Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: ...Leslie Newbigin's fine book, The Household of God, and was much impressed by it. I was deeply moved by the author's clarity, his fresh vision, his open ecumenical spirit, and his Christ-centered faith. As we have been discovering this week, those qualities are still very much in evidence in Bishop Newbigin's work. It's a pleasure
and honor to present him to you for this third lecture in the Warfield series. The title of the lecture this afternoon is "Foolishness to the Greek: How Shall the Word Be Heard?" Dr. Newbigin.
NEWBIGIN: Dear friends. The farther we go on, the more nervous I feel, but however we feel Father Warfield watching us, we must continue. I have defined the purpose of this series of lectures as to explore what would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and our culture. Yesterday evening, I was so
foolish as to attempt a profile of our culture, and today, I must try to say something about the other party in the encounter, the gospel. If we begin with the example of cross-cultural mission, we see a group of people called missionaries who already organize their corporate life around a story which is told in a book, which is
continually re-enacted in word and sacramental action in their liturgy. The encounter between the gospel and this strange culture takes place in a whole complex of contexts between this company organized in this way and the people to whom they come. At a very early stage, they will begin to translate the book into the language of the people and commend it to them as a model of God,
as a message of God calling for their response. For our modern Western society, both the book and the society are already very familiar. They are not perceived as addressing any fresh challenge to our accepted worldview. Critical scholarship using the tools in the past two hundred years has brought the Bible into the brilliant light of the modern scientific
worldview. The story which it tells is now placed within the general history of the ancient world and evaluated by the same criteria as the modern historian uses in his work on any other ancient document. Under the light, under this light, the Bible has no privileged status. It is part of the whole corpus of ancient literature. The events which it records are to be understood by placing them within the
same unbroken network of cause and effect which binds all historical events together. The ideas which 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 and continuous with the total religious experience of the
human family as a whole. And if the sacred book has been thus de-sacralized and placed firmly within the world of objective facts, which the scientist studies and classifies, so also the sacred society, the church, is de-sacralized. The more recent techniques of the anthropologist and the 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, which is affirmed by the theologian, but as examples of the universal operation of cause and effect as it is observed in other human societies. And who can deny that this kind of scientific study has been enormously illuminating, both in respect of the book, and in respect
of the society. The light of the Enlightenment was real light. We are able to understand the Bible in many respects better than we did before. We are able to understand what actually goes on in the life of the church in many ways better than we did before. Whatever else may be possible, it is not possible to go back behind that experience. It is not possible to unlearn what we have learned to
know and it is not possible to prevent that knowledge from becoming the possession of all peoples and all cultures who desire it. But how as man 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 however -- we are talking about something, which from the point of view of our culture is, so to speak, 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, all of which are, at least in principle, patient of explanation in the terms of the invariable operation of
cause and effect as our culture has learned to understand it. 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, which it is the business of science to understand and so to master. How then can it challenge or encounter us? May we not use one of Isaiah's parables in a sense opposite to his
and ask, "Shall the axe vaunt itself against him who use it, who uses it?" 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 of speaking of any encounter? It's well-known that the first and perhaps the most massive attempt 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. Schleiermacher defined the nature of theology in terms which place it firmly on one side of the divide between the world of public facts and the world of private values with which we have been dealing. Christian doctrine
and I quote from Schleiermacher, "Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affirmation set forth in speech," I'm sorry, "are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech." They are, and again to quote, "transcripts of the religious self-confident, 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 to natural science. They belong, and again I quote Schleiermacher, "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," says Schleiermacher
, "We must declare the description of human states of mind to be the fundamental, dogmatic form while propositions of the second and third forms, that is, about the attributes and acts of God and about the constitution of the world, are permissible only insofar as they can be developed out of propositions of the first form. It is clear from such statements as these, that
Schleiermacher was fencing off an area of inward religious experience which would be protected from the otherwise total dominance of an "objectifying consciousness," to use his phrase. From a world of hard facts, 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 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 was a brockenspecter, simply the projection of the 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 which shaped the public world. We're familiar with the kind of liberal theology so characteristic
