3. The Word in the World
I have defined as the purpose of these chapters the exploration of what would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and our culture. I have tried to sketch a profile of one of these two parties, our culture. It is now necessary to focus attention on the other party, the gospel.
If one begins with the example of cross-cultural mission, one sees a group of people called missionaries who already organize their corporate life around a story that is told in a book and is continually reenacted by word and sacramental action in their liturgy. The encounter between the gospel and the strange culture takes place in a whole complex of contacts between the community organized in this way and the people to whom they come. At an early stage they will begin to translate the book into the language of the people and commend it to them as the word of God calling for their response.
For our modern Western society, both the society and the book are already extremely familiar. They are not perceived as addressing any fresh challenge to our accepted world-view. Critical scholarship, using the tools developed in the past two hundred years, has brought the Bible into the brilliant light of the modern scientific world-view. The story it tells is now placed within the general history of the ancient world and evaluated on the basis of the same criteria that the modern historian uses in his work on any other ancient document. Under this light, the Bible can have no privileged status. It is part of the whole corpus of ancient literature. The events it records are to be understood by placing them within the unbroken network of cause and effect that links all history together. The ideas it expresses, whether in myth, saga, or legend, are to be understood by relating them to the similar beliefs of other ancient peoples. And the religious experience to which it bears witness is to be understood as part of the continuous religious experience of the human race as a whole.
And if the sacred book has been thus desacralized and placed firmly within the world of objective facts that the scientist studies and classifies, so also the sacred society, the church, is desacralized. The more recent techniques of the anthropologist and sociologist have in this century been applied to the church in all its manifestations. The sociologist sees the changing structures of ecclesiastical bodies not as the divinely willed order that is affirmed by the theologian, but as examples of the normal operation of cause and effect as it is to be observed in other human societies.
And who can deny that this kind of scientific study has been enormously illuminating with regard to both the Bible and the church. The “light” in the Enlightenment was real light. We are able in some respects to understand the Bible better than we did before, and we are able in some ways to understand what actually goes on in the life of the church better than we did before the Enlightenment. Whatever else may be possible, it is not possible to put ourselves back before that experience. It is not possible to unknow what we have learned. And it is not possible to prevent that knowledge from becoming the possession of all people of all cultures who desire it.
But how, as men and women who do possess this knowledge, how can we speak of a genuine encounter between the gospel and our culture? What are we speaking of when we speak of the gospel? However we define it—as verbal message, as events in history, as faith embodied in praxis, as inward religious experience, or whatever—we are talking about something that is, from the point of view of our culture, already accounted for. It is part of our culture. We know where to place it. It is firmly held within the web of facts, events, and experiences that are all, at least in principle, patient of explanation in terms of the invariable operation of cause and effect. It is all capable of being objectified and studied with the appropriate techniques of modern science in its broadest reach. It is all part of the total world of phenomena that is the business of science to understand and so to master. How can it challenge us? We may use one of Isaiah’s parables (in a sense opposite to his) and ask: “Shall the axe vaunt itself against him who hews with it?” (Isa. 10:15). The Bible and the church are part of our culture. How shall a part of our culture make claims against our culture? Is there any meaning in speaking of an encounter?
It is well known that the first and perhaps still one of the most massive attempts to affirm the gospel in the context of post-Enlightenment culture was that of Schleiermacher, and it can truly be said that all subsequent theological work in the Protestant West has been done under his shadow. In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher defined the nature of theology in terms that place it firmly on one side of the divide between the world of public facts and the world of private values. “Christian doctrines,” he writes, “are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.” They are the transcripts of “the religious self-consciousness.” Insofar as Christian theology incorporates statements about the attributes and acts of God or about the constitution of the world, it must be understood that these are not properly part of dogmatics, that they belong respectively to metaphysics and natural science; they “belong to the objective consciousness and its conditions, and are independent of the inner experience and the facts of the higher self-consciousness.” “We must declare the description of human states of mind to be the fundamental dogmatic form; while propositions about the second and third forms (i.e., about the attributes and acts of God, or the constitution of the world) are permissible only insofar as they can be developed out of propositions of the first form.” That matter becomes very clear in Schleiermacher’s brief treatment of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. He consistently speaks of this as a fact but absolutely denies that it has any bearing on faith in Jesus as Redeemer, which is the heart of the self-consciousness of the Christian believer.
