Response to Lucy Larkin

By the Rev Tony Nicholls

Thank you Lucy for your thought provoking and interesting engagement with our understanding of: the Bible; creation; and the connection between the two. While in many ways the introduction resonates with me, I find myself unable to “suspend my suspicions”. For what I am asked to do is to treat the Bible as a revered person, a wise elder, a mentor or a spiritual director. Now each of these people are excellent resources in life, but at the end of the day, they are each simply another person giving advice in one form or another. They only have as much authority as I give them. But when we come to the Bible, we come to listen to the almighty and powerful Lord of the universe. God’s speech through the Bible has an altogether different authority to that of other humans who give advice. When this Lord of the universe warns us about something, it carries infinitely more weight than when a created being warns us about something. However I did appreciate the encouragement given to come to the Bible in humility and patience, ready to be surprised and challenged. We must always be open to God speaking to us in fresh ways, and bringing a greater depth of understanding through the words of the Bible.

Although it is helpful to be reminded that Scripture is not equal to God, I think we need to be careful not to distance Scripture from God. For when we read the Bible, we are listening to God speak. The Bible is the primary means that God uses to communicate with us. It is true that God spoke through humans living in a very different time and culture to our own. But this does not make the Bible any less God’s communication to us. We may need to work hard to understand the culture and context of the Bible, and then work hard to understand how it applies to us today, but it is nevertheless God’s words to us today.

I must admit that whenever I hear the earth spoken of as a being, as something that has a relationship with God, I become very nervous. For although God created the earth and all the creatures on it, the earth itself is not a thinking being like humans. Earth is the place that all other things dwell: humans, animals, plants, etc. But it is not itself a thinking being. I think the danger is in raising the importance of earth to the level of humans, or even above the level of humans. However in the creation account, and throughout the Bible, God clearly lays out the primary importance of humans, of those creatures created in the image of God.

This is not to say that because humans are more important than the earth they dwell on, that they can do whatever they feel like doing to the earth. Instead, humankind is given the responsibility, as Lucy points out, to rule over and care for the earth.

Lucy has very helpfully drawn out in her paper the idea that the Bible is not a collection of books written in one particular style, to be read in one particular way. She has used the language of grammar to show that the authors of the books of the Bible write in the way one would expect human authors to write, that is in different moods. This is perhaps seen to be a corrective to clause 2 of the Jerusalem Declaration, which seems at first glance as though it implies the whole Bible is a rule book to be obeyed. However this is to misunderstand the intent of clause 2 of the Jerusalem Declaration. For in order to translate, read, preach, teach, and obey the Bible accurately, one must recognise and make sense of the: grammar, genre, and context. Thus the way that a Psalm is taught and obeyed will be quite different to the way a narrative or an epistle is taught and obeyed. Just as at the grammatical level an indicative will be taught and obeyed differently to the way an imperative or an optative is taught and obeyed.

Despite my somewhat negative approach to some of the arguments in this paper, I must say that I agree with much of the overall thrust of the paper. I do think it’s important for humans to care for the earth, to rule it wisely as God’s caretakers. Thanks Lucy for your challenge to us.

PS – I just read Phillip’s comments regarding the priority of indicatives over imperatives in the Bible, and the particular mention of the Ten Commandments. Excellent point! Reminds me of what I learnt in ethics at Bible College

The Wisdom of Ants and the Storehouses of Snow: Fresh Readings of the Bible For a Planet in Peril

By Revd Dr. Lucy Larkin.

Come with me into a theological thought experiment. Just for the purposes of this blog paper and just for a little while, suspend your suspicions. Hang them up because I’m on an intentional quest. I’m seeking wisdom and I’m coming to the Bible as I would to a revered person, a wise elder, a mentor or a spiritual director to find some answers.

I often seek the counsel of this person. Sometime it is enough to rest in their presence. When I’m weary or assailed by the noise and complexities of life it’s good to sit, drink in hand, and say nothing. At other times I come for a rigorous dialogue, an engaging debate, a good laugh. I know my deepest and truest questions will not be scorned. This person is deeply attractive, relentlessly realistic, wildly hopeful. I have an assurance that our deliberations will yield truth. Sometimes I come knowing that I will find a new understanding which surprises and challenges me. Sometimes I have a list of questions that need working through. It requires patient and open listening and humility on my part. Sometimes, as now, I come on behalf of another; for one who is in trouble. In this thought experiment, the friend I mean is the earth, our planet, who is, of late, in a bad way. For this friend I come almost in desperation. Behind it is a sense of needing to probe, to test, to arrive at a place of peace about the integrity and authenticity of the elder and their ability to answer my questions on behalf of my friend.

My reasons for suggesting that it is possible to approach Scripture in this way are threefold. Firstly, to highlight the ways in which it, like a person, is nuanced and complex. It has a history, a memory, a testimony, a status and a life of its own. It has, at times, deeply mysterious qualities. What are we to do with ‘difficult’ passages, discordant or dark ones even? How do we sit with its propensity to send us somewhere else entirely to the place we thought we were.