of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, in which the boundaries of what it is possible to believe were firmly fixed by the axioms of the Enlightenment in which it was taken for granted that the modern scientific worldview provides the only reliable account of how things actually are and that the Bible has to be understood only in terms of that account. This required a reconstruction of the biblical
history on the base 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 must be understood as a psychological experience of the disciples. Insofar as the biblical scholar recognized religion as an authentic part of human experience, it could find in the Bible testimony
to religion, perhaps to the supreme and definitive expression 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 authoritative place for the Bible in this 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 this account is contradicted by modern science, modern science is wrong. About this strategy, three things may be said. Firstly, 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 has been remarked, I think, by Langdon Gilkey, "Even the most devout fundamentalist in Texas, when prospecting for oil consults the geologists and not the biblical scholars." Secondly, that those who hold this position are themselves part of the modern world and consequently when they say that the Bible is factually accurate, they are working with a whole context of meaning, a concept of
facticity [sic] which is foreign to the Bible. Fundamentalism in this form is essentially a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. And thirdly, I suppose the, one of the very ablest among those who have espoused this position whose venerable portrait hangs above my head at this moment, of him it has been pointed out that at the crucial point in his analysis of the
basis upon which the Bible is finally authoritative, he appeals to the church's age-long experience of the Bible as something which has evoked and continues to evoke awe and reverence, a sense of the holy. In fact, Warfield finds the ultimate authority of Scripture at a point where he is speaking a language which Schleiermacher would have acknowledged
as authentic. Much more common than this has been the strategy which 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 which we know, limited by the intellectual tools available to them. Consequently,
their accounts of national 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 some kind of, to the same kind of critical analysis that he would use in respect of any other similar ancient document. The scholar, in other words, is the active subject,
and the Bible is the passive object. Its material is to be interpreted in terms of the scholar's total understanding of what is the case and 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 which 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 of the text. It is rather that he perceives a congruence between the faith to which the text bears witness and his own, but his training in the skills of
modern, critical, historical -- his training in the skills of the modern, critical historian warns him against a simple transference of the religious words of the Bible to his own. He is aware that that world was so different from this that he cannot simply reproduce the religious experience of the biblical writer or the biblical character. Indeed, in an extreme development of this
view, the English New Testament scholar, Dennis [Naiman?] has told us that the cultural gap between that world and this is so wide that a modern reader can in no way enter into what an Israelite of the eighth century meant when he said, "Yahweh," or what a Christian of the first century A.D. meant when he said, "theos." Such an extreme skepticism both denies the fundamental
unity of the human race and also implicitly absolutizes certain twentieth-century worldviews, but it is only the extreme development of a way of treating the Bible which so fixes it like a fossil embedded in ancient strata that it cannot speak to us today, except as exemplifying forms of universal experience, universal religious experience, which 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 which could be applied to modern life. In the period of what was called the "biblical theology" much was made of distinctively biblical concepts, often contrasted with Greek concepts; concepts which 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, the great English archbishop -- his influential writings on church and society are a good example of that. Once again, it is not the text of the Bible itself which functions as authority, but the concepts and principles which can be extracted from it and it is not clear that these derive
their authority from that fact that they were extracted from the Bible, or to put it more exactly, it is not clear that their provenance in the Bible gives them, and if so, why it should give them, any authority other than their authority which intrinsic rightness may give to 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, on this view, is not in the text itself but in the events which are recorded and interpreted in the text. The Bible is the record of the acts of God, not a compendium of teaching about God. Not the text, but the story behind the text 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 which constitute the salvation history is to be understood as forming the central thread of universal history, thus replacing the world history
which is taught in the secular academies, or whether it is understood as the clue to the specifically religious experience which 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 the secular historian and immune therefore from their critical investigations.
In this case of course 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 Rudolph Bultmann and the many biblical scholars who have been influenced by him. Here one can say truly that the relation between the scholar and
the text is emphatically not that of subject to 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 the world of objective facts. Faith is not faith if it seeks security in what are called facts, whether metaphysical or historical.
