9 Christ, the Clue to History
A learned Hindu friend has several times complained to me that we Christians have misrepresented the Bible. He has said to me something like this: "As I read the Bible I find in it a quite unique interpretation of universal history and, therefore, a unique understanding of the human person as a responsible actor in history. You Christian missionaries have talked of the Bible as it were simply another book of religion. We have plenty of these already in India and we do not need another to add to our supply."
Surely this complaint has some justice. Certainly the Bible is sharply differentiated from the sacred books of the East at exactly this point. Unlike them, it sets out to speak of human life in the context of a vision of universal, cosmic history. Although, of course, it contains a great variety of material-legal codes, prayers, wise sayings, and moral instruction-it is, in its overall plan and in a great part of its content, history. It sets before us a vision of cosmic history from the creation of the world to its consummation, of the nations which make up the one human family, and-of course-of one nation chosen to be the bearer of the meaning of history for the sake of all, and of one man called to be the bearer of that meaning for that nation. The Bible is universal history.
How, then, are we to assess it in relation to the other visions of history which are offered in our culture, whether world history as taught in the schools and universities, or natural history as it is deciphered by the biologists, palaeontologists, and cosmologists? To try to answer that question fully would require a much deeper consideration than I am capable of. But one can begin by asking another question: What does it mean to write or to tell history? It cannot mean the recording of all the uncounted millions of things which have happened in the past. It involves selection. And this means selection on the basis of what is significant. But, significant for what? The answer depends on one's belief about the point of the story. If it is the history of a small society, a school or a college for example, the things selected for inclusion will be those that contributed to the growth and development of the school, but even here historians will differ about what is important according to their different views of what the college should be. Probably most of the history taught in European schools in the past two or three centuries has been national history-the history of one's own nation and of others insofar as they impinged on ours. World history, when it is taught, is usually taught as the history of civilization; the significant facts are those which have had a bearing on the development of the kind of society which we now regard as modern. But is this in fact the point of the story? Many people in many cultures have denied that world history in this sense can be written. If human affairs are, like the rest of nature, essentially cyclical in character, moving endlessly through the cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death, then events are hardly worth recording, and if there is to be a history it will not be of "civilization" but of the rise and fall of civilizations in a series which does not lead to any significant end.
World history as it was taught in European schools for more than 1,000 years from Augustine was based on his vision embodied in Civitas Dei, which in turn was based on the biblical vision. In the seventeenth century the millenarian element in the biblical vision was reaffirmed by several Christian thinkers and, in the following century under the influence of the Enlightenment, this became secularized in the doctrine of inevitable progress, a doctrine which lasted perhaps up to the First World War. After that shattering event, it became increasingly difficult to believe that the whole point of the cosmic story was to produce the civilized society of Europe in the twentieth century. The doctrine survived in an apocalyptic form in Marxism, which was strongly attractive to Europeans between the wars, but it also has lost its power as a key for explaining the whole human story. In the closing decades of this century it is difficult to find Europeans who have any belief in a significant future which is worth working for and investing in. A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can. One searches contemporary European literature in vain for evidence of hope for the future; rather, in Jurgen Moltmann's words, it is characterized by cold despair, loss of vision, resignation, and cynicism.
My Hindu friend saw in the Bible a unique vision of universal history and of the place of the human person as a responsible actor in history. The two belong together. You cannot have hopeful and responsible action without some vision of a possible future. To put it in another way, if there is no point in the story as a whole, there is no point in my own action. If the story is meaningless, any action of mine is meaningless. The loss of a vision for the future necessarily produces that typical phenomenon of our society which the sociologists call anomie, a state in which publicly accepted norms and values have disappeared.