My second reason for personifying the Bible is to give weight to the relational aspects that are present in any reading of Scripture. If I can borrow a notion from the philosopher Martin Buber, I would say that true dialogue requires an openness to the real ‘meeting’ that is in ‘the between’. Only here in the encounter of a unique ‘one’ with ‘another’ does the new and the potentially delightful emerge. There is a sense in which, although I read the text, the text reads me too. Moreover my coming to it is not entirely blank. I bring my own identity, my gender, ethnicity, social location, my education, my life experiences and preoccupations which condition my ability to receive what is being said. Thus I come searching wisdom but I am searched out too. As Jeremiah 17:10 has it ‘I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind’.

Thirdly, there is an ongoing aspect to any relationship of depth. To access an authentic wisdom for each new generation and situation the Bible should be read and reread. Scripture itself records many breaks with, as well as renewals of, tradition. This is also to acknowledge the continual participation of God in the processes of creation through the Holy Spirit, and the sub-plot of God’s ongoing engagement with humanity. Part of my ‘non-blank’ coming to the scriptures is that I belong in the midst of a believing community in all its complexity. To read scripture as an Anglican is to read it ecclesially, as part of the church past, present but also not forgetting the future. My scriptural reading is thus informed by others and their encounters with God in worship, in meditation, in study and in conversation. There is another aspect to my belonging which is worth emphasising. Although I seek wisdom on behalf of the earth, I am part of the earth too, so this is not detached and dispassionate searching.

There is then, more than one dialectic going on whenever I read scripture and this is possibly where the analogy of scripture as a wise person breaks down. It is about me and God, but much more is going on than just that. Moreover, scripture is not equivalent to God. I can be confident in scripture’s revelatory and transformative abilities but it is the God behind scripture, not scripture itself, that I seek.

Scripture is not the same as God in another way. Feminist theology has alerted us to the silences of the texts and the marginal characters. Likewise certain of its words are embedded in cultural presuppositions that are no longer intelligible in or resonate with our own time. When it comes to an eco-theological approach to scripture I engage in what could be termed a hermeneutic of desire and retrieval. There are many desires I have in this regard but one is the desire to find the ‘hidden’ story of the earth and its relationship with God and to retrieve from that story wisdom that informs care for the earth. This is not exactly a hermeneutic of suspicion but it is to be aware of the anthropocentric blind spots in the interpretation of scripture through the ages. If there is no reading of scripture that is ‘a view from nowhere’ we can at least be upfront about our perspective and concerns.

David Ford has, in his book, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), argued that God speaks in different ‘moods’ in scripture that can be understood grammatically. These are the indicative, imperative, interrogative, subjunctive and optative. I find these play helpfully into my hands in terms of my analogy of scripture as a spiritual director.

The indicative is about affirming and denying. Some examples from the gospels are when Jesus says, ‘blessed are you’, or ‘woe to you’, Luke 6:20ff. The imperative implies command and obedience. Jesus himself was obedient. Ford notes that arguably, the Christian faith has often been seen in terms of the indicative (‘this is the good news’), (‘do this and you will be saved’). The interrogative is about questioning and being questioned (‘are you the son of God?’, ‘why do you look for the living among the dead?’ etc). In Jesus’ life and death there is intricate questioning that goes on generating further questions. The subjunctive opens up possibilities and surprises, it is the realm of the ‘may be’ and the ‘might be’. This is the mood of the parables of Jesus; in which a different vision of God and society holds the potential for surprises and reversals. This is rooted in the possibility of interpreting Scripture, along with the Spirit, in new periods and situations. Finally the optative is about desire, desiring and being loved. It is in the longing for, the ‘might be’, the ‘if only’… it is about fulfilment and wholeness.

Ford argues that all these ‘moods’ are present in the scriptures and to read them together is the path of wisdom. He cautions against any of them dominating inappropriately, whether it be on the one hand a literalist dogmatism or a moral absolutism, or on the other, an indefinite questioning and openness which leads to confusion or an endlessly experimental exploration of attractive possibilities. For him it is part of discernment and wisdom to navigate between these.

If wisdom lies in hearing all the moods of the voice of God in Scripture then how do we listen to them in regard to the earth? A place to begin would be with the general demeanour, the broad brush strokes by which my mentor, the Scriptures, lives her life. Thus we could state that scripture mentions ‘the earth’ five times more often than it does ‘heaven’. There is no separate word for nature as we have it now. There is ‘erets’, which is the earth as a geographical place, the terrestrial globe. Then there is ‘adamah’ – literally, arable land, the soil, the growing medium. It is in this sense that Adam and Eve are ‘earthlings’. ‘Gan’ is also sometimes used to refer to a paradisical garden with trees. The New Testament adds ‘cosmos’ as in ‘God so loved the cosmos’. The Bible’s preferred phrase is ‘heavens and earth’ or ‘earth and all that is in it’.