To seek that kind of security is to, is to seek a sort of justification by works which is the antithesis of genuine faith. Faith, says Bultmann, "Faith must not aspire to an objective basis in dogma or history on pain of losing its character as faith." Consequently, Bultmann and his followers can cheerfully accept the disillusion
of most of the historical material of 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 have here . . . that we are here firmly within the post-Kantian worldview in which fact and value have no intrinsic relation to one another. Bultmann seems to accept
uncritically the so-called scientific account of nature and history which claims to provide secure knowledge of objective facts as part of any call to faith, as part of the, on part of the knowing subject. But authentic existence which is the essence of faith belongs to a world from which neither science nor history in its secular sense can have anything to say.
It belongs exclusively to the private world. If we admit this dichotomy of fact and value, then it would seem that we are bound to admit Bultmann's claim that religion -- 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 who belongs to post-Enlightenment to hear himself or herself addressed by a call to faith from the Scriptures. They agree -- they argue powerfully that as employed by them, the work of radical, historical criticism of the Bible is an implicate of 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 in question the claim of the modern world; that the scientific study of nature and history can provide a sort of knowledge which is secure and not open to doubt; in other words, which does not depend on faith. Can room really be found
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 question the other way round, does not consistency require us to eliminate even 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 without any association with the so-called Jesus of history. And is faith the proper name for something which is merely a psychological condition and has no covenantive element,
no object about which ontological claims can be made? All these strategies, which I have in such a shockingly cursory way tried to describe, have this in common: they operate within the cultural presuppositions of the modern scientific worldview. That is obvious. But is it not also inevitable? Is it possible to read the scriptures as anything other than the people we are?
Can we set aside the axioms and assumptions which we share with our contemporaries in all our daily business while the assumptions which have shaped the whole of education and which we accept, not deliberately, but inevitably because this is simply how things are as we have learned to understand them. Is not this how we are bound to see things if we are to retain our integrity?
The Bible is not an extra-terrestrial entity which 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 which we have? How indeed can it influence us at all except it speaks to us in our language as part of the real world of which we are a part? 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 totally vacant mind. Everyone comes with a pre-understanding and without that, no understanding is possible. But the reader has also in a sense to place a temporary moratorium on his pre-understanding and allow the text to speak
in its own way and to accept the possibility that this pre-understanding will be changed into a new understanding that is part ... thus the path of the true hermeneutic lies between two dangers. One is so to emphasize the strangeness of the text that it remains to the end only an object of study which 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 so to fail to recognize the otherness of the text that one simply absorbs it into the already existing pre-understanding. In either case, the text fails to challenge and change the understanding of the reader. Plainly these observations are applicable to the reading and understanding of Scripture
as of any other text. We come to it, inevitably, with the pre-understanding into which we have been nurtured by our culture. It cannot be otherwise. But it has to be asked whether the model of the hermeneutical circle is adequate to describe what is involved in the encounter between Scripture and our culture. I have in mind, in asking this question, the many passages of Scripture which 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, quoting the sixth chapter of Isaiah, in which He warns, that except for those to whom it is given, His teaching will create not understanding, but blindness
and hardness of heart. I have in mind the words of St. Paul, to the effect that the preaching of the gospel, except for those who are called to be its witnesses, is either intolerable or incomprehensible. Clearly, this kind of language implies a relationship between pre-understanding and understanding, which 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. But there is an analogy in the field of natural science which is, I think, at this point helpful. It is an analogy -- no more.
