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Two short italicised extracts from Sean’s Whitley Lecture give a good indication of what he is proposing as a Baptist Covenantal approach to interpreting the Bible:

Biblical interpretation in covenantal perspective should be understood as the church’s active, diverse and ongoing engagement with the biblical texts.

A Baptist, covenantal hermeneutic will permit interpretive diversity and disagreement as a hallmark of the church’s life and not insist on particular interpretive decisions as the necessary hallmark of being ‘biblical’.

Embedded in a magisterial, though still developing lecture, these proposals offer important and liberating principles that could enable Baptists both to take the Bible seriously, and accept that differences of biblical interpretation can be seen as both enriching corrective and shared responsiveness in our task of living under the rule of Christ. The underlying assumption is that if we are met together in covenanted fellowship in Christ, then that foundational covenant agreement should be strong enough to support significant difference, enable us to agree to differ and respect our differences, and continue talking towards, and walking towards, a shared understanding in seeking to discern the mind of Christ.

Listening to Sean eloquently and persuasively arguing for such interpretive diversity within a covenanted unity raised the thought:

the maturity of a Baptist community could well be measured by its capacity to allow, encourage and practice the interpretation of Scripture, believing that differences in interpretations of Scripture are to be subsumed under the greater responsibility to live out our covenanted relationship with each other in Christ, within the diversity of the community Christ Himself has called together.

In other words, as we explore, discuss, disagree, try to agree on the meaning of the biblical texts, we presuppose as a prior principle, our shared relationship with the living Christ, and our sincere goal of hearing and obeying His call. That call to obedient living is often mediated through the faithful questioning of a community engaged in listening…to Christ through Scripture, and to Scripture interpreted by a community held together by covenant and trustful of the Spirit, who bears witness to Christ amongst us and within us.

Those of us who heard Sean’s lecture, now look forward to the intended expansion of his reflections into a full monograph. As Baptist Christians too often tempted to claim ‘biblical’ for our point of view, and to represent any other view as ‘unbiblical’, we sorely need such wise, generous and capable guidance. Thank you Sean for a good evening of thinking and rethinking about an area of our life together that is both crucially important and culpably neglected.

The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterised throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order. Instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionally from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality. in this perspective the splits become healed, constructive syntheses emerge, being and doing become conjoined, and integration of form takes place in the sciences and arts, the material and the spiritual dimenisions overlap, while knowledge of God and of his creation go hand in hand and bear constructively on one another.

T. F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, xi.

This piece of abstract but highly assertive theology reminds me of one of my favourite hymns:

…

O Lord of every shining constellation

   that wheels in splendour through the midnight sky;

Grant us your Spirit’s true illumination

   to read the secrets of your work on high.

.

You, Lord, have made the atom’s hidden forces,

   your laws its mighty energies fulfil;

Teach us, to whom you give such rich resources,

   in all we use, to serve your holy will.

.

O Life, awaking life in cell and tissue,

   from flower to bird, from beast to brain of man;

Help us to trace, from birth to final issue,

   the sure unfolding of your age-long plan.

.

You, Lord, have stamped your image on your creatures,

   and, though they mar that image, love them still;

Lift up our eyes to Christ, that in His features

   we may discern the beauty of your will.

.

Great Lord of nature, shaping and renewing,

   you made us more than nature’s heirs to be;

You help us trace, with grace our souls enduing,

   the road to life and immortality.

A F Bayly

‘ If you are a theologian you will pray truly, and if you pray truly you will be a theologian.’ (Evagrius Ponticus, On Prayer).

Here’s my thesis for discussion:

If the priesthood of all believers is a revolutionary and essential principle of Christian community, so is the principle that every believer is a theologian.

Evagrius Ponticus established a theological democracy when he said, ‘The theologian is the one who prays truly, and the one who prays truly is a theologian’. Theology is not a specialist subject for the awfy clever folk in the church. Theology is to talk about God, think about God, to find ideas, words and images that help us express the inexpressible, glimpse the ineffable, adore and praise the One we will never comprehend except through the grace and love of the One who in gracious love makes Himself known. Theology is prayer doing its thinking, and thought leading to adoration and contemplation. Theology is to enjoy God’s company without ever forgetting in whose company we are.

So, in the Body of Christ, in fellowship with God in the communion of the Spirit, we’re all theologians – some of us are better at it than others, but theology is something we do for each other, with each other. There is a theology of all believers, a call for us to bear testimony, to express our faith, to praise and glorify God in our language and song and art and actions towards each other and towards the whole human community.

All of this was sparked by my enjoyment of Tom Torrance’s book, The Christian Doctrine of God. One Being Three Persons. (see sidebar). This is not an easy book – the greatest Scottish theologian of the 20th and 21st century wrote it, so devotional marshmallow it isn’t; spiritual fast-food it isn’t; the Trinity for Dummies it isn’t. In theology, the via negativa is a theological approach that begins by saying what something is not.

Positively this book is amongst the finest pieces of theological writing on the Christian doctrine of God. Scottish theology has its own distinctive flavour, something I’ll blog about one of these days. But part of that distinctiveness is critical indebtedness to Reformed theology and deeply informed interaction with the Christian ecumenical consensus. Tom Torrance embodies that. And the subject matter of this book is too important to be confined to any self-appointed theological elite. This is high carb theology for hard worked Christian souls. There’s nothing instant or pre-cooked about it; it isn’t theology to go. It’s theology to sit down with, to develop a taste for, to be prepared to pay for…because it’s worth it.

Torrance has an unrivalled grasp of theological history, combined with a passionate faith in the centrality of Jesus Christ for all Christian thinking about God, and these passed through the prism of a mind both pastorally sensitive and intellectually precise. So, not an easy read – but it is devotional reading, if we devote ourselves to the work it takes to know God, to learn of the great love which loves us, and rejoice in a mystery that baffles and a truth that our minds will never exhaust.

So I’ve a small cluster of questions about how we nurture devotion these days.

1. In the absence of regularly singing hymns which are deliberately and skillfully theological, where do we fix our doctrinal reference points?
2. In a Christian book market fixated on practical, applied, ‘how to’, self help approaches to Christian devotion, what ignites the fires of the mind and the passions of the heart to love God more than whatever it is we want God to do for us?
3. If in our different jobs, continuing professional or personal development is an accepted and valued goal, where is the equivalent of that in the life of the church as we each fulfil our role as true theologians who pray, and who when we pray are true theologians?
4. How daft is it to expect every Christian to be practical, practising theologians, prepared to think deep and long, to pursue the reality of God, and who knows, to risk being baffled by a chapter of Torrance in order at least to sense the complexity and richness, encounter the glory and the mystery, endure the discipline and soul stretching, of what it means to love God with all of the heart, soul, mind and strength we can bring?

Next post I’ll give a few samples of Torrance in full flow – will it be devotional reading? Depends whether we do our devotions as theologians who pray, and whether in our praying we are theologians, lovers of the God who comes to us in Christ through the Spirit, and whose presence requires our best attention.