In the Old Testament, themes of Creation, Jubilee and Sabbath imply a right ordering of relationship between God, humanity and the natural world, again broadly speaking: the Bible opens with the great statement of God as creator of all things. Creation is ‘good’, a gift and a blessing. But note, according to Proverbs wisdom was there from even before the beginning of the world. Proverbs 3:18 ‘Wisdom … Is a tree of life to those who embrace her: those who lay hold of her will be blessed. By Wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations…’ The unpacking of the creation stories in Genesis involves much more than I could possibly do here. You will have to be content with my big tip, which is that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are meant to be read together. That tricky verse, Gen 1: 28 (“Be fruitful and increase in number: fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground”) is to sit alongside Gen 2:15 (‘The lord took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.)

In the New Testament, there are Christological themes of reconciliation, redemption and creation held together in Christ and a vision of a new heaven and earth. I shall say a little about these later. Suffice it to say ecotheologians have written whole books, have even devoted much of their life’s work to aspects that I can only touch upon here.

Now, lets look at those ‘moods’ in a bit more detail. The indicative in terms of affirmation and praise is certainly present in the psalms. I shall list a good many for cumulative effect, but these are certainly not the only passages with this theme, e.g. in Ps 104 …He stretches out the heavens like a tent…he makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind….he makes springs pour water into the ravines…the lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God….there is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number…when you send your spirit they are created, and you renew the face of the earth….I will sing to the Lord all my life…Praise the Lord O my soul. Ps 148:3 Praise him sun and moon, praise him all you shining stars…Ps 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Ps 50:11 I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine…for the world is mine and all that is in it. Ps 65 Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion who formed the mountains by your power…you care for the land and water it, you enrich it abundantly …the meadows and the valleys…. shout for joy and sing. Ps 8 O Lord, Our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Ps 96 Sing to the Lord all the Earth… let the sea resound and all that is in it…Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy…. Ps 95 Come let us sing for joy to the Lord… the sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

However there are also quite a few passages that starkly make a link between the beliefs and behaviour of humans and their effects on the earth. Here we have the ‘woe to you’, so for example in Hosea 4:1-3 ‘There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder… and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away: the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying’. Or Jeremiah 4:23 ‘I looked at the earth and it was formless and empty; and at the heavens and their light was gone. I looked at the mountains and they were quaking;….the earth will mourn and the heavens above grow dark.’ Or Isaiah 24:4 ‘the earth dries up and withers…the earth is defiled by its people…. A curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt.’

The cries of the earth in mourning and desolation as the result of the sin of humanity are ones that we are to take seriously in our time.

Likewise the imperative mood is expressed often in passages about the earth. e.g. Deuteronomy 20:19 ‘When you lay siege to a city…. do not destroy its trees…Are the trees of the field men that you should besiege them?’ Here are a couple of my personal favourites; Deuteronomy 22:6 If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life. And, Proverbs 6:6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!’ (This is something my kids instinctively do).God commands us to watch ants in order to gain wisdom!

Interrogatives also abound, (Isaiah 40:21 ‘Do you not know? Have you not heard?.... He stretches the heavens like a canopy…Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: who created all these?’) but are perhaps most poetically expressed in the closing chapters of Job where God speaks out of the whirlwind. So, for instance Job 39:1 ‘Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?’ God responds to the suffering and despair of Job with cosmology, meteorology, ornithology and animal husbandry! Whereas Job has related everything to his own condition, God’s answer is to celebrate creation for its own sake. Creation has a dignity, freedom, beauty, mystery and intense life of its own and God is intimately related to it. So in Job 38:22 ‘Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail which I reserve for times of trouble?…’

Subjunctives are harder to find but are surely present in passages such as Romans 8 ‘The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed…. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth…’ There is complex theology here, which again is impossible to deliberate on at length here, but there is certainly the suggestion that the time has come for liberating what has come to be enslaved and that the liberation of nature is tied up somehow with the liberation of humanity.

The great Colossians hymn of 1:16 is worth hearing too. Here is the statement that the world is made not only by Christ and for Christ, but in him all things ‘hold together’, and it really does mean all things, thus Christ is the agent of redemption and creation. In a cosmic drama of reconciliation our redeemer is also our creator, our creator is also our redeemer. Redemption then is the restoration of creation too. Redemption does not mean the annihilation of creation but rather its renewal. This renewal of the old is a bringing of it to fulfilment. God does not make all new things, but all things new.

There is also much to ponder in the opening words of John’s gospel; that ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us’. What implications are there of this from an ecological point of view? I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Apart from one of those passages that surprises and challenges us (Revelation 11:18 The time has come for…. destroying those who destroy the earth) much of the visioning of the book of Revelation operates in the optative mood. In Rev 22 1-2 the river of the water of life flows from the throne of God and of the lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stand the tree of life… and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. This tree along with its counterpart in Genesis ‘frames’ the scriptures such that we could say that the whole Biblical witness stands between these trees of life.

