Living Wittily

Theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture

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Ben Myers at Faith and Theology (see my Favourite Blog sidebar for the link to Ben’s blog) has a link to a lecture by Archbishop Rowan Williams on The Bible: Reading and Hearing.

Archbishopmedium Ever since I read Rowan Williams prophetic and perceptive Lent Book, The Truce of God, around 1985 I think, I have read whatever he has written with care and a willingness to listen to this deeply spiritual and intelligent Christian thinker. Yes, I think Rowan Williams is first and foremost a thinker, of the kind the Christian church needs and should cherish, and should listen to with care and humility. That he was made Archbishop is in my view a mixed blessing – the politics and institutional tip-toeing required of his high church office may not be one of his strengths, though he’s no political lightweight either. But there is a generosity of mind, an imaginative and humane intellect, a spirit richly endowed with learning and experience, that make him one of the most important theologians the Church of England has produced in a century or two. He is deeply read in the fathers of the Church, sympathetic to the diversity of Christian spirituality, global in his sense of the scope and significance of the Gospel, and a persuasive if at times undogmatic apologist for the Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In this lecture he states his aim early on:

my aim is a very modest one, to examine the practice of reading the Bible so as to tease out some of what it tells us about the nature of Christian identity itself.  Because some of our present difficulties are, at the very least, compounded by the collision of theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture, and it seems imperative to work at a genuine theology of the Bible as the sacred literature of the Church.

A genuine theology of the Bible – absolutely. A placing of the Bible within a clear understanding of God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, the church receiving the Bible as God’s gift to be read, heard, preached, performed – as the script of the Christian community. Yes; but the script of the Gospel drama interpreted and performed as an expression of our relationship, not to theological ideas, but to a Person, Jesus.

I’m going to ponder Rowan Williams lecture some more – and then blog on it. Like the Archbishop, I think the way we approach the Bible, the way we interpret it and live it, and the way it interprets us and calls how we live into question, decisively forms our christian identity – for good or ill.

Comments

2 responses to “Theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture”

  1. Graeme Clark avatar
    Graeme Clark

    Thank you for drawing my attention to this thoughtful lecture which I have found most helpful in my current work in writing about ‘Imaginative Use of the Bible in Pastoral Care’.
    Rowan Williams’ key emphasis on the public and community nature of bible reading “before Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public” is central as are his two key principles:
    1. when we are dealing with texts that are grammatically addressed to a specific audience, we are being asked to imagine that historically remote audience as not only continuous with us but in some sense one with us.
    2. in dealing with texts that are not grammatically directed in this way, we are obliged to ask, ‘What does this text suggest or imply about the changes which reading it or hearing it might bring about?’
    Of particular help for pastoral care is his warning about the danger of not using imagination in our reading of the bible so that our reading is “processed into whatever most concerns us now and subjected to the criteria by which we judge something as useful or useless for the time of our plans and projects.”

    Reply
  2. Graeme Clark avatar
    Graeme Clark

    Thank you for drawing my attention to this thoughtful lecture which I have found most helpful in my current work in writing about ‘Imaginative Use of the Bible in Pastoral Care’.
    Rowan Williams’ key emphasis on the public and community nature of bible reading “before Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public” is central as are his two key principles:
    1. when we are dealing with texts that are grammatically addressed to a specific audience, we are being asked to imagine that historically remote audience as not only continuous with us but in some sense one with us.
    2. in dealing with texts that are not grammatically directed in this way, we are obliged to ask, ‘What does this text suggest or imply about the changes which reading it or hearing it might bring about?’
    Of particular help for pastoral care is his warning about the danger of not using imagination in our reading of the bible so that our reading is “processed into whatever most concerns us now and subjected to the criteria by which we judge something as useful or useless for the time of our plans and projects.”

    Reply

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