It is clear from statements such as these that Schleiermacher was fencing off an area of inward religious experience that would be protected from the otherwise total dominance of an “objectifying consciousness” (to use his phrase), from a world of hard fact ultimately explicable on the terms provided by Newtonian science. It is also clear why subsequent Protestant theology has always seemed to tremble on the edge of falling into pure anthropology, so that theological statements were thought to have no referent except the religious consciousness itself. And it is clear that Feuerbach was only drawing the obvious conclusion when he said that the very idea of God is a brockenspecter, the projection of an image of the human ego onto the cosmos. Such an understanding of theology could perhaps, at least until the arrival of modern psychology, provide a hiding place for religion from the searing light of science, a space within the modern world for the continued cultivation of an archaic form of self-consciousness. But it could not challenge the ideology that ruled the public world.
We are familiar with the kind of liberal theology so characteristic of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in which the boundaries of what is possible to believe were firmly fixed by the axioms of the Enlightenment, in which it was taken for granted that the modern scientific world-view provides the only reliable account of how things really are, and that the Bible has to be understood only in terms of that account. This required a reconstruction of biblical history on the lines of modern historical science. It required the elimination of miracle. It dictated that while the crucifixion of Jesus could be accepted as a fact of real history, his resurrection was a psychological experience of the disciples. Insofar as the biblical scholar recognized religion as an authentic fact of human experience, he could find in the Bible testimony to religion, perhaps to the supreme and definitive experience of the religious spirit. But intellectual integrity required that the Bible must be understood in terms of what it is possible for a modern person to believe.
Many different strategies have been developed in the attempt to retain an authentic place for the Bible in the post-Enlightenment world. One was to continue to assert as a matter of faith that the Bible is a factually accurate account of creation and history and that where the account is contradicted by modern science, modern science is wrong. About this strategy we may say three things: 1) It is difficult to maintain without a kind of split personality if one is going to live an active life in the modern world. As Langdon Gilkey has remarked, even the most devout fundamentalist in Texas, when prospecting for oil, consults the geologists and not the biblical scholars. 2) Those who hold this position are themselves part of the modern world; consequently, when they say that the Bible is factually accurate, they are working with a whole context of meaning, within a concept of factuality that is foreign to the Bible. Fundamentalism in this form is a post-Enlightenment product. 3) Perhaps the ablest theologian among those who have espoused this position is Benjamin Warfield, and it has been pointed out that in the last analysis Warfield’s position rests upon a reference to experience, to the church’s perennial experience of the Bible as something that has evoked and continues to evoke awe, reverence, a sense of the holy. In fact, Warfield finds the ultimate authority of Scripture at a point where he is speaking a language that Schleiermacher would have acknowledged as authentic.
Much more common than this has been the strategy that seeks to conserve the religious meaning of the Bible without any attempt to defend its factual accuracy in matters of natural science or history. This recognizes that the biblical writers were people of their own times, ignorant of many things we know, and limited by the intellectual tools available to them. Consequently, their accounts of material phenomena and historical events have to be examined with the critical tools available to us. But this can lead to a situation in which the scholar simply subjects the biblical text to the same kind of critical analysis that he would use in the case of any other text of similar antiquity. The scholar is the active subject; the Bible is passive object. Its material is to be interpreted in terms of the scholar’s total understanding of what is the case, of how things have happened and can happen. The scholar works within the accepted view of how things are, which takes it for granted that all causes are adequate to the effects they produce, and that events are to be understood by relating them to antecedent causes. The scholar examines the text but is not, in any profound sense, examined by it. If he is a believer, he will draw from the text illumination for his own faith. But his faith does not rest on the authority of the text. It is rather that he perceives a congruence between the faith to which the text bears witness and his own.
But the scholar’s training in the skills of the modern critical historian warns him against a simple transference from the religious world of the Bible to his own. He is aware that that world was so different from his that he cannot simply reproduce the religious experiences of the biblical writer or the biblical character. Some scholars are so impressed by the gulf that separates the biblical writers from ourselves that they nearly deny any possibility of communication across it, since “we cannot understand the word ‘God’ in any of the ways in which Old Testament Jews understood the name Yahweh or even in the ways in which New Testament writers understood the word ‘Theos.’ ” Such an extreme skepticism both denies the fundamental unity of human nature and also implicitly absolutizes a certain twentieth-century world-view. But it represents merely the extreme development of a way of treating the Bible that so fixes it like a fossil embodied in ancient strata that it cannot speak to us today except as exemplifying forms of the universal religious experience that can be paralleled in other parts of the human story.