But does the story have a point? Normally you cannot be sure what is the point of the story until you have reached the end. There can always be surprises at the end, and in the best stories there are. How then can we, who are still in the middle of the cosmic story, know what the point of the story is, or whether it has any point at all? Only if the author of the story has let us into the secret while we are still in the middle. There can be no other possibility. And here of course, when we speak of "the author letting us into the secret," we are talking the language of revelation. There is no escape from this language if this is our situation, and to pose "reason" against revelation at this point is simply unreasonable. When reason is set against revelation as an alternative or supplementary way of reaching an understanding of our situation, it is obvious that there is confused thinking. If, in this argument, "reason" means the use of inductive methods to discover the truth about our situation by observing all the "facts" and drawing conclusions from them, then it is clear that this kind of inductive process is not applicable to the question of the meaning of the human story as a whole, for the reason that the data for a valid induction are not available until cosmic history has reached its end. There is, of course, a science called futurology which, with the help of the new tools of artificial intelligence, seeks to make forecasts for the future on the basis of existing trends. No one need doubt its usefulness, but certainly no one should pretend that it is other than a very limited exercise. The failures of the futurologists are far more obvious than their achievements, whether one is thinking of the statistical forecasts used by government departments or of the more romantic exercises such as those of Alvin Toffler which have been proved wrong almost before the ink was dry on the pages. And there are vast areas of human life where the predictive power of the most sophisticated computers is exactly nil. No computer in 1900 could have predicted quantum mechanics, for to have predicted it would have been to have achieved it. The universe, as physicist John Polkinghome has recently said, is nothing like a clock with fixed and predictable movements. It is full of surprises and will continue to surprise us. If it has any coherent purpose, if the story of which we are part has any real point and is leading to any worthwhile end, then there is no alternative way of knowing it other than that its author should let us into the secret. There can be, in strict logic, no other way.
The Bible, as my Hindu friend rightly saw, is the communication of that secret by those who have been chosen to be entrusted with it as bearers of it, agents of it, witnesses of it. I have tried to show in the preVllous chapter why it is appropriate that it should be entrusted to a chosen few for the sake of all, why there is a logic in the way of election. Let me now suggest some of the implications of this for those who are so chosen.
1. The first is that the communication of the secret calls for faith. It can be disbelieved. Those who believe stake their lives on their belief. There can be no coercive proof that they are right. If there could be, revelation would be unnecessary. In the light of the Bible as a whole one may say that those who believe will probably always be a minority. Certainly the Bible has many warnings that they must expect to be a persecuted minority if they are faithful. As I said earlier, one of the elements of sickness in our society is the belief that there is, or there ought to be, available to us a body of knowledge which cannot be doubted, in respect of which we do not have to take the risk of committing ourselves to that which cannot be coercively demonstrated. Because the secret is the secret of the author's intention, it can only be communicated through those means by which mutual understanding between persons is achieved-that is to say, by acts of trust. In this sense it is a personal belief, a belief for which I am personally accountable. But it is not therefore merely subjective: it is belief about what is true and is therefore true for everyone and for all time. It is the truth about the meaning of the whole human story. Therefore the belief is held, as F'olanyi would say, with universal intent, and the proof of this is that I seek to share it with all human beings in all times and places, irrespective of their race, creed, or culture, and to test it against every situation that confronts me. Only if I am so committed is it genuine belief.
2. The secret is communicated through happenings in the course of the history of one nation, Israel. At this point a person lecturing in a university classroom will be expected to say something like: "The Israelites believed that in the things that happened to them God was revealing his purpose for them and for the world." I resist the temptation to speak that way, because that is immediately to distance myself from this Israelite faith. It is to take up a standpoint outside that faith, the standpoint of a historian of religions. The faith of Moses and the prophets and the apostles is thus safely sterilized, stuffed, and mounted like a specimen in a museum. I must state the facts as I believe them. God communicated the secret to his chosen people Israel through events in their history. A person called upon to conduct biblical studies in the academic world of our contemporary culture will be expected to use what is called "objective" language in describing the events of the Bible. What is called "confessional" language is regarded as inappropriate to a university context, fitted rather for a denominational seminary. By using this "objective" language, the lecturer is supposed to protect himself from the charge of explaining historical events by invoking the idea of divine action. But this protection is illusory, for two quite distinct reasons. In the first place, it is obviously inadmissible to suppose that while God can act in the minds of people to alter their beliefs, he cannot intervene in the world of nature to alter the course of events. There are no human beliefs apart from events in the natural world, such as electrical impulses in the cerebral cortex. You cannot divide the natural world into two parts, one open to divine influence and the other not. And, in the second place, it is obviously an illusion to suppose that one way of interpreted history-namely without reference to divine action-is simply objective truth, whereas another way, which incorporates the idea of divine action, is not objective truth but part of a confessional stance. The truth is, of course, that all history is interpreted history, and the question, "What is the frame within which history is interpreted?" requires an answer which can only be a matter of faith. Indubitable knowledge of the meaning and goal of history will only be available when history has reached its terminus. The difference between the two ways of telling the biblical story, the way of Relig%,ionsgeschichte and the confessional way, is, in terms of the sociology of knowledge, simply that one represents the reigning plausibility structure and the other calls it in question. There is therefore no need to apologize for the forthright affirmation that God chose to communicate the secret to the people whom he had chosen to be the bearers of it for all the nations, namely the people of Israel.
