. . . [T]he same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions.–Jacob Burckhardt

I wrote this essay primarily for myself, out of a need to sort out my thoughts about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Larkin Stuart Lecture on “The Bible Today: Reading & Hearing.” As an account of scriptural authority founded in the practice of reading and listening, it is clearly the product of a forceful and dynamic intellect; but it troubles me as a liberal, in spite of the fact that the commentator at Anglicans Really Alive sees no difficulty for liberals in it.

[The Archbishop] is critical both of the fundamentalist way of reading the bible, which he characterizes as seeing scripture “simply an inspired supernatural guide for individual conduct” and of the liberal way which he characterizes as seeing it simply as “a piece of detached historical record.”

While the thinking of Anglicans Really Alive sees itself as liberal, it is not liberal in this sense, and I believe most of us, as most of the liberal end of the spectrum in the North American debate, would be comfortable with Rowan Williams theology of hermeneutics.

Still, I’m troubled, and my trouble begins with Dr. Williams’s characterizations of the two perspectives he wishes to avoid (he ends up calling them Biblicist and liberal). In his opening remarks, the archbishop describes fundamentalism in more or less neutral language but takes a cheap shot at liberalism:

For many, it is obvious that a claim to the effect that Scripture is “God’s Word written” implies a particular set of beliefs about the Bible’s inerrancy. For others, it is equally obvious that, if you are not that savage and menacing beast called a “fundamentalist”, you are bound to see the Bible as a text of its time, instructive, even sporadically inspiring, but subject to rethinking in the light of our more advanced position.

Dr. Williams’s reductions of the two viewpoints seem to me to be vicious, though vicious in somewhat different ways. To claim that fundamentalists view scripture as merely an “an inspired supernatural guide for individual conduct” gives a pass to the political dimension of present day fundamentalism in the United States. Having successfully purged itself of some female clergy already, the Southern Baptist Convention has recently adopted a revised statement of faith limiting the pastorate to “men as qualified by scripture.” One wonders whether Dr. Williams would give a pass to Paige Patterson’s firing of an untenured assistant professor at Southwestern Theological Seminary on scriptural grounds because she is a woman. Here is a use of scripture that is broadly corporate, as are the social agendas of other fundamentalists and fundamentalist groups from the political “kingmakers,” presently being courted by Republican candidates and touted in the press, to the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Of course, liberalism has its own political agendas, most recently in evidence at the Peace Witness for Iraq and the Witness to Equality on Capitol Hill. But if Dr. Williams gives a pass to the fundamentalist view of scripture and seems to ignore (or tacitly endorse) fundamentalist politics, he also suggests in his slap at liberalism that we liberals are shallow and arrogant.

While I agree with Dr. Williams that the tradition of scripture is a tradition of reading and hearing, at least in part; and while I think that honoring that tradition in our present-day practice is both beautiful and good, my next difficulty with the archbishop’s remarks begins with this passage:

[T]he Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.

Begging the archbishop’s pardon, an invitation is hardly a summons. Dr. Williams seems to want the suggestion of openness that the word invitation carries without the plain sense. Indeed, a use of hermeneutic language normally associated with the opening of texts in order to argue that scripture is closed is the essential casuistry of Dr. Williams’s argument in this lecture. According to that argument, scripture summons us to accept membership in a community that is not finally a free gift, though the archbishop makes use of the language of grace. In the final analysis the Eucharistic community has some pretty specific membership requirements. Later in the lecture we learn that belief in the resurrection is a requirement for participation in the community that scripture constitutes, as we learn that a proper understanding of the text of scripture is that it “repeatedly recreates a movement towards conversion (towards the cross of Jesus, in Christian terms), so the eternal possibility of “reading again” stands as a warning against ignoring the active “restlessness of the text in summoning the reader to change.” So scripture summons us, actively, restlessly (presses against us like any good Derridian writing), but we are not permitted to respond with a hermeneutic of suspicion. We are to be passive, to be converted, to be of one mind. At the very least this is to elevate the creedal aspect of our religious life above all others.

In another online comment, Fr. Bill Carroll argues that Dr. Williams’s thought is characterized by a “hermeneutics of retrieval” which he has from Ricoeur. That may be, and perhaps my response to Dr. Williams should simply echo Fr. Carroll’s view that modern ideological criticism of scripture arises out of “the heart of the Eucharistic assembly itself.” But I both agree and disagree with Fr. Carroll at a deep level. In the final analysis, I do not think I agree with Dr. Williams at all.

I do not believe that Dr. Williams has any quarrel with the conception of the Eucharistic community as a diverse community, (though I do not think Dr. Williams is any sort of democrat). If his polemic sets up creedal standards for listening to scripture, I think it also presumes that dissensus in the Eucharistic community constitutes a “radical disruption . . . that poses a prima facie challenge to the continuity of God’s people then and now.” Hence, we are to understand the Eucharistic community as “contemporary with [its] founding act” but not with “what the community now senses itself to be or to have achieved,” the latter understanding being a distortion of the Eucharist. Here is how Dr. Williams puts the case more or less finally in terms of his developed view of the place of scripture in the life of the church.

We must acknowledge the tensions and internal debates in Scripture; we must also acknowledge the clear sense that the text is presented as a narrative of “fulfilment” — as one that contains a vision claiming comprehensiveness of meaning. We are to locate ourselves within this set of connections and engagements, the history of Israel, called, exiled, restored, and of Jesus crucified and risen and alive in the Spirit within the community, not to regard Scripture as one element in a merely modern landscape of conflicts.