Belonging to this mood is also the great vision of Isaiah 65:17 Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth…..The wolf and the lamb will feed together and the lion will eat straw like the ox’. Someone is bound to ask me about the vision of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ (ouranon kainon kai gen kainen). ‘New’ here connotes new in quality, in contrast to what is old. Thus there is the sense of renewed, not disposed of in the Biblical passages. What seems to be in 2 Peter 3 a vision of great destruction (vs 10 ‘But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare’) is counteracted by vs 13 (‘but in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness’.)

The optative mood is also glimpsed in Leviticus 25 where there is a full working out of the command to rest, to restore and to equalise in the justice concepts of the Sabbath and Jubilee. (vs11 ‘ The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and to be holy for you…’) and note that in Genesis 9 God makes a covenant with all living things (vs12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you….I have set my rainbow in the clouds and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” )

It must be possible to say from even this brief foray into the scriptures that God deeply values the earth. Indeed the Trinitarian God, as creator, redeemer and sustainer is inextricably bound up with its history and its fate, as are we humans. To hear the wisdom contained within Scripture it is necessary to be attuned to each of the moods and voices and not to let one have ascendancy. That is, those which affirm and arrest, those which summon, those that question, those that are open to possibilities and those that display God’s vision and desire for the future of the world. In practice this means that we are to be alert to the cries of the vulnerable ones, even the vulnerable of the earth such as coral reefs and for such attentiveness to inform our action. Scripture discloses to us that there is a kind of wisdom in the act of crying itself. I need not have worried then about arriving at a place of peace.

Response to Phillip Tolliday

I quite like the history of ideas. Ideas that we take for granted were not always so obvious. Quantification is an example. We think it obvious that phenomena can be considered in a consistent and even manner. But it was not always so. Almost a thousand years ago the hours of the day in Western Europe were not standardized across the year. In winter, when there was less light, an hour was shorter than it was in summer when there was more light! (We keep the length of an hour standard, but have less daylight hours in winter because we recognise standardised quantification.) Another example is the medieval picture of a city with no 'space' in the city, just all the buildings crowded together. Part of the reason for this is because former ages did not have a concept of nothing and absence quite like we do. Unused space did not need to be represented. Similar to the use of zero in the late middle ages and Renaissance; it took a long time to catch on because representing nothing seemed odd. Time is another example of a shift in understanding toward equal quantification. But to us now it seems odd not to recognize nothing. The difference in ideas from one age to another is part of the hermeneutical that must be negotiated by any interpreter of the past. Phillip has done us a favour by focusing our attention on a number of different ways theologians and interpreters have attempted to bridge the gap between Scripture and themselves.

Phillip's assertion, corroborated in the post, is that Scripture is sufficiently plain for the theological task (and therefore Christian living). Importantly, however, the plain sense does not mean we should expect a single interpretation of the text. On the contrary, a variety of interpretations, by both a single interpreter or across the history of Scriptural interpretation, is to be expected and desired. Each plain sense reading must be a constant negotiation between text and some kind of 'rule'. Whether the rule be the doctrine of God (Calvin) or a community's interpretive conventions (see Phillip on Kathryn Tanner), or an eschatological perspective (Rowan Williams) that, in some way, discourages nailing down the meaning of a text for all time, the meaning of a particular text will become plainer. The relationship between Scripture and 'rule' needs further elucidation, of course. But the point remains: in the history of interpretation, faithful reading of Scripture has resulted in a variety of plain meanings. Phillip is not suggesting that a former age's plain meaning can no longer function in this way now. Multiple plain meanings synchronically and diachronically is not a clever way of disarming the integrity of Scripture and descending into individualised and subjective personal readings of the text.

If we follow the detail of Phillip's examination, and follow the trajectory, where does this lead us in the current debate in the Anglican Communion? For one thing, it should help us see that the multiplication of interpretations does not mean necessarily that some people are not taking Scripture as authoritative. It could mean exactly the opposite. Second, to naively claim that some interpretations are obvious, and that contrary interpretations are therefore wrong, needs a lot more justification. Granted, a particular interpretation might be plain, but somight the other. Part of the work needed is an honest confession of what 'rule' we use to negotiate the text. is the rule derived from the overall plot of the Scripotures (as Phillip mentions)? My penchant for a doctrinal approach makes me wonder if some of the diametrically opposed views on the issue of who has sex with whom might be due to majoring on something less than major.

A good precise piece of work Phillip.

Just How Plain is the ‘Plain Sense’ of Scripture?

By Revd Dr Phillip Tolliday

A recent document posted by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans notes that: ‘We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary to salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.’ Jerusalem Declaration – Article 2.