3. I said that this communication of the secret was in the course of the events of Israel's history. I referred previously to James Barr's attack on the so-called Biblical Theology movement on the ground that according to the biblical record the communication is as much a matter of words as it is of happenings. I have tried to meet this criticism already. Obviously the happenings are understood and recorded in words; there is no other way. But the words refer, directly or indirectly, to the happenings. God is always "the LORD who brought you up out of the land of Egypt," or "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The words do not hang in the air; they refer to things that have happened. And of course these things are interpreted by reference to the activity of God, or else-as often in the Psalms-to his apparent failure to act. The interpretation (namely that God is at work) is not something added to the experience of the event; it is the context for understanding the event. There is thus a circularity which is characteristic of all fundamental faith-commitments and which we noted already in the work of science. The scientist starts with the conviction that the world is rational and that events at different times and places in the natural world can be related to one another in a coherent way. Without this conviction, which is a matter of faith, he could not begin his work. But the goal of his work is to prove the truth of the faith from which he began, to prove it in ever new situations. So also the biblical writers take for granted the reality of God's presence and activity in all things and struggle to find it true in ever new situations, situations which seem to contradict it such as the endless disasters that afflicted Israel and that reached their climax in the crucifixion of the Messiah. This circularity is, as I have said, the mark of all fundamental thinking. One can stand outside the circle, declining to accept the starting point. But then, if one is to make any sense of things at all, one has to work in another circle.
4. Although event and interpretation are thus indissolubly linked, this does not mean that there is only one interpretation. Evidently not. The work of critical scholarship on the documents of both testaments has helped us to see how the same events were reinterpreted by successive generations in the light of new experiences. This is true of the exodus from Egypt and of the experience of exile and return. It is very clearly true of the events of Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection. There is no single interpretation of these events. It is therefore of great positive significance that Jesus did not write a book to record in unchangeable form the revelation which he brought. It is not an unfortunate accident, but of the very heart of the gospel, that we do not know exactly what Jesus said and did. It is of the essence of the matter that he did not provide us with such a record, but communicated the secret to a community which was then sent out into the world to carry the secret into the life of the world, always reappropriating and reinterpreting it in the light of new circumstances. This means that from the very beginning there has been in the Church debate and struggle and difference of opinion about how to interpret the secret in new situations. The New Testament itself gives us ample evidence of this. The understanding of God's action in history, in other words, remains always a matter of faith and never of indubitable knowledge. We are required in each generation afresh, guided by the original witnesses, to interpret the events of our time in the light of what has been disclosed in those particular events through which God chose to reveal and effect his purpose.
5. What are the implications of this for our understanding of the role of the Bible in the life of the Church? The question of biblical authority is at the very heart of our task as bearers of the gospel in our contemporary Western culture. During the long centuries in which the Bible was the main controlling element in the "plausibility structure" of Western society, the question hardly arose. History was understood as providential history from Augustine until the eighteenth century. Arguments about God's providence and his purposes were as natural in a debate in the House of Commons as they would be astonishing today. There could of course be fierce debates about how we are to interpret God's providential dealings at any particular moment, but no argument about the fact that that is what needs interpreting. Today there can be vigorous debates among scientists about what is the case, but there are very few to question the authority of science as such. Now the biblical interpretation has to justify itself before the bar of reason as it is understood within the reigning plausibility structure. It is hardly necessary to document the fact that a great deal of contemporary theology attempts to do just that. In the oft-repeated phrase, the attempt is made to understand the biblical message in the light of modern thought. Yet no believer can really be content with this, since it assigns the final authority to what is called modern thought. What we are required to attempt is the much more difficult enterprise of trying to understand modern thought in the light of the biblical story.
