speak Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic. No doubt the drafters’ concern was primarily with first-time translation into minority languages, a cause now less daunting, though not less urgent, as a result of the admirable labours of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. But we should take stock, too, of the situation with English translations. Since the Revised Version of 1881 an astonishing amount of effort has been lavished upon the work of English translation, and in the course of time the philosophy of translation has modified, steadily widening its view of what is involved in accommodating an ancient text to a modern language. Traduttore traditore, as the Italian proverb goes. The current generation of translations, guided by moralistic ideals, has surely crossed the line at which interpretation becomes domestication. The words I have quoted from the first Psalm, for example: Blessed is the man who has not walked... , are usually presented today in the form, Blessed are they who..., so ensuring that we miss the Psalmist’s suggestion that the vocation of the reader is necessarily a solitary one.

Especially through the ministries of preaching (in the liturgical context) and teaching (outside it) the church ensures an encounter with the text respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading. What claims, then, do other readers, and especially those of the past, make upon us? At this point we often meet a strange and slightly mystical claim, that the text has its own ongoing life in the life of its readers, so that we engage not simply with what the text was, but with what it has become. With the mighty rushing of a Hegelian Geist we may even think we hear the Holy Spirit speaking in a multitude of wrong interpretations. That is certainly a step too far. In extending the authority of the text to cloak the vagaries of its readers, it dissolves the text’s critical authority altogether. We cannot think of colonising the text, like an under-populated continent, of occupying it so thoroughly with the culture of our own civilisation that it becomes precisely what we want it to be. It must always be possible to challenge, out of the text itself, even the most historic and consensual readings if they are downright wrong. Medieval artists, reading that the disciple whom Jesus loved lay on his breast in the Upper Room, themselves being used to sit at table as we do, portrayed John alone among the twelve reclining, sometimes even sleeping, in fulfilment of the words of the corrupt Latin text of Psalm 4: In the selfsame I will sleep in peace and take my rest, thus symbolising the repose of love in the eternal beloved. We may find this charming, even edifying. But in no case is it fit to be mentioned in one breath as the authority of Scripture. That was the truth of the Reformation emphasis: the Bible is not the creation of the church’s reading but its judge, capable of calling to account any and every way in which it is read.

That said, the reading of Scripture is a collective enterprise, a task of the whole communion of saints, in which every generation participates. Together with the Biblical authors we may read their past readers, and if we take the canonical text seriously as the fulfilling of the law, we shall not imagine that good reading could be set in partisan opposition to them. All serious reading of the canonical text has in view the catholic horizon. It is not because the church of the past bequeathed us a different text from that which it inherited, but because it shares a text with us, that we can read in hopeful anticipation that the insights of one generation and another will complement each other. Good interpretation catches the echo of the text as it bounces off different surfaces. So the readings of the past are a proper test of our readings, challenging us to demonstrate our care, good faith and self-abnegating attention. And that, too, the Reformers knew very well.