In this paper I want to inquire into what might be meant by the plain sense of Scripture. (1) One of my primary questions will be: just how plain is the plain sense? To anticipate my conclusion, I believe the answer can be stated both negatively and positively. Negatively, the plain sense of Scripture is plainer than a deconstructionist believes it can be, but not nearly as plain as a fundamentalist believes it is. Positively stated, the plain sense of Scripture is sufficiently plain. In this context ‘sufficient’ is a loaded term, referring as it does to the sufficiency of Scripture and thereby forming part of the complex of the so-called Properties of Scripture.

In a world where the plain sense of any text is under suspicion it may seem overly ambitious to assert that we must read, preach, teach and obey the Bible in its plain and canonical sense. Indeed a moment’s sober reflection might serve to show us that given the manifestly different, not to say contradictory, interpretations of Scripture within our various communities that the plain sense of Scripture appears to be anything but plain. To this situation there are at least two possible—though to my mind unsatisfactory—solutions. The first is to say that the plain sense of Scripture simply entails the abandonment of the hermeneutical task. If all believers can find Scripture clear in its meaning and application then perhaps we just have to live with a ‘conflict of interpretations.’ The situation invited by such a scenario is the same one dogging the Anglican Communion at the moment: how much conflict can be sustained while still remaining under the same roof called ‘Christian.’ The second solution is to say that Scripture is the Church’s book and must therefore be interpreted according to the rule of faith. On this understanding it is ‘The church to teach and define, the Bible to illustrate and confirm.’ But it is here that the Protestant critique of the principle of tradition begins to bite, because how do we know that the magisterium of the church is a correct interpreter of Scripture? Moreover what becomes of the church’s obligation to listen to the Scriptures? Are not the dynamics driving the various authorities within the church similar to those of the individual interpreters? In what follows I will suggest that an understanding of the plain sense of Scripture does not commit us to the elimination of ‘readerly activity,’ nor does it ‘suspend interpretation.’(2)

II

Kathryn Tanner addresses the issue of the plain sense of Scripture via a ‘theological investigation that is almost sociological in nature.'(3) She argues that the meaning of the plain sense is to be discerned from its function within specific faith communities. Thus the plain sense is the familiar, the traditional and hence authoritative meaning of a text within a community whose conventions for the reading of it have therefore already become relatively sedimented.' (4) By this I take her to mean that the plain sense is the sense which is immediately apparent within the community and is accepted as their ‘unselfconscious habit.’ It may also be her way of countering a suspicion that the plain sense consists of whatever the community might say any given text ‘means,’ but this is not her point. To say that the conventions for reading a text in a particular way have become relatively sedimented means that a reading which strikes the community as unfamiliar would, on Tanner’s account, be not according to the plain sense. But presumably it could become so, since the plain sense is not anything ‘in itself, apart from an interpretive practice of using texts’ by the community. (5 Since her discussion of the plain sense is formal, ie., she is looking for the plain sense as a function of communal practice, it follows that she does not attempt to ‘prejudge the material character of the plain sense as that is variously established in fact by different communities or by the same community at different times or in different circumstances.' (6) Consequentially the plain sense need not be always and everywhere the same.

A tangible and material example of how Tanner’s proposal works in practice is provided by Kathryn Greene-McCreight who shows how the literal meaning or plain sense of Genesis 1-3 has been variously interpreted and understood by Augustine, Calvin and Barth. Her conclusion, which is justified by comprehensive examples from all three thinkers is that ‘the intent to read the “plain sense” in the examples of exegesis examined…almost never amounts to a search for the single meaning of the text.' (7) Instead we find ourselves confronted with three discrete attempts to negotiate the plain sense by way of an engagement between the text and the rule of faith.

Augustine emphasizes the importance of the literal meaning of the text, claiming that allegorical meanings can only be favoured over the literal in those cases where the literal meaning would be contrary to the rule of love. Ironically, Augustine himself found the literal meaning of the text repulsive and it was instead the sermons of Ambrose, themselves based on allegorical interpretations of Scripture, which finally turned Augustine’s heart toward the Gospel. In his negotiation of the plain sense, Augustine is attuned to ‘both intra-communal and extra-communal apologetics.’ Augustine’s plain reading is limited in part by the verbal sense of the text as well as by the rule of faith. Significantly the latter not only poses a ‘limit to polysemy,’ it also ‘generates polysemy’—and it is able to do both because the text cannot be read in contradiction to the catholic faith. However, in the end it is ‘on the basis of the literal sense that one can and must authorize doctrine.' (8)

In seeming distinction from Augustine, Calvin preferred the literal reading and disdained allegorical interpretation; a position which accounted in part for his criticism of Origen. In his commentary on Galatians he wrote: ‘Let us know, then, that the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and simple one [verum sensum scripturae, qui germanus est et simplex] and let us embrace and hold it resolutely. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as deadly corruptions, those pretended expositions which lead us away from the literal sense [a literali sensu].' (9) But what exactly did Calvin mean by the literal sense? Suffice it to say here that for Calvin the literal sense did not automatically rule out figural interpretation. Indeed literal interpretation turns out to be more complex than we might imagine because Calvin’s negotiation is between the verbal sense of the text and his doctrine of God. Whereas Augustine’s reading of the text was informed to some degree by his neo-Platonic background, Calvin’s is shaped by the cultural milieu of Humanism. Calvin, more than Augustine, interprets the biblical text according to the letter, ie., literally, but because of this, and not in spite of it, this means that he reads much of the text figuratively. In addition, the reason why a ruled reading necessitates a figurative interpretation of many texts is because for Calvin the purpose of the text is to expound doctrine and ethics.