But is this possible? Many would deny that it is. In a recent review article in the journal Theology the writer said that trying to criticize one's own culture is like trying to push a bus while you are sitting in it. Mod ern thought is not something outside me as a Christian. My whole education and even my theological training has shaped me into a person who shares the ways of thinking that are roughly covered by the phrase "the modern scientific worldview." Is there any escape from this? Can I get off the bus? Can I stand outside myself and look at my way of thinking as a critic of it? More specifically can this book, one among millions of books which we call the book, the Bible, call into question the whole way in which I, as a member of this society, understand the world?
This is a point at which the experience of a foreign missionary has something to contribute. A missionary in India learns to realize that there are certain ways of understanding the world that are so fundamental that they have never been questioned in all the revolutions of Indian thought from the Buddha to the Mahatma, from Gautama to Gandhi. I mean, for example, the doctrines of karma and samsara which see human life in terms of the wheel of nature, the endless cycles of birth, growth, maturity, decay, death, and then a new birth. That is, strictly speaking, the "natural" way to understand human life-the life of the individual and the life of nations. Within this view it is therefore inconceivable that the life of one man at a particular point in history could permanently alter the state of things. Jesus can illustrate the truth about the human condition, but he cannot change it. And so, as I have mentioned earlier, a portrait of Jesus can be happily accommodated in the premises of a Hindu missionary establishment, because Jesus has been painlessly incorporated into the Hindu worldview. The foreign missionary knows that this is not the conversion of India but the co-option of Jesus, the domestication of the gospel into the Hindu worldview. He only slowly begins to realize that the same thing has happened in the West. Jesus is understood in the light of the assumptions which control our culture. When "reason" is invoked as a parallel or supplementary authority to "Scripture" and "tradition," what is happening is that Jesus is being co-opted into the reigning plausibility structure. But the business of the missionary, and the business of the Christian Church in any situation, is to challenge the plausibility structure in the light of God's revelation of the real meaning of history. How is this to be done? Archimedes said, "Give me a lever and a fulcrum outside the earth, and I will move the earth." Where can we find that Archimedean point outside our culture? Are we compelled to sit tight in the bus, even if it is headed for a precipice? Or can we appeal to the Bible to call our culture in question?
One group of people who say "Yes" are the people usually called "fundamentalists." Obviously that term can be used in a wide variety of ways. Fundamentalists are often dismissed as obscurantist or crazy fanatics, and some may be. Whatever their defects, they recognize the problem. If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure? But the fundamentalist case has been flawed. If the Bible is treated as a compendium of factually inerrant propositions about everything in heaven and earth, then it is impossible to explain both the contradictions between parts of the Bible and things we certainly know as the results of the work of science, and also the obvious inconsistencies within the Bible itself on factual matters. Even the most convinced fundamentalist who lives in the modern world has to rely at innumerable points on knowledge provided by science and not by the Bible. In fact this way of looking at the Bible is nearer to the Muslim way of looking at the Qur'an and prompts the question: "Why, then, did Jesus not write a book as the Prophet did?"
Nor can the Bible provide the Archimedean point that we need if we treat it as the record of unique religious experiences. Anyone who is familiar with the religious literature of the world knows that the religious experiences of the biblical writers are not unique. There is a large amount of devotional literature in the worlds of Hinduism and Islam which can be used without incongruity by a Christian. What is unique about the Bible is the story which it tells, with its climax in the story of the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. If that story is true, then it is unique and also universal in its implications for all human history. It is in fact the true outline of world history, as my Hindu friend rightly saw. This story is, quite simply, unique. In many cultures stories are told about dying and rising gods, stories which are clearly rooted in the universal human experience of death and birth, but these stories make no claim to be actual history. They have no dates and places attached to them. They illustrate the unchanging human condition but make no claim to change it irreversibly. The biblical story is unique. But how does the telling of it challenge the reigning worldview?
6. The answer is that it can do so through the witness of a community which, in unbroken continuity with the biblical actors and witnesses, indwells the story the Bible tells. Here I have used the word "indwells," one of the key words in the epistemology of Michael Polanyi which I have referred to earlier.