Since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we have been familiar with the idea of what he calls paradigm shifts in scientific work. I know that his thesis has been strongly 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 is really the case,
but whatever valid criticisms may be made of Kuhn's thesis, he does demonstrate that shifts such as that from the physics of Newton to that of Einstein do not arise by any step-by-step reasoning from within the pre-suppositions of the earlier view. Rather, by a new vision which calls for a kind of conversion. My point here is simply this: while there is a 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, Newton's laws are still valid for large bodies in slow motion. Thus, to recognize a radical discontinuity
between the old and the new is not to surrender to sheer irrationality. By analogy, one could suggest that the radical conversion of which the Bible speaks does indeed imply discontinuity, which is not capable of being acknowledged in the model of the hermeneutical circle and yet which does not imply a surrender to irrationality. Since the new
understanding of the converted person might -- and I am claiming no more at this point than that -- might have the possibility of finding 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 old could do. To Saul of Tarsus, Jesus of Nazareth could only be seen as a subverter of the law. For Paul the Christian,
the law can be seen as the paidagogos who brought him to Christ and Christ can be seen 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 relation between the gospel and this, or any other, human 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 St. John. Here the language and the thought-forms of that hellenistic world are so employed that Gnostics in all ages have thought the book was written especially for them, and yet, nowhere in the scriptures is the absolute contradiction
between the Word of God and human culture stated with more terrible clarity. The first 12 chapters trace with relentless and cumulative power the total inability of even the best and most godly to grasp what is being affirmed. They end with the absolute rejection of Jesus as a blasphemous sinner and with the judgment upon the disciples of Moses that they are children of the devil.
And then, from chapter thirteen to seventeen, we find ourselves in a totally different world, a world in which Jesus Himself is the radiating center of light and love and all circumstances and all future history are illuminated and made meaningful by that light and love. The relation 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 side, Jesus is the center and the source of all truth. The boundary between these two worlds is defined in terms of death and birth and those on this side of that boundary are not those who have been able to make a kind of gigantic hermeneutical leap, but they are 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 that 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 our culture. The Christian claim is that although
that other way of understanding the world can in no way be reached by any logical steps from the axioms of this one, nevertheless, that other way does offer a wider rationality which embraces and does not contradict the rationality of this. We have to test that claim in later lectures. Here and now, we have to ask -- we have to look at what that claim
implies 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 steadily to deny the reality of things which society regards as real, or to affirm the reality of things which
society regards as illusions. The "plausibility structures", to use again Peter Berger's phrase, the plausibility structures which largely control our perceptions of what is the case, are socially produced. This is true whether we are talking about tightly-knit religious societies, societies such as Islam, or whether we are talking about our modern plural societies which treat religious confraternities
as simply as manifestations of options taken by a group of individuals for the private sector of their lives. The modern scientific worldview functions as a plausibility structure 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 of 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 which excludes -- which exhibits the cause-and-effect relationship between
phenomena. Even at points where the model seems at least for a moment to falter, as in the case of quantum physics, no scientist will suggest that the particles in question act from conscious purpose or because of diving intervention. The success of this method has been so overwhelming that it is inevitable that the Bible should be subjected to the same
methods of study; methods which assume that its contents can be explained without reference to any divine purpose controlling events. And to one whose mental world is wholly shaped by the modern scientific worldview, the statement, "God acted at this point and this is the explanation of what happened," simply does not explain. It does not belong to the world of real causes
as our culture understands them. He will be bound to attempt some kind of translation. He recognizes that the biblical writers shared with their contemporaries a worldview 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,
if it is to have any relevance for the modern world, it has to be translated, in order to have any contemporary meaning, within the worldview which we inhabit and we are familiar with the various ways in which the translation is attempted. 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 surely quite unscientific to treat it as if it were. The Bible comes into our hands as the book of a community written -- the book of a community, and neither the book nor the community can properly be understood except in their reciprocal relation with each other. Quite clearly, the community as it exists
is being continuously shaped by the attention which it gives to the book. Equally obviously, the community's reading of the book is shaped by a tradition which it has developed through the experience of previous generations of believers, seeking to live and 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 for him by the tradition which 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 the scriptures.
