We Need a Story

Philip Pullman, the children’s author and atheist, known most famously for his trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000) where he attacks and seeks to undermine Christianity, (the film of the first book comes out this Christmas) says in an recent essay:

‘We need a myth, we need a story, because it’s no good persuading people to commit themselves to an idea on the grounds that it’s reasonable. How much effect would the Bible have had for generations and generations if it had just been a collection of laws and genealogies? What seized the mind and captured the heart were the stories it contains’ (‘The Republic of Heaven’, The Horn Book Magazine, 2001, 666).

I believe Pullman is correct. He is aware that if we reject, say the Christian story, we need to replace it with something equally powerful: we need a story in which we can orient our life and answer the big questions. Where I disagree with Pullman is instead of rejecting the Christian story, I believe we need to tell the story better. The New Testament scholar Richard Hays has remarked,

'I have grown increasingly convinced that the struggles of the church in our time are a result of its losing touch with its own gospel story. We have gotten "off message" and therefore lost our way in a culture that tells us many other stories about who we are and where our hope lies. In both the evangelical and the liberal wings of Protestantism, there is too much emphasis on individual faith-experience and not enough grounding in our theological discourse in the story of Jesus Christ.' (The Faith of Jesus Christ, 2nd Ed., 2001, lii)

Pullman, in His Dark Materials (HDM), is reacting against the Western description of God as an authoritarian power, which I think he is justified in doing. I have no problems with Pullman killing off this god. In fact it clears the way for us to introduce the triune God of the gospel, who's power is displayed on a cross. We also see in HDM that Pullman's understanding of the Christian story is centred on heaven and hell. Colin Gunton has said '‘[the Enlightenment’s] view of traditional Christianity as authoritarian and excessively other-worldly was not entirely a caricature’ (Enlightenment and Alienation, 1985, 1). But the Christian story we find in the New Testament is not centred on the individual's eternal destination, but in the person's participation in the divine drama of the triune God.

It is God’s story that the gospel tells and only secondly of our involvement. It’s a story that subverts and reveals the emptiness of all other stories. This is a story that we can orientate people towards in their search for identity, which is grounded not in fantasy but in truth and a truth that is not firstly scientific and detached, but is personal and christological, that is, Jesus Christ is the Truth (Jn 14:6) or ‘. . . no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 3:11). Because this truth is christological it is also relational. The gospel is not a doctrinal basis to which people sign up to, but is the Spirit liberating us through Christ into relationship with the Father.

Sadly Stanley Hauerwas is right when he says, 'God has entrusted us, God's church, with the best story in the world. With great ingenuity we have managed to make the story, with the aid of much theory, boring has hell.' We need to find new ways to tell the story of Jesus, to show that it is alive and kicking, to show that it is world-altering and life-changing - it might mean we have to change. This I believe is what deep church is all about.

Book Review: The Rhythm of Doctrine

John E. Colwell, The Rhythm of Doctrine: A Liturgical Sketch of Christian Faith and Faithfulness, (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 135pp. (with thanks to Paternoster for a review copy)

John Colwell continues to provide Baptists and others with examples of excellent theology. In 2001 Living the Christian Story was published, a book on Christian ethics. In 2005 Promise and Presence was published, a book on sacramental theology. And now The Rhythm of Doctrine is published providing a systematic theology based around the liturgical year.

This is a short book - it's a sketch, in the style of Kathryn Tanner's recent Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (2001) and Colin Gunton's The Christian Faith (2001), where the reader is provided with a fairly brief treatment of Christian doctrine, with the promise or hope in the preface or introduction for a longer and more detailed treatment to follow. This at frequent moments is both tantalizing and frustrating as the reader is left wanting a fuller argument or discussion.

This is a novel description of dogmatics from a theologian who has excellent grasp of the tradition and systematic theology. Whereas most systematic theology follows the creed (God, creation, Christ, atonement, Spirit, church), Colwell has decided to follow the liturgical year - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, All Saints - with his desire to write a systematic theology rooted in the worship of church. This allows the different doctrines to breathe and find a life in the context of worship. Colwell wants to avoid the way that too much systematic theology is often detached from the life of the church.

Colwell, as he states in the introduction is a theologian who owes a debt to Stanley Hauerwas. This is evident in his desire to see doctrine and ethics as 'a single theme' and not related disciplines: 'there can be theology, no knowledge of the true God, without worship, and there can be worship or theology with transformation, without ethics' (p.3). Colwell therefore attempts to link each of the seven seasons to one of the seven virtues (hope, love, faith, wisdom, justice,temperance and fortitude). In a similar way to Sam Wells' recent God's Companions (2006) and the Wells and Hauerwas edited Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (2005), Colwell argues that worship (and especially the sacraments) shapes us the ethical life. So Advent teaches us about hope, Christmas about love, Lent about temperance and so on. He acknowledges that this is more 'a convenience of systematic tidiness rather than a matter of any inherent association' (p.10), by which I think he means that some of the virtues could be placed (naturally) with a different season. Having said that, I did enjoy and found helpful the way Colwell brings the seasons, the doctrines and the virtues together in each chapter.