To make the point as clearly as possible, I would like to refer to a saying of one of the Latin American liberation theologians to the effect that the important thing in the use of the Bible is not to understand the text but to understand the world through the text. What I understand hirn to be saying is something like this: it is possible to undertake the most exhaustive and penetrating examination of the biblical text in a way which leaves one, so to say, outside it. The text is an object for examination, dissection, analysis, and interpretation from the standpoint of the scholar. This standpoint is normally that of the plausibility structure which reigns in her society. From this point of view she examines the text, but the text does not examine her. Of course that can happen, as it did for Karl Barth as he sat under his apple tree in Safenwil, when he discovered to his astonishment that the apostle Paul was not only addressing his contemporaries in Rome but was actually addressing Karl Barth, and that an answer was required. But most biblical study as currently conducted is protected from that interruption. The text is examined, so to say, from outside.
What is required, according to the Latin American writer, is that one lives in the text and from that position tries to understand what is happening in the world now. This concept of "living in" or "indwelling" is connected in Polanyi's writing with the concepts of tacit and focal awareness. The simplest example of what is meant is to be found in my relation to my body. It is only through my body that I make contact with and obtain knowledge of the world. The five senses all operate through physical organs of my body. If I use my hands to feel something in the dark, I am only tacitly aware of my hands: I am focusing my attention on the surface I am exploring. I indwell my body and am tacitly aware of it and relying on it. But I do not focus attention on my bodily organs unless something has gone wrong. I am focally aware of the things out there which I want to understand. And, as Polanyi says, we are all the time using means to extend our understanding of what is out theretools, instruments of all kinds, and-very fundamentally-the language we use and the concepts we develop (often very abstract concepts) to grasp and cope with our experience. All of these are, as it were, extensions of our hands and eyes and ears. While we are using words we are only tacitly aware of the words we are using: we are focally aware of the thing they refer to. We indwell our language, our concepts, our whole plausibility structure. That is why no one is conscious of the plausibility structure unless something happens to show that it is failing to cope with reality as it is being experienced.
What the quotation from Latin America suggests is that our proper relation to the Bible is not that we examine it from the outside, but that we indwell it and from within it seek to understand and cope with what is out there. In other words, the Bible furnishes us with our plausibility structure. This structure is in the form of a story. In Hans Frei's phrase, it is realistic narrative which "renders" the character which it portrays. What is involved in this phrase "realistic narrative"? Consider what it means to get to know a person. One can read an account of his character and career such as might be embodied in an obituary notice. But in order to know the person one must see how she meets situations, relates to other people, acts in times of crisis and in times of peace. It is in narrative that character is revealed, and there is no substitute for this.
If we follow these suggestions we get a picture of the Christian life as one in which we live in the biblical story as part of the community whose story it is, find in the story the clues to knowing God as his character becomes manifest in the story, and from within that indwelling try to understand and cope with the events of our time and the world about us and so carry the story forward. At the heart of the story, as the key to the whole, is the incarnation of the Word, the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus defines for his disciples what is to be their relation to him. They are to "dwell in" him. He is not to be the object of their observation, but the body of which they are a part. As they "indwell" him in his body, they will both be led into fuller and fuller apprehension of the truth and also become the means through which God's will is done in the life of the world. Very briefly let me suggest six implications of this way of looking at the matter:
a. I am suggesting that to live in this way means to inhabit an alternative plausibility structure to the one in which our society lives. A plausibility structure is not just a body of ideas but is necessarily embodied in an actual community. It cannot exist otherwise. In this case the community is that company of people who have been chosen and called by God in continuity with those who have gone before from the very beginning of the story. A plausibility structure is embodied in an actual historical community among all human communities, one which carries forward a tradition of rational discourse and argument as ever new situations have to be met and coped with, and it is therefore something which is always changing and developing.
b. The structure is essentially narrative. An actual history, enacted at the specific times and places which form the background of the Bible, provides the clue for understanding contemporary history. As we face new opportunities and new dangers, we are the people who know what it is to cross the Red Sea on dry land, to be fed with manna in the wilderness, to return with singing from Babylon, to stand before the cross, and to meet the risen Lord in the breaking of bread. This is our story, and it defines who we are. Just as character can only be truly rendered in narrative form, so the answer to the question "Who am l?" can only be given if we ask "What is my story?" and that can only be answered if there is an answer to the further question, "What is the whole story of which my story is a part?" To indwell the Bible is to live with an answer to those questions, to know who I am and who is the One to whom I am finally accountable.