Barth’s understanding of the plain sense of Scripture is controlled by his assumption ‘that the Bible’s central function is to witness to Jesus Christ.' (10) Barth distinguishes between the categories of myth and saga and reserves the term ‘saga’ for the creation stories. Since saga has to do with history, even if it is not limited to history, it follows that the creation stories considered as saga ‘call for reading a “deep” literal sense, one which “points beyond itself.”'(11) Since Barth regards the creation stories as saga he is able to make a very close connection between the literal or simple and figurative meaning in the text. Indeed for Barth ‘Scripture is read “plainly” in the inextricable conjunction of simple and figurative reading.’(12) Greene-McCreight provides an example of this
conjunction in Barth’s discussion of the work of creation on the third day.

‘The sea of which [the passage] speaks is, of course, literally and concretely the fluid element in all its earthly fullness, gathered and maintained in its place in relation to the earth, forming the natural western boundary of Palestine. But as such it is much more…it is a sign which points beyond itself…Similarly, the ‘earth’ is literally and concretely the terra firma on which, protected from the onslaught of the sea, man may and will have his being. But while it is this, it is much more. The miracle of its existence as such is also a sign…visibly and palpably it is a presentation of the grace in virtue of which God sustains and protects man for Himself and His purposes.' (13)

The polyvalence of the biblical texts means for Barth that a plain sense reading of Scripture must encompass the figural as well as the simple or surface meaning. In an example such as the one above, it is those elements of the story that point beyond themselves that signify no less than the simple, the proper and plain sense of the text.

Greene-McCreight’s conclusions from her study of Augustine, Calvin and Barth suggest that a plain sense reading of Scripture is based on more than its purely verbal sense. There is a constant negotiation between the text and the ruled sense of reading. Each of these theologians ‘comes to the Bible with an overall understanding of the “plot” of the story. (14) To be sure, that plot differs from person to person, but formally, as Tanner has already suggested, this means that a plain sense reading will result from ‘a conjunction of verbal sense and prior understanding of the subject matter of the text provided by the conception of the Christian faith supplied by the apostolic tradition. (15) Not only is it the case that the plain sense need not be always and everywhere the same; it is not always and everywhere the same.

Rowan Williams has suggested that we need to ‘re-examine and re-state the case for the primacy of the literal.' (16) The relation between the literal and the non-literal sense of Scripture is best understood as a tension between ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’ forms of reading. According to Williams, a literal reading is diachronic, by which he means that we can read a text in a dramatic way, ‘by following it through a single time-continuum, reading it as a sequence of changes, a pattern of transformations.' (17) These transformations include ‘the movement of the text as it stands,’ ‘the deeper movements or rhythms within it…the way in which it can put itself in question,’ an awareness on the part of the reader of the writer’s goals ‘as they are enacted in the text.' (18) These considerations lead to a measure of flexibility in the definition of ‘literal’ that Williams readily acknowledges ‘may seem odd.’ However, his point is that a literal reading of the text will disclose a dissonance as well as a resonance between the time of the text and our time. Such reading, is, he says, ‘a way of resisting the premature unities and harmonies of a non-literal reading (whether allegorical, existentialist, structuralist or deconstructionist), in which the time that matters is only the present of reader…' (19) Those of us who have employed such hermeneutical strategies are fully aware of their usefulness. But have we moved to these strategies too readily, bewitched by ‘narrow and sterile definitions of the literal sense against which recent hermeneutics has so sharply reacted.' (20)

Thomas Aquinas insisted on the priority of the literal sense of Scripture and he interpreted this literal or plain sense as the intention of the author—in the case of Scripture, God. Aquinas did not believe the literal sense to be dependent ‘on a belief that all scriptural propositions uncomplicatedly depict real states of affairs detail by detail; it can and does include metaphor…'(21) Consequently Aquinas allowed for an understanding of the literal or plain sense that included a ‘plurality of genres within it.’ However, this wider sense was lost and the culprit, according to Williams, was a ‘more sophisticated literary hermeneutic, by way of historical and comparative criticism’ that led to the redefinition of ‘literal’ that we now associate with fundamentalism (22) Williams argues that fundamentalism linked the literal with the historical, but then assumed (incorrectly) that the historical can apply only to a univocally descriptive and exact representation of particular sequences of fact. In the light of this it is interesting to consider that neither Augustine, nor Calvin nor Barth was able to sustain this demand for a univocal and exact representation of ‘fact’ in order to justify their plain sense or literal reading of the Scriptures.