Another way of seeking to relate the Bible to the post-Enlightenment world has been to distill from it concepts or principles that could be applied to modern life. During the period of what was called biblical theology, much was made of distinctively biblical concepts that enable one to deal with reality in distinctive ways. In an earlier period the attempt was made to draw principles for conduct from the Bible. William Temple’s influential writings on church and society were a good illustration. Once again, it is not the text of the Bible itself that functions as authority but the concepts or principles that can be extracted from it. And it is not clear that these derive their authority from the fact that they are extracted from the Bible. Or to put it more exactly, it is not clear what their provenance in the Bible gives them or why it should give them any authority other than the authority that their intrinsic rightness may give them to the reason and conscience of modern men and women.
Another strategy has been to concentrate on the character of the Bible as history—the history of the acts of God. God’s revelation of himself, in this view, is not in the text itself but in the events reported and interpreted in the text. The Bible is the record of the acts of God, not a compendium of teaching about God; the story behind the text rather than the text itself is the locus of God’s revelation. It is for the modern believer to understand the story of these acts, the salvation history, in contemporary terms. This view thus parts company with the two previous ones in accepting the reality of divine action in history. But it is not always clear whether the series of divine acts that constitute the salvation history is to be understood as forming the central thread of universal history, thus replacing the world history taught in secular academies, or whether it is understood as the clue to the specifically religious experience that is available as a personal option within the public history. Salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) is sometimes portrayed as something quite distinct from the ordinary history depicted by secular historians and immune from their critical investigations. In this case it is clear that we are still caught in the familiar dichotomy. Heilsgeschichte belongs to the private world; the public world has a different kind of history.
Very notable among contemporary appeals to Scripture is the work of Rudolf Bultmann and the many biblical scholars who have been influenced by him. Here one can say that the relationship between the scholar and the text is emphatically not that of subject and object. Here the text is indeed allowed to address the reader, but it can do so only in the pure immediacy of subject to subject. The encounter has nothing to do with a world of objective facts. Faith is not faith if it seeks security in what are called facts—whether metaphysical or historical. To seek this kind of security is to seek a sort of justification by works and is the antithesis of genuine faith. “Faith,” says Bultmann, “must not aspire to an objective basis in dogma or in history on pain of losing its character as faith.” Consequently, Bultmann and his followers can cheerfully accept the dissolution of most of the historical material in the gospels in the powerful acids of scientific criticism and yet find in the New Testament that which summons them to faith understood as authentic existence. It is very obvious that we are here firmly within the post-Kantian world, in which fact and value have no intrinsic relationship to each other. Bultmann seems to accept uncritically the so-called scientific account of nature and history that claims to provide secure knowledge of objective facts apart from any call to faith on the part of the knowing subject. By contrast, the authentic existence that is the essence of faith belongs to a world for which neither science nor history in its secular sense can have anything to say. It belongs exclusively to the private world.
If we admit the dichotomy of fact and value, then it would seem that we are indeed bound to admit Bultmann’s claim that to rely on so-called objective facts of history or of science is in conflict with the evangelical call to be justified by faith alone. Bultmann and his successors do seek to enable the modern person belonging to a post-Enlightenment culture to hear himself or herself addressed by a call to faith from Scripture. They argue powerfully that, as practiced by them, the work of radical historical criticism of the Bible is implied by the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. But what has to be asked is whether this call of the gospel is addressed only to the individual in the privacy of his own soul or whether it does not also call into question the claim of the modern world that the scientific study of nature and history can provide a sort of knowledge that is secure, is not open to doubt, and does not depend on faith. Can room really be made for faith in the private world if it is banished from the public world as merely a poor substitute for secure knowledge? And, to turn the same argument the other way around, does not consistency require us even to eliminate the name of Jesus altogether from this account of authentic existence—except for illustrative purposes? If the objective facts of history form no part of the foundation for faith, why do we need to invoke that name? The Christ of faith could, it would seem, function very well on Bultmann’s terms without being confused by any sort of association with the so-called Jesus of history. And is “faith” the proper name for something that is merely a psychological condition and has no cognitive element—has no object about which ontological claims can be made?
The dichotomy between a world of so-called objective facts that can be “scientifically” known apart from any faith commitment on the part of the knower and a world of beliefs that are solely the personal responsibility of the believer is precisely what has to be questioned in the light of the gospel. This will be our concern in the next chapter. Here it must be said that if such a dichotomy were to be accepted, Bultmann and his followers would be correct in rejecting any foundation for faith in the so-called facts of history. But it should not be accepted.