This is the hermeneutical circle which operates within the believing community and it is precisely this which gives us the clue to understanding the nature of the Bible itself, for it has become very clear, has it not, that the scriptures as we have them, are 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 continual reshaping of the tradition in the light of new experiences. Today, therefore, as the result of critical scholarship, we are able to read the text in a way that was not possible for former generations. It is not a uniform corpus of dead facts from the past
as though, as I say, it had just been dug up out of the sands. It is part of a living process in which we also shared along with all who have gone before us in the school of discipleship and with all who are contemporaries in the same school. We can ask such questions as what actually happened; how did the writer understand it; how did the other writer re-interpret the tradition he received; from what sources
did the writer, the idea, the image come; what did the earlier writer mean and how does that differ from the way that the later writer understood it? The asking and answering of all these questions can greatly enhance our understanding, provided that it is within the context of that same ultimate faith, which governs the life of the whole community and of our contemporary struggle to understand
and be faithful in our own time. The relation between these two kinds of concern could 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 details of the finger movements, but if she attends to these while she is playing a concerto, the consequences will be disastrous. Then, all
her mind and soul must be wrapped in the glory of the music and the finger work will be completely forgotten and yet the glory of the music would be lost if the finger work was not done. It is, of course, possible to study the movements of the pianists'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 those principles. In that sense,
it would be an explanation. It could be done by a person who was tone-deaf and for whom a Mozart sonata was merely a jumble of noises, but it would surely be an odd kind of science which insisted that this was the only scientific way of understanding what is going on. It would surely be equally unscientific not to recognize that the reason why universities, even purely secular
universities, continue to devote huge resources to the historical, critical study of the scriptures, resources far out of proportion to those devoted to other ancient documents, but the reason is that these scriptures have functioned and continue to function. Their meaning is to be found by treating them merely as fragments from a past which we can only reconstruct by a great deal of guesswork; rather, we
must affirm in the words of the German New Testament scholar Stuhlmacher, "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 which Peter Berger uses in his apologetic.
The Bible functions as authority only within a community which is committed to faith and obedience and is embodying that commitment in an act of discipleship which embraces the whole of life, private and public. This is the plausibility structure within which Christian faith is nourished. Although it may be shocking to a certain kind of Protestant post-Enlightenment conscience, it is not
the Bible by itself, but the church confessing the mystery of faith, which is spoken of in Scripture as the pillar and bulwark of the truth. I have spoken of the hermeneutical circle, which operates within the community of faith. Scripture and tradition, tradition and Scripture, are in a constantly-developing reciprocal relationship and the development is not merely a
cerebral process, but is part of a total life of worship, of obedience, of risk-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 which lives without that faith. I have suggested that at that boundary, one has to
use other models, such as that suggested by the biblical image of death and new 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 within that structure. The language of the Bible, therefore, is translated into the terms of our culture
so that it may correspond to reality as we know it, and we have looked at some of the proposals for doing so. In my next lecture, 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, that a paradigm shift, which while not logically necessary, does not deny the reason which operates within
our contemporary plausibility structure. At the end of this lecture, I only want to say, briefly, something further about the relationship of Scripture and tradition and the sense in which, within the reciprocity of this relation, it is Scripture which is primary. I have briefly referred earlier in this lecture to some of the ways in which post-Enlightenment scholars has tried 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, which must be maintained even when contradicted by modern science. There is the view of Scripture as bearing witness to authentic, personal experience in whatever terms this may be understood. This witness can then be properly placed within the total religious experience of the human race. There is the view of Scripture as embodying
concepts and principles which can be distilled from its material and which can stand in their own right as having intrinsic authority. And, finally, there is the view which locates the divine revelation in the history behind the story in the events which the biblical writer sought, no doubt with limited understanding, to record and interpret. This salvation history is then to be distinguished from the history which secular historians seek to reconstruct, and therefore
is immune to their historical, to their critical, assaults. In distinction from all of these and in line with what I have learned from scholars like Hans Frei and 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 action and purpose of God.
