How do we read these Old Testament stories?

 Lately, in my daily Bible reading, I have been using The Message, a translation of the Bible in contemporary language by Eugene Peterson. I like it because it sometimes expresses familiar passages in new ways that make me think.

One bonus in the "Readers Edition" that I have, kindly given to me by my wonderful wife, is that at the beginning of each Bible book there is a short introduction by Peterson. Here is some of his Introduction to 1 & 2 Samuel.

Four lives dominate the two-volume narrative ... Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David. ... These four lives become seminal for us at the moment we realize that our ego-bound experience is too small a context in which to understand and experience what it means to believe in God and follow his ways. For these are large lives—large because they live in the largeness of God. Not one of them can be accounted for in terms of cultural conditions or psychological dynamics; God is the country in which they live. 

Most of us need to be reminded that these stories are not exemplary in the sense that we stand back and admire them, like statues in a gallery, knowing all the while that we will never be able to live either that gloriously or tragically ourselves. Rather they are immersions into the actual business of living itself: this is what it means to be human. Reading and praying our way through these pages, we get it; gradually but most emphatically we recognize that what it means to be a woman, a man, mostly has to do with God. These four stories do not show us how we should live but how in fact we do live, authenticating the reality of our daily experience as the stuff that God uses to work out his purposes of salvation in us and in the world. 

One of many welcome consequences in learning to “read” our lives in the lives of Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David is a sense of affirmation and freedom: we don’t have to fit into prefabricated moral or mental or religious boxes before we are admitted into the company of God—we are taken seriously just as we are and given a place in his story, for it is, after all, his story; none of us is the leading character in the story of our life. 

 For the biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.” The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this. This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.” We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality”—God as decoration, God as enhancement. The Samuel narrative will not allow that. In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

[The complete text of this introduction is here.]

Where to from here? How should the West respond to its Christian heritage?

 Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland is an amazing read. In just over 500 (!) pages he presents a compelling story of the interplay of Christian theology, church history, and the intellectual and political history of the Western world. 

This month in the theology reading group, we are discussing the third and final section, Modernitas, which covers 1645 to the present. The scope is amazing. The cast of characters includes Oliver Cromwell, Baruch Spinoza, Benjamin Lay, Voltaire, Marquis de Sade, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Karl Marx, Andrew Carnegie, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.R.R. Tolkien, the Beatles, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., ... The issues and topics discussed include the abolition of slavery, evolution, human rights, capitalism, communism, democracy, war, sexual morality, secularism, homosexuality, and the #MeToo movement.

A helpful summary of the main point of the book is at the end.

 If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution – a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead—then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth? 

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth. 

Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.

(p.524-5, Abacus 2020 paperback edition).

A specific example of the type of argument Holland makes (and his beautiful prose) is the following. Even Marxism is deeply indebted to Christian theology.

 Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by certainties that had no obvious source in his model of economics. They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil. 

Communism was a ‘spectre’: a thing of awful and potent spirit. Just as demons had once haunted Origen, so the workings of capitalism haunted Marx. ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ This was hardly the language of a man emancipated from epiphenomena. The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’—owed to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it. (pp. 441).

So what? What might be appropriate responses to this book? It is receiving considerable attention from those with a wide range of perspectives, both Christian and not. There seems little argument about whether the book is historically accurate. The debate is more about the implications for life today. Here is a caricature of two responses, briefly alluded to by Ross Douthat in a column in the New York Times a year ago.

An atheist who identifies with the secular political left may concede the Christian origins of many issues that are central to their vision for society: economic justice, human rights, equality,... However, they may say that we can take these good things and we can dispense with all the theology and Christian institutions. They are outdated, unscientific, superstitious, have served their usefulness, and on balance have been instruments of oppression.

A Christian who identifies with the political right will be proud of this heritage and argue that unless Western society returns to these origins, and institutionalises them in terms of law and education we are doomed to societal chaos.

I find both problematic and actually dangerous. Both seem to assume that all you need to do is legislate and institutionalise morality and values. Both may have a strain of self-righteousness. It is just different sins that they focus on.

As much as I love the book, Tom Holland presents a "secular" history of the human dimension to Christianity, which is almost one-dimensional. On one level this is fair enough as it is where his expertise lays and is the ground rules for public intellectual discourse.

There are some more fundamental questions that need to be addressed.

Holland highlights some aspects of the Western world that are distinctly "Christian" But, what about the many aspects that are not, such as individualism, consumerism, neoliberalism, ...?

Is there a role for the divine? Is there something amazing and powerful and transcendent also going on in all this history? Who was Jesus? Was he more than a profound teacher who died a brutal death? Did he actually rise from the dead? Jesus' death on the cross was certainly a powerful, counter-cultural, and inspiring symbol of suffering. But did it actually bring into being a new spiritual reality and achieve a real reconciliation with God (i.e. atonement)? Were Christians who changed their worlds able to do that just because they were inspired by radical ideas (power through weakness, the last will be first, the dignity of all humans, ...), or were they actually tapping into a powerful spiritual force that not just transformed them but also those they interacted with? Is the positive influence of Christian ideas and values on Western society an example of common grace?

In different words, what actually is authentic Christianity? Is it true? Is it real?

Has the modern church lost the radical and counter-cultural edge of the teachings of Jesus and Paul?

The book highlights the necessity of the western world to grapple with such questions in a humble, honest, and open manner. If Christianity shaped our past and present, how should it shape our future?