These considerations lead Williams to propose that we ‘reconceive the literal sense of Scripture as an eschatological sense.' (23)This grows out of his assumption that how we understand our own relationship to the time and place of the text is an important element in ascertaining the plain sense of the text. A key question is, how does our time fit within the ‘time’ of the narrative? One way of testing how this works is by using a lectionary that involves us in reading as public performance. ‘At certain times, above all the paschal celebration, this is intensified in a way evidently designed to bring our time and the time of the canonical narrative together.'(24) But to read our time into the history of salvation is to read it into a time which is not yet complete. It is to read our lives in the light of the eschaton and it is therefore to be ‘integrated into…a future we cannot but call God’s because we have no secure human way of planning it or thematising it.' (25) Consequently, the literal or plain sense of Scripture guards against the premature closure of meaning. Far from the literal being a source ‘for problem-solving clarity, as it might appear for the fundamentalist’ it is instead always growing out of and being shaped by a particular set of communal and individual histories. In summary, Williams, like Greene-McCreight and Tanner, sees the plain sense reading of Scripture as an invitation to broaden interpretation and not restrict it.

III

The previous section has explored the possibility that the plain sense of Scripture might not be always and everywhere the same—indeed, that given the eschatological imperative in Christianity, it cannot remain the same. It has become clear that whatever the plain sense(s) of Scripture there is always some sort of negotiation—more or less explicit—that takes place between the text and the so-called ruled reading, better known as tradition. In this section I will touch on the plain sense of Scripture under the headings of ‘clarity’ and ‘perspicuity.’ These headings are reminiscent of the Reformation and post-Reformation polemics about the authority of Scripture and in particular the principle of sola scriptura.

Famously, Luther debated with Erasmus about the clarity of the Scriptures, arguing that Erasmus’ skeptical view of the Bible’s perspicuity was wrong. During the Council of Trent the debate with Luther was subsequently taken up and sharpened by Robert Bellarmine. Growing out of this polemical context, and driven in part by the objections of Bellarmine, Protestant Dogmatics came to refer to ‘the properties of sacred Scripture.’ They believed that objections raised against the clarity of Scripture entailed an assault on the authority of the Bible. In an attempt to defend the authority of the Bible they proposed a doctrinal complex consisting of Scripture’s ‘necessity,’ ‘sufficiency,’ ‘perspicuity,’ and ‘efficacy.'(26) Within this polemical context the perspicuity or clarity of Scripture was not simply, nor even primarily, an epistemological principle; it was also an hermeneutical, Christological, ecclesiological and critical principle.(27)

Fundamental to an understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture, and arguably the driving force behind all plain sense readings was the confessional principle: the notion that the clarity of Scripture had to do with God, and more specifically, with ‘God’s communicative act.' (28) Thus John Webster gets to the heart of the matter when he states,

‘Theological talk of the clarity of Holy Scripture is a corollary of the
church’s confession of the radiance of God in the gospel…The clarity of
Scripture is the work which God performs in and through this creaturely servant [ie., the Bible] as, in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God illumines the communion of saints and enables them to see, love and live out the gospel’s truth.'(29)

These are strong claims and against them are ranged significant objections, five of which Thompson notes. Firstly, the doctrine fails to take account of the transcendent mystery that is the subject of Scripture. Secondly, the doctrine fails to acknowledge the God-given role of the church as the interpreter of Scripture. Thirdly, the doctrine fails to take seriously the nature of the words of Scripture. Fourthly, the doctrine fails in practice given the reality of diverse interpretations. Finally, the doctrine fails by its own criterion, since Scripture confesses its own obscurity. (30) None of these objections were new. Robert Bellarmine had already rehearsed most of them in the sixteenth-century.

In relation to Scripture testifying to its own obscurity, Bellarmine drew readers attention to Acts 8 where the Ethiopian eunuch needed an interpreter before he could understand the passage he was reading. He also pointed to 2 Peter 3:16 where the writer referred to some things in Paul’s letters that were ‘hard to understand.’ This, thought Bellarmine was enough to show that there was something wrong with the doctrine of perspicuity. He also referred to Augustine’s observations in De Doctrina Christiana where Augustine had opined that the obscure passages in Scripture were useful as a way of ‘taming our pride and rousing our understanding from listlessness.(31)

The Reformers responded by saying that these objections did not affect the doctrine of perspicuity, since they had never suggested that the clarity of Scripture should be confused with transparency. The assertion of perspicuity was not a call for the abandonment of hermeneutics (32) Neither was it an attempt to give the Bible qua text some magical or occult quality. Yet something gave rise to contrary suspicions and that something was an over-anxious desire to remove the subjective or communal dimension of Scripture in favour of its objectivity. This desire, understandable in the polemical context of the times was to create its own problems.