This is a systematic theology for the church. It is both readable and academic. In its attempt to bring doctrine and ethics together it reminded me of Barth's Church Dogmatics, albeit a very brief version. It is exciting, because it demonstrates the importance of doctrine, doxology and ethics, where so often in the life of the church they are separated from one another. In A Better Hope, Hauerwas has a chapter called 'Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the "And",' which I think Colwell does so well in this book. I hope this book gets widely read. Although he is not a big fan of labels, this is an example of deep church theology, rooted in the tradition - both systematic and doxological - and with a proper concern for the life of the church in the present. I encourage John to one day develop this brief sketch into a detailed presentation. It would be an even bigger gift, than this short book is already, to the church.

Rowan Williams on Christian performance

For Rowan Williams, the choice between faithfulness to received traditions of creedal, scriptural, and theological discourse, on the one hand, and genuine theological creativity, on the other, is false. This is because Williams sees the texts of scripture, creed, and tradition not as historical artifacts whose meaning is equated with the original authorial intention behind the texts but rather as scripts for a certain kind of performance, similar to the script of a play. Just as a theater company can remain faithful to the words and stage directions of the script of a play while enjoying a great deal of freedom to stage the play in a way that is illuminating and challenging to audiences of its day, so the theologian can remain faithful to the words of the texts of Christian sources while interpreting them in ways that are fruitful and demanding for today’s Church and world.

(Jeffery McCurry, 'TOWARDS A POETICS OF THEOLOGICAL CREATIVITY: ROWAN WILLIAMS READS AUGUSTINE’S DE DOCTRINA AFTER DERRIDA', Modern Theology, 23/3: 415-433 [2007])

deep church and gospel amnesia

A mission for the deep church conversation must be towards enabling Christians to remember who they are, to be 'the kind of community that tells and tells right the story of Jesus (Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 1981, 52). I find certain sentences from books get lodged in my brain (there are quite a few Colin Gunton and John Colwell), but one particular one is from Andrew Walker's Telling the Story (SPCK, 1996). He writes, with some help from Brueggemann, that modern christians have gospel amnesia, that we are illiterate about own faith and we have forgotten who we are. I think what Andrew Walker is doing with the deep church conversation is try and rectify that problem: to make Christians literate again, to remind them and create in them a deep love of the Christian story that we find in scripture. A deep church is one that has a deep theology, that is able to read scripture, pray and worship drinking from deep wells.

The deep church conversation I think requires us to acknowledge that there is more than the evangelical story or the charismatic story or whatever tradition we swim in. The deep church conversations wants us to see their is a richer, deeper story of God, that if we begin to hear from can help train us and make us fit for living the Christian life. I remember Roy Searle of the Northumbria Commmunity speaking at Greenbelt about how too many Christians identify themselves in one narrow way, and that instead, we need to receive and learn from one another and from the history of the church.

I look the fact that John Colwell a Baptist writes a book that argues for the seven sacraments. I like the way that Colin Gunton would bring Karl Barth, John Owen, John Calvin, Irenaeus, Edward Irving, John Zizioulas and others into conversation. I like the way Stanley Hauerwas is identified as a Roman Catholic, but calls himself a Methodist, leans towards the Anabaptists and belongs to an Anglican church. These are theologians who recognise we need a deep theology for a deep church.

What I liked about Remembering Our Future is that in each of the chapters there was shared concern for scripture being heard in church and then also a concern that our worship be more trinitarian, a concern that we take seriously the sacraments, a concern that our spirituality be rooted in the everyday.

With those in the emerging church rightly encouraging us to ask what does it mean to be church and those in the alternative worship movement encouraging us to ask what does it mean to be worshipping communities, I believe it is good that those who have begun this conversation around deep church, are encouraging us to be rooted in the gospel and engage with the theological tradition of the church.

New Series of Deep Church Lectures

Another set of lectures for June and July. They are free. For locations and times, click here.

Week 1 (19th June): Dr. Graham Tomlin - 'Luther, the Cross and the Christian Life’

Week 2 (26th June): Dr. Chris Joby - ‘Why do Christians worship’

Week 3 (3rd July): Dr. Alan Spence - ‘The humanity of Christ’

Week 4 (10th July): Dr. Douglas Knight - ‘The people of the Spirit in the Body of Christ’

Steve Holmes on strange voices

'When we learn to listen to the tradition faithfully, not assuming that we already know what we shall hear, but instead allowing earlier voices their own integrity, we will inevitably be surprised by the strangeness of much what is said. At that point we will be faced with a choice: we might take the modern way of patronising earlier voices by assigning them to their 'place in history', and so pretending that they have nothing to say to us; or we might believe that to listen to these voices in all their strangeness, and to regard their positions as serious, and live, options is actually a theological imperative. Perhaps the most two obvious areas where this will be true are sexual ethics and biblical interpretation ...'

(Listening to the Past, Paternoster, 2002, p.86)

Steve Holmes: An example of why 'deep church'

'I suggested in the first three chapters of Listening to the Past that one of the problems in listening to the tradition is the otherness of the historical contexts of the doctors of the Church - and, indeed, that one of the problems in listening to Scripture is the otherness of the historical contexts of the prophets and the apostles. This problem is, however, also in a way a benefit. Encountering - listening to - people who do not think the way we do, who assume different things in different ways, offers us the opportunity to have our own prejudices challenged. ... [A] clash between the tradition and the assumptions of our own age at least offers us the opportunity to ask the question. A respect for, and a disciplined listening to, the tradition can enable us to speak prophetically in our own day, calling our contemporaries to hear the challenge of the gospel.'

(Listening to the Past: The Place of Tradition in Theology, Paternoster, 2002, pp.135-136)