All the strategies I have described in such cursory fashion have this in common: they operate within the cultural presuppositions of the modern scientific world-view. That is obvious. But is it not also inevitable? Is it possible to read Scripture in any other way than as the people we are? Can we set aside the axioms and assumptions we share with our contemporaries in all our daily business and conversations, which have shaped the whole of our education, which we accept not deliberately by choice but inevitably and apart from any decision to do so, simply because this is how things in fact are? Is this not how we are bound to see things if we are to sustain our integrity? The Bible is not an extraterritorial entity that has been dropped into our world from another, it is part of our world. Are we not therefore bound to interpret it by means of the only categories of thought we have? How, indeed, can it influence us at all, except as it speaks to us in our language as part of the real world we inhabit?
In asking these rhetorical questions, I am not forgetting all that has been written about the famous hermeneutical circle. No one comes to any text with a completely vacant mind. Everyone comes with a pre-understanding; without this no understanding is possible. But the reader must also, in a sense, place a temporary moratorium on his judgment, allow the text to speak in its own way, and accept the possibility that the pre-understanding will be changed into a new understanding. The path of the true hermeneutic thus runs between two dangers: one is emphasizing the strangeness, the otherness of the text so much that it remains to the end only an object of study that does not call into question the pre-understanding of the reader but leaves his mental world unchanged except for the addition of some new facts; the other danger is failing to recognize the otherness of the text so much that one simply absorbs it into the already existing pre-understanding of the reader. Plainly, these observations are applicable to the reading and understanding of Scripture. We come to it, inevitably, with the pre-understanding into which we have been nurtured by our culture. It cannot be otherwise. But we must ask whether the model of the hermeneutic circle is adequate to describe what is involved in the encounter between Scripture and our culture.
In asking this question, I have in mind the many passages of Scripture that emphasize the incomprehensibility of its message by the wisdom of this world, the radical discontinuity between all human wisdom, even the most profound, and the revelation with which Scripture is concerned. I have in mind the terrible words of Jesus in which he quotes from the sixth chapter of Isaiah to warn that, except to those to whom it is given, his teaching will create not understanding but blindness and hardness of heart (Mark 4:11–12). I have in mind the words of Paul to the effect that the preaching of the gospel, except to those who are called to be its witnesses, is either intolerable or incomprehensible (1 Cor. 1:25–26). Clearly, this kind of language implies a relationship between pre-understanding and understanding that is (to put it no more strongly) not adequately represented by the model of the hermeneutical circle. It implies a profound discontinuity—not just a circle but a chasm.
Of course, to speak of total discontinuity would be absurd. If the discontinuity were total, there could be no awareness of it on either side. There is an analogy in the field of natural science that is, I think, helpful. It is an analogy, no more. Since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we have been familiar with the idea of what he calls “paradigm shifts” in scientific work. I am aware that his thesis has been criticized, and I would certainly not want to imply that scientific theories are merely convenient ways of organizing data rather than ways of seeing what really is the case. Whatever valid criticisms may be made of Kuhn, however, he does demonstrate that shifts such as that from the physics of Newton to that of Einstein do not arise from any step-by-step reasoning from within the presuppositions of the earlier view but from a new vision that calls for a kind of conversion. My point here is simply this: while there is radical discontinuity in the sense that the new theory is not reached by any process of logical reasoning from the old, there is also a continuity in the sense that the old can be rationally understood from the point of view of the new. In Einstein’s physics, Newtonian laws are still valid for large bodies in slow motion. Newtonian physics is still valid for mechanics. Thus, to recognize a radical discontinuity between the old and the new is not to surrender to irrationality. Seen from one side there is only a chasm; seen from the other there is a bridge.
By analogy, one could suggest that the radical conversion the Bible speaks about does indeed imply a discontinuity that cannot be acknowledged in the model of the hermeneutical circle. And yet it does not imply a surrender to irrationality, since the new understanding of the converted person might make it possible (no more than this is claimed at the moment) to find a place for the truth that was embodied in the former vision and yet at the same time offer a wider and more inclusive rationality than the older one could. Saul the Pharisee can only see Jesus of Nazareth as a saboteur of the law. Paul the Christian can see the law as the paidagogos that brought him to Christ; and he can see Christ as the fulfillment of the law.