In Protestant Orthodoxy the doctrine of the clarity of Scripture took its place within a doctrine complex. Webster notes that within this ‘larger dogmatic ontology of the Bible’ such a complex provided a strategy against secularizing Scripture. By using this strategy the Reformers aimed to affirm that ‘these were not simply attributes of the subjective use of Scripture’ but were instead reflective of the ‘objective (though not, of course, non-natural) character of Scripture as divine communication.' (33) However, this push for objectivity did not come without its dangers and it is now evident that talk about the properties of Scripture could, and did, become disconnected from ‘talk of God’s reconciling and revelatory activity.’

Some attempts to defend the doctrine of perspicuity after the seventeenth-century fell into the trap of ‘talking of Scripture’s clarity in se and ante usum [so] that it became extracted from its proper dogmatic location and rendered as a natural property of the Bible qua text.' (34) And this in turn led to a situation in which ironically, the very thing that had been feared, ie., subjectivity, made its reappearance by way of ‘rational accessibility.’ Disconnecting perspicuity from its doctrinal and confessional setting meant that instead of its context being ‘the self-communicative presence of God to the community of faith’ it now became ‘the transparency of an historical report to historical reason.' (35) Thus a seemingly maximalist claim yielded minimalist conclusions.

IV

The second article in the Jerusalem Declaration is hardly making a spectacular claim in its demand that ‘the Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense.’ The tradition of the sensus literalis ‘is the closest one can come to a consensus reading of the Bible as the sacred text in the Christian church.' (36) Formally, therefore, I have no issue with the article as it stands; materially, however, I do have some reservations. I have tried to show the plain and canonical sense has varied from time to time. Yet the plain sense has been the consensus view and those who advocated it did not assume that their differences from previous readings entailed a diminution of the plain sense. It is more accurate to speak of the plain sense in the plural, whether we regard this as a consequence of eschatology (Williams), or communal life (Tanner), or multiple interpretations of the text (Greene-McCreight). Moreover, I have suggested that the post-Reformation quest to objectify Scripture and abstract it from its doctrinal setting which, being ecclesial, is at least eschatological and communal leads to a narrowing of the literal sense of Scripture, and this in turn suggests what all the defenders of perspicuity reject: namely, that the plain sense equals transparency.

1. For the purposes of this essay I shall regard the terms ‘plain sense,’ ‘clarity of scripture,’ and ‘perspicuity,’ a synonymous. Some would also include the ‘literal sense’ under this heading. For a recent attempt to distinguish the plain sense from other senses, i.e., the original, the intended, the historical and the literal, see John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, Kentucky: WJKP, 2007. For a view that places the literal and the plain sense together, see Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin and Barth Read the “Plain Sense” of Genesis 1-3, New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

2. John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Doctrine II, London: T & T Clark, 2005, 59.

3. Kathryn Tanner, ‘Theology and the Plain Sense,’ in Garrett Green, ed., Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987, 59-78, [60].

4. Tanner, ‘Theology and the Plain Sense,’ 63.

5. Tanner, ‘Theology and the Plain Sense,’ 64.

6. Tanner, ‘Theology and the Plain Sense,’ 65.

7. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 241, emphasis in the original.

8. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 80.

9. Cited by Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 97.

10. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 226.

11. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 186.

12. Greene-McCreight,Ad Litteram, 223.

13. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 223, emphasis in the original.

14. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 244.

15. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram, 244.

16. Rowan Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ Modern Theology, 7, 1993, 121-134 [124].

Williams, like Tanner, is indebted to the seminal essay by Hans Frei, ‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?’ in Frank McConnell ed., The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, Oxford: OUP, 1986, 36-77.

17. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 123.

18. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 122.

19. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 123.

20. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 124.

21. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 123.

22. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 124.

23. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 132, emphasis in the original.

24. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 126.

25. Williams, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture,’ 132.

26. Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, 268.

27. Anthony Thiselton, New Horizons In Hermeneutics, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992, 180.

28. Mark D. Thompson, A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture, Downers Grove: Apollos, 2006, 169-170. ‘The clarity of Scripture is that quality of the biblical text that, as God’s communicative act, ensures its meaning is accessible to all who come to it in faith.’

29. John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Doctrine II, London: T & T Clark, 2005, 33.

30. Thompson, A Clear and Present Word, 21-30.

31.Thompson, A Clear and Present Word, 15-153, for these and other examples and 153-157 for W. Whitaker’s response to Bellarmine.

32. Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge, Leicester: Apollos, 1998, 315-317.

33. Webster, Confessing God, 34-35, emphasis in the original.

34. Webster, Confessing God, 35.

35. Webster, Confessing God, 35.

36. Frei, ‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?’, 37.