c. To say this does not mean that I am relieved of the responsibility for making day-by-day and moment-by-moment decisions about what to do. The Bible does not provide answers to my questions of a kind which could relieve me of this responsibility. The character which is rendered in the biblical story is the character of the One who as creator and Lord of all calls his people into a responsible relationship of love and obedience. The story is therefore, from the beginning, the story of human decisions which are sometimes, indeed often, wrong. The biblical characters are no more infallible than we are. A central part of the character that is rendered in the narrative is the infinite patience of God, both his wrathful correction of the erring and his loving wooing of them back to himself. The story is carried forward in the same way by men and women who must take responsibility for their decisions about how to act here and now in situations which are always new, but who can also trust in the infinite resources of the one who has called them.
d. If I am asked what grounds I can show for choosing to live in this community and to share this plausibility structure rather than the one which rules public life, my answer must be twofold. First, that a plausibility structure is by definition the frame within which one makes all decisions; one does not decide for it on the basis of some more ultimate framework of belief. Like the scientist's faith in the rationality of the cosmos it is the starting point for exploration, not the conclusion of reasonings based on some other premises. Second, that I do not choose this, but that I am chosen. If I am pressed to answer the question, this is the only final answer. God in his mysterious providence has chosen and called me, through means which are only partly known to me, to be part of this community of faith for the sake of sharing his secret with the whole world.
e. The distinguishing mark of this community will be hope. I have spoken repeatedly about meaning in history, but that is a phrase which is perhaps of doubtful clarity. No one knows the meaning of history in the sense of having a full understanding of everything that happens. I shall speak in the next chapter about the sense in which Christ is the meaning of history. But it is perhaps better to speak of the goal of history, for action is only meaningful when it is directed to some goal which is at least conceivable. Within the community whose plausibility structure is shaped by the biblical story there is a clear vision of the goal of history-namely the reconciliation of all things with Christ as Headand the assurance that this goal will be reached. This is what gives its distinctive character to the Christian hope. In most ordinary speech "hope" means little more than desire for a better future. When I was learning to read and speak the Tamil language I slowly came to realize that it had no word for "hope." When I questioned my Hindu teacher about this, he asked me in turn what I meant by hope. Does hope mean anything? Things will be what they will be. I may wish that they turn out better than likely, but why should I wish to be deceived by my desires? This conversation helped me to realize that in English also the word "hope" often stands for nothing more than a desire for what may or may not he. In contrast to this, the New Testament speaks of hope among the great enduring realities-an anchor of the soul entering in beyond the curtain which hides the future from us, something utterly reliable. I suggested earlier that the absence of any sense of a worthwhile future was one of the marks of our present culture. By contrast one of the marks of the biblical counterculture will be a confident hope that makes hopeful action possible even in situations which are, humanly speaking, hopeless. That hope is reliable, because the crucified Lord of history has risen from the dead and will come in glory.
f. Hopeful action means having something to which one can confidently look forward. It means having a horizon. As I said earlier, apart from what has been done in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are shut up to only two possibilities. One possible horizon for our action is a vision for the future of the human race, a future in which we shall have no part. The other possible horizon is a personal future for me beyond death. From that future the world in which I now seek to serve God is absent. Its future is not part of my future. The one possibility gives meaning to my participation in the public life of neighborhood, nation, and world at the cost of marginalizing the human person. The other provides meaning for the individual human person at the cost of marginalizing our shared public life. What is made possible through the gospel is a life looking toward a horizon which is different from either of these. That horizon is defined in the words "He shall come again." For a Christian the horizon for all action is this. It is advent rather than future. He is coming to meet us, and whatever we do-whether it is our most private prayers or our most public political action-is simply offered to him for whatever place it may have in his blessed kingdom. Here is the clue to meaningful action in a meaningful history: it is the translation into action of the prayer: "Your kingdom come, your will be done, as in heaven so on earth."