I shall return in a moment to the importance of the hermeneutical circle; but here I am only concerned to affirm that the model of the hermeneutical circle is not adequate to account for what is involved in the relationship between the gospel and this or any other culture. I suppose that the boldest and most brilliant essay in the communication of the gospel to a particular culture in all Christian history is the gospel according to John. Here the language and the thought-forms of that Hellenistic world are so employed that Gnostics in all ages have thought that the book was written especially for them. And yet nowhere in Scripture is the absolute contradiction between the word of God and human culture stated with more terrible clarity. The first twelve chapters trace with relentless and cumulative power the total inability of even the best and most godly to grasp what is being offered; and they end with the absolute rejection of Jesus as a blasphemous sinner and with the judgment of the disciples of Moses as children of the devil. And then, from Chapter 13 to 17 we find ourselves in an entirely different world, a world in which Jesus himself is the radiating center of light and love, and all circumstances and future history are illuminated and made meaningful by that light and love. The relationship between these two situations can in no way be described in terms of the hermeneutical circle. On the one side, Jesus is the one who subverts true religion and contradicts ordinary rationality; on the other, he is the center and the source of all truth. The boundary between the two worlds is defined in terms of death and rebirth. And those on this side of the boundary are not those who have been able to make a sort of gigantic hermeneutical leap but those who have been chosen and called—not of their own will—to be the witnesses of Jesus to the world.
When the matter is stated in this way, we who are part of contemporary Western culture are inclined simply to reject such a scenario as irrational. Indeed, we are bound to do so from within this culture. The Christian claim is that, though that other way of understanding the world can in no way be reached by any logical step from the axioms of this one, nevertheless that other way does offer a wider rationality that embraces and does not contradict the rationality of this. We have to test that claim in a later chapter. Here and now we have to look at what this claim involves for our understanding of the hermeneutical circle.
Contemporary exponents of the sociology of knowledge have made us familiar with the fact that our sense of what is real is, to a large extent, a function of the society in which we live. It is almost impossible for an individual to deny steadily the reality of things that society regards as real, or to affirm the reality of things that society regards as illusions. The plausibility structures that largely control our perception of what is the case are socially produced. This is true whether we are talking about tightly knit religious societies such as Islam or about our modern pluralistic societies that treat religious confraternities simply as manifestations of options taken by groups of individuals for the private sector of their lives. The modern scientific world-view functions as a plausibility structure in the same way as does Islam or Catholicism. This is not, of course, to say anything about the truth of the views embodied in these structures, but only about the way they function in limiting the freedom of the individual in deciding questions about truth.
The awe-inspiring achievements of modern science in the past 250 years have been based, we recall, on the methodological elimination of the idea of purpose from the study of phenomena. The model of explanation accepted by modern science is one that exhibits the cause-and-effect relationship between phenomena. Even at points where the model seems—at least for the time being—to falter, as in the case of quantum physics, no scientist will suggest that the particles in question act from conscious purpose or as the result of supernatural intervention. The success of this method has been so overwhelming that a failure to find an explanation within its terms is treated simply as a temporary setback and not as grounds for doubting the method. And it is surely inevitable that the Bible should be subjected to the same methods of study, methods assuming that its contents can be explained without reference to a divine purpose controlling events. To one whose mental world is wholly shaped by the modern scientific world-view, the statement “God acted at this and this point in the explanation of the story” simply does not “explain.” It does not belong to the world of real causes. He will be bound to attempt some kind of “translation.” He recognizes that the biblical writers shared with their contemporaries a world-view in which divine intervention was accepted as an explanation. He, however, lives in a different world. If the text is not to be treated as merely an archaeological specimen, an example of an interesting but now extinct form of human consciousness, it at least has to be translated in order to have any contemporary meaning within the world we inhabit. We are familiar with the various ways in which the translation is done.
But there is another possibility, one for which reasons can be given even within the terms of modern thought. The Bible is not a collection of documents recently dug up in the sands of Egypt. It is quite “unscientific” to treat it as if it were. The Bible comes into our hands as the book of a community, and neither the book nor the community are properly understood except in their reciprocal relationship with each other. Quite clearly, the community as it now exists is being continuously shaped by the attention it gives to the Bible. Equally clearly, the community’s reading of the Bible is shaped by a tradition that has been developed through the experience of previous generations of believers in seeking to understand and put into practice the meaning of the book. The “pre-understanding” with which the contemporary community comes to its reading of the Bible is shaped by the ways in which previous generations of Christians have come to understand it in the course of their discipleship. Every Christian reader comes to the Bible with the spectacles provided by the tradition that is alive in the community to which he or she belongs, and that tradition is being constantly modified as each new generation of believers endeavors to be faithful in understanding and living out Scripture. This is the hermeneutical circle operating within the believing community.