In Frei's language, the biblical literature is what he calls "realistic narrative," and he defines that as "that in which character and individual person," I'm sorry, "characters and individual persons in their internal depth and subjectivity, as well as in their capacity as doers of actions and sufferers of 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." That is a quotation from Hans Frei's book, "Eclipse of Biblical Narrative." In this view, the Bible
taken as a whole, fitly renders God, who is the Author and Sustainer of all things; who is not just the correlate or referent of universal religious experience, but is the Author and Sustainer of the universe. But this picture can only be understood as we ourselves are engaged in the same struggle which we see in the Scriptures,
the struggle to understand and deal with the events of our time in the faith that it is the God revealed in Scripture, who is, in fact, the agent, whose purpose created and sustains 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 nations 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, 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 that 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 the 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 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 which shares in the struggle, we open ourselves continually to the scriptures, always in company with our fellow disciples of this and former ages and in the context of the struggle for obedience, we find
that it is constantly - - we find in the Bible constantly fresh insights into the character and purpose of the One who is rendered in its pages. We read these pages, as part of real history, secular history, the history of which we are a part. What other history is there? There are not two different histories, but there are two, or many, different ways of understanding
history. We recognize this, because it is constantly being applied to the contemporary events among which we live. It is possible, and in our culture, normal to exclude the idea of God 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 which can be scientifically charted.
But it is idle to suppose that any kind of peaceful co-existence 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 this moment making and suffering history know that there is only one history, but we know it can be understood
theistically or atheistically. It is true that a methodical 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 that community which is controlled by the rendering of God in Scripture, will surely be precluded from dichotomizing 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 relation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is simply one manifestation of the illusion which 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 which finds its focus in Jesus is the faith with which we interpret the whole of history; or, whether we limit this faith to a private world of religion and hand over the interpretation of 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 determinative clue of the character and activity of the One whose purpose is the final meaning of history. The boundary between the community and the society for which the Bible is not determinative is marked by that paradigm shift which is traditionally called conversion. However, the conversion may occur in many different ways;
it can happen suddenly or over a period. Those who belong to the community inhabit a different plausibility structure from their contemporaries. Things are real to them, to the one, which are myths or illusions to the other. God's power active in world history is not for them a mythological way of speaking, but is an account of reality, but it is so, only,
in the context of an active engagement with current events, which corresponds to this faith and continually renews this experience. In conclusion, let me say this: the difference between these two plausibility structures is perhaps seen most sharply at the point where we have to come to terms with the Christian tradition about the resurrection of Jesus. Within the community of faith,
the confession is made that God raised Jesus from the dead and that the tomb was empty. Within the plausibility structure of the modern world, there will be, this will become something like the following: the disciples had a series of experience which led them to the belief that in some sense Jesus was still alive, and that therefore, that they interpreted the cross as victory and not defeat. People do have such
psychological experiences. If that is what is meant by the Easter event, then it qualifies for admission into the world of facts as our culture understands it. The former statement can only be accepted as a fact if the whole plausibility structure of contemporary Western culture is called in question. To accept it as a fact means that history has a meaning which 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 which gives it a new meaning. It means a radical contradiction of this world as it is, but the affirmation that this is so can only be made by a community which is itself engaged in that contradiction, which is actually pitting its life
against the rulers of this world and in fellowship with Jesus, 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 at some time seemed to be 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. The community of faith celebrates the fact of 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, because the Living God, who was present in Jesus crucified, is now and always the sovereign Lord of history
and therefore makes possible a continuing struggle against all that negates His purpose. From the point of view of our contemporary culture, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is irrational. It cannot be incorporated into the existing plausibility structure. It must be regarded as the esoteric belief of a community which is living in a world of make-believe rather than the world of facts. There is no way by which the truth of this claim
can be demonstrated within the plausibility structure which 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 conclusion to this lecture. Firstly, that from within the plausibility structure which is shaped by the Bible, is it perfectly possible to acknowledge and
cherish the insights of our culture. There is an asymmetry in their relation, as between the paradigms of science, not a total discontinuity. From one side, the other looks quite irrational, but from the other side, there is a rationality which embraces both. Secondly, therefore, the conflict between the two views will not be settled on the basis of logical argument. That view will
prevail which is seen to offer both in theory and in practice the widest rationality and the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of human experience. This is as much a matter of faithful endurance 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;
not only a conversion of the will and of the feelings, but a conversion of the mind, a paradigm shift which 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.