And precisely this gives us the clue to understanding the nature of the Bible itself. For it has become very clear that Scripture as we have it is the result of the operation of this same hermeneutical circle from the very beginning. Modern scholarship, using the tools of historical and literary criticism developed since the Enlightenment, has enabled us to see that the present text of Scripture as we have it is the result of just such a continuous reshaping of tradition in the light of new experience. Generation after generation, the story has been retold so as to bring out its relevance to the contemporary situation. Today, therefore, as the result of critical scholarship, we are able to read the text in a way that former generations could not. It is not a uniform corpus of “dead” facts and sayings from the past. It is part of a living process in which we share with all who have gone before us in the school of discipleship, and with all who are our contemporaries in the same school. We can ask such questions as: What actually happened? How did this writer understand it? How did the other writer reinterpret the tradition he received? From what source did this word, this idea, this image come? What did the earlier writer mean, and how does this differ from what the later writer understood? But we ask these questions from within our commitment to faith and discipleship, which has been shaped by the tradition in which we share as members of the community that acknowledges the book as authoritative. We are also continually retelling the story in its relevance to ever-new situations.
The asking and answering of all these questions can greatly enhance our understanding, provided it is within the context of the same ultimate faith that governs the life of the whole community, and of our contemporary struggle to understand and be faithful in our own time. The relationship between these two kinds of concern may perhaps be illustrated by the familiar example of the pianist. A great pianist must, at the proper time, concentrate all possible attention on the precise detail of finger movements. But if she attends to these alone while playing a sonata at a concert, the result will be disaster. While she plays, all her mind and soul must be wrapped up in the glory of the music, completely forgetting the finger work. And yet she will lose the glory of the music if she has not done the finger work. It is, of course, possible to study the movements of the pianist’s fingers simply as an example of the operation of mechanical, chemical, and electrical principles. A completely self-consistent account of these movements could be given by using these principles. It could be done by a person who is tone-deaf and for whom a Mozart sonata is merely a jumble of noises. But any explanation insisting that this was the only “scientific” way of understanding what is going on would be an odd kind of “science” indeed. It would surely be equally unscientific not to recognize that the reason our universities, even purely secular ones, continue to devote huge resources to the historical-critical study of Scripture—resources far out of proportion to those devoted to other ancient documents—is that these Scriptures have functioned and continue to function in this reciprocal relationship with living communities of faith. It is this relationship that is the clue to their meaning. And it is surely a very unscientific kind of science that supposes that the clue to their meaning is to be found by treating them as fragments from a past we can hardly reconstruct except by a great deal of guesswork. Rather, we must affirm, in the words of Stuhlmacher, that “the biblical texts can be fully interpreted only from a dialogical situation defined by the venture of Christian existence as it is lived in the Church.” To recognize this is to recognize also the validity of the “sociology of knowledge” approach used by Peter Berger in his apologetic. The Bible functions as authority only within a community that is committed to faith and obedience and is embodying that commitment in an active discipleship that embraces the whole of life, public and private. This is the plausibility structure within which the faith is nourished. Although it may be very shocking to a certain kind of post-Enlighten-ment Protestant conscience, it is not the Bible by itself but the church confessing the mystery of faith that is spoken of as the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15–16).
I have spoken of the hermeneutical circle that operates within the community of faith. Scripture and tradition, tradition and Scripture are in a constantly developing reciprocal relationship, and the development is not a merely cerebral process but is part of a total life of worship, of obedience, of side-taking discipleship in the ever-changing circumstances of new generations and new cultures. But I have asserted that it is not possible to use the model of the hermeneutical circle to account for what happens at the boundary between this community of faith and the world that lives without this faith. I have suggested that at this boundary one has to use other models—such as are suggested by the biblical image of death and birth. It is obvious that our modern Western world constitutes a plausibility structure within which the biblical account of things is simply unacceptable. It does not correspond to reality as we know it. It is therefore natural that the demand should be made that the language of the Bible should be translated into the terms of our culture so that it may correspond to reality as we know it. We have looked briefly at some of the proposals for doing this. In the next chapter I shall try to show that it is not irrational to propose that a wholly different plausibility structure is possible, that a paradigm shift is possible which—while not logically necessary—does not deny the reason that operates within the contemporary plausibility structure. At the end of this chapter, I wish merely to say something further about the relationship between Scripture and tradition and the sense in which, within the reciprocity of this relation, it is Scripture that always has the primacy.
Earlier in this chapter I have briefly referred to some of the ways in which the post-Enlightenment world has sought to identify the locus of divine revelation and therefore of authority in Scripture. There is the fundamentalist attempt to assert that Scripture is a body of factually inerrant statements about nature and history that must be maintained even when contradicted by modern science. There is the view that Scripture bears witness to authentic personal experience (an experience in whatever terms this may be understood) that is continuous with the total religious experience of the human race. There is the view that Scripture embodies concepts and principles that can be distilled from its material and can stand in their own right as having intrinsic authority. And finally, there is the view that locates the divine revelation in the history behind the story, in the events the biblical writer sought—no doubt with limited understanding—to record and interpret. This “salvation history” is to be distinguished from the history secular historians seek to reconstruct and is therefore immune from their critical assault.
In distinction from all this (and in line with what I have learned from Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and others), I would want to speak of the Bible as that body of literature which—primarily but not only in narrative form—renders accessible to us the character and actions and purposes of God. In Frei’s language, the biblical literature is “realistic narrative,” which he defines as that
in which character or individual persons in their internal depth or subjectivity, as well as in their capacity as doers and sufferers of actions and events, are firmly and significantly set in the context of the external environment, natural but more particularly social … that kind in which subject and social setting belong together, and character and external circumstances fitly render each other … Neither is a shadow of something more real or more significant.
In this view, the Bible, taken as a whole, fitly renders God, who is not merely the correlate or referent of universal natural religious experience but is the author and sustainer of all things. But this fitness can only be understood as we ourselves are engaged in the same struggle that we see in Scripture, the struggle to understand and deal with the events of our time in the faith that the God revealed in Scripture is in fact the agent whose purpose created and sustained all that is, and will bring it to its proper end. To use the current jargon, the understanding in question simply does not exist apart from praxis. And praxis means involvement in the public world as much as in the private, since the God who is “rendered” in the Bible is the God of nature and of history as he is of the human soul. The way in which we must read Scripture today is controlled by the fact that we are, from moment to moment in the complex events of our time, dealing with and being dealt with by the same living God who meets us in Scripture, seeking his will, offering our obedience, accepting the share he allots to us of suffering, and looking for the final victory of his cause.
When we speak in these terms, it is clear that we are not talking about a sphere of private religious experience distinct from our experience of life—secular life in this world. To discern God’s purpose and to be obedient to it among all the ambiguities and perplexities of life is always a struggle. We may often be wrong both in our understanding of what God is doing and in our attempted obedience, just as it is made clear in Scripture that the people whose stories it tells were often wrong, or only partially right, in their discernment of God’s purpose. At best, we can hope to choose the relatively better and to reject the relatively worse. We can never claim that either our understanding or our action is absolutely right. We have no way of proving that we are right. That kind of proof belongs only to the end. As part of the community that shares in the struggle, we open ourselves continually to Scripture, always in company with our fellow disciples of this and former ages and in the context of the struggle for obedience; and we constantly find in it fresh insights into the character and purpose of the one who is “rendered” for us in its pages. We read these pages, naturally, as part of our real history, secular history, the history of which we are a part. What other history is there? There are not different histories, but there are different ways of understanding history. We recognize this because another way of understanding history is being applied to contemporary events around us all the time. It is possible, and in our culture normal, to exclude the name of God altogether from our account of public affairs, and to construe history as a continuum of cause and effect, an arena where “historical forces” are at work and events take place in accordance with regularities that can be scientifically established, or at least an arena in which the only purposes at work are those of individual human beings.
But it is idle to suppose that any kind of peaceful coexistence is possible between these two ways of understanding history. It is clearly an illusion to imagine that there are two kinds of history—sacred and profane, salvation history and secular history. We who are at the moment making and suffering history know that there is only one history, but we know that it can be understood theistically or atheistically. It is true that a methodological atheism may be required in the course of historical study, just as a scientist may eliminate any concern with the music while he studies the movement of the pianist’s fingers. But those who belong to the community that is controlled by the rendering of God in Scripture will surely be precluded from a dichotomizing of their lives into a private sphere where God is acknowledged and a public sphere in which events are finally interpreted without reference to God. The long-running debate about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is simply one manifestation of the illusion that has haunted our culture ever since the Enlightenment. There is only one Jesus, and there is only one history. The question is whether the faith that finds its focus in Jesus is the faith with which we seek to understand the whole of history, or whether we limit this faith to a private world of religion and hand over the public history of the world to other principles of explanation.
The argument hitherto leads to this preliminary conclusion. In the missionary encounter between the gospel and our culture, the first party will be represented by a community for which the Bible is the determinant clue to the character and activity of the one whose purpose is the final meaning of history. The boundary between this community and the society for which the Bible is not determinative is marked by the paradigm shift that is traditionally called conversion. However this conversion may occur—and it can occur in many different ways—those who belong to this community inhabit a different plausibility structure from that of their contemporaries. Things that are myths or illusions for others are real for them. God’s power active in world history is not a mythical way of speaking for them, but an account of reality. But it is so only in the context of an active engagement with current events that corresponds to and continually renews this experience.
The difference between the two plausibility structures is seen most sharply at the point where we have to come to terms with the Christian tradition about the resurrection of Jesus. The community of faith makes the confession that God raised Jesus from the dead and that the tomb was empty thereafter. Within the plausibility structure of the “modern world,” this will become something like the following: “The disciples had a series of experiences that led them to the belief that, in some sense, Jesus was still alive and therefore to interpret the Cross as victory and not defeat.” This experience can be accepted as a “fact.” People do have such psychological experiences. If this is what is meant by the “Easter event,” then it qualifies for admission to the world of “fact.” The former statement (i.e., that the tomb was empty) can be accepted as a fact only if the whole plausibility structure of contemporary Western culture is called into question. To accept it as a fact means that history has a meaning that cannot be found from any study of the regularities and recurrences of the past. It means that the whole existing order of nature and history is confronted by a new reality that gives it a new meaning. It means a radical contradiction of this world as it is. But the affirmation that this is so can be made only by a community that is itself engaged in that contradiction, is actually pitting its life against “the ruler of this world,” and—in fellowship with Jesus—is bearing the cost in its own life. All understanding of past events is part of one’s understanding of the present and the future. All “facts” of history are remembered and recorded because they have been at some time significant for those engaged in the contemporary struggle of living. The way we understand the past is a function of our whole way of meeting the present and the future. The community of faith celebrates the resurrection of Jesus as the ground of assurance that the present and the future are not under the control of blind forces but are open to unlimited possibilities of new life. This is because the living God who was present in the crucified Jesus is now and always the sovereign Lord of history and therefore makes possible a continuing struggle against all that ignores or negates his purpose.
From the point of view of our contemporary culture, the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead is irrational. It cannot be incorporated into the existing plausibility structure. The widespread phenomenon of “religion,” with Christianity regarded as one of its many varieties, can indeed be accommodated without difficulty in our culture. But this claim cannot. It must be regarded as the esoteric belief of a community that is living in a world of make-believe rather than the world of facts. There is no way by which the truth of the claim can be demonstrated within the plausibility structure that shapes the modern mind. It is, of course, equally true that the contemporary dominance of this plausibility structure is no proof of its congruence with reality. But three positive things can be said very briefly by way of a conclusion to this chapter. First, from within the plausibility structure that is shaped by the Bible, it is perfectly possible to acknowledge and cherish the insights of our culture. There is an asymmetry in this relationship, as between the paradigms of science, but not a total discontinuity. From one side the other looks quite irrational, but from the other side there is a rationality that embraces both. This will be the theme of our next chapter.
Second, therefore, the conflict between the two views will not be settled on the basis of logical argument. The view will prevail that is seen to offer—both in theory and in practice—the widest rationality, the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of experience. This is as much a matter of faithful endeavor and costly obedience as of clarity and coherence of argument. It is at the heart of the biblical vision of the human situation that the believer is a witness who gives his testimony in a trial where it is contested. The verdict as to what stands and what falls will only be given at the end. To suppose that some kind of rationally conclusive “proof’ of one position or the other might be available now is to misunderstand the human situation.
And finally, it follows that the missionary encounter of the gospel with the modern world will, like every true missionary encounter, call for radical conversion. This will be not only a conversion of the will and of the feelings but a conversion of the mind—a “paradigm shift” that leads to a new vision of how things are and, not at once but gradually, to the development of a new plausibility structure in which the most real of all realities is the living God whose character is “rendered” for us in the pages of Scripture.