But a landscape of conflicts is what we in fact inhabit, not only as Christians, but as humans striving to live decently and ethically in a world that is constantly being torn apart by violence, much of it sectarian in nature. This is “the world in front of the text,” and it is not merely modern; it is of a piece with the history of the faith. I like very much this observation by Fr. Carroll. “One must also recognize that there are ideologies present in the text [of scripture] which actually corrupt and destroy the liberatory thrust of the Good News (as well as of Torah, prophets, and other writings) and that these ideologies are used by Christians today, including Christians in the churches of the Anglican communion, to deadly effect.” And one must also acknowledge, I believe, that the history of the Church as well as “the law and the prophets” is a history of dissensus in which unity of understanding and established orthodoxies have most usually been brought about politically at best and at worst by force.

I could argue for the validity of historical criticism in the life of the Church, as Fr. Carroll argues for the validity of ideological criticism, but I don’t think I need to do that. The point I probably need to make is that from the perspective of Christian humanism (and that is my perspective) neither the history of the Church nor scripture itself is above criticism from outside itself. A paragraph of Dr. Williams’s text suggests a view that need not necessarily foreclose my own or Fr. Carroll’s. (I’ll quote the entire paragraph, even though it is long).

Among those skills we need to bring for receptivity is a capacity to think through what the initial relation between text and audience might be. I am not thinking primarily here of the way in which good critical scholarship elucidates such relations, though that is one of the underappreciated gifts of intellectual modernity — the enrichment of sheer historical imagination in ways barely accessible to most premodern readers and hearers. What I have in mind is a more basic matter, the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world “in front of the text” — the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself. Elements in that text may be valid and significant, but yet be capable of partial and even distorting use if not seen as part of a rhetorical process or argument. It is always worth asking, “What is the text as a full unit trying not to say or to deny?”

But Dr. Williams uses this passage to set up an argument about specific texts, and he chooses two contentious texts as cases in point. He first problematizes Jesus’ statement late in John’s gospel, “No-one comes to the Father except by me,” by suggesting that it isn’t “about the fate of non-Christians.” However, Dr. Williams”s “text as a full unit” makes the same supercessionist argument about where Christians are to locate themselves, to borrow one of Dr. Williams’s phrases, that John’s gospel is generally taken to make. Disclaimer aside, Dr. Williams seems to me to give little comfort to those among us who seek not merely to tolerate other faiths but to honor them.

Dr. Williams also problematizes Paul’s famous condemnation of same-sex relationships in the first chapter of Romans by arguing that Paul is really condemning the self-righteousness of the law abiding. The passage has been seized upon by some as a “rebuff to conservative bishops.” I don’t think this view gives sufficient weight to the way Dr. Williams concludes his remarks about the passage.

As I have said, this does nothing to settle the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment. But I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community.

The claim that Paul, in condemning same-sex relationships, is really trying to move his readers “to an awareness of universal sinfulness and need” is, as Dr. Williams points out, no comfort to those of us who seek an inclusive church, since that rhetorical intention in no way problematizes the specific evils Paul condemns.

[T]he whole point of Paul’s rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents.

Earlier, in his discussion of the Johannine passage, Dr. Williams has noted that “Jesus as he goes towards his death in the perfection of his ‘love for his own’ is already in some way a knowing of the Father as that goal towards which the self-giving of Jesus in life and death is directed.” From this Dr. Williams concludes that “The Father is not to be known apart from this knowledge of Jesus.” I think this adds a Trinitarian dimension to the requirements for receptivity Dr. Williams is urging, and while it isn’t my business to make any sort of argument about the Trinity I have to observe that the scriptural summoning to which Dr. Williams constantly alludes is not directed to a community of mere hearers of the word. It is rather directed to the Church, as a singularly constructed community.

Writing, for Derrida, is aphoristic, always pressing against the reader who must reconstruct it and against the closure of the book. For Dr. Williams, a chief characteristic of the text of scripture is closure. The lessons we read in our churches are characterized by closure just as the canon of scripture is closed. “It is not that we are given only a method of interpretation by the form of Scripture — a method that, by pointing us to the conflict and tension between texts simply leaves us with theologically unresolvable debate as a universal norm for Christian discourse . . . . There is a substantive and discernible form. The canon is presented to us as a whole, whose unity is real and coherent, even if not superficially smooth.”

I am thinking that Dr. Williams makes equally scant use of Ricoeur (whose “world in front of the text” allows for a far more relativized reading of scripture than Dr. Williams is willing to accept) and is more in line with various critiques of Ricoeur that argue in favor of determinate meaning (“the re-readability of the text risks the appearance of indeterminacy”). And I am thinking perhaps Dr. Williams shares with Professor Habermas the conviction that the goal of discourse is the achievement of consensus. But I am also thinking that “theologically unresolvable debate” is the norm in the Church and has always been the norm. There may be no more normative document in the church than the Nicene Creed; yet its construction was surrounded by debate, which even force of arms could not end. To this day there are rival versions of the creed, and to prefer one version over another is still to make a claim to privilege.

At one point, Dr. Williams seems to argue that the closure of the canon of scripture is established by the tradition of reading. “If we were asking whether there could be supplements to Scripture, ‘third testaments’ and so on, we should be attempting to assess the revelatory claims of various texts that, in the nature of the case, had not been read publicly and communally in the way scriptural texts have been, and therefore not read continuously in anything like the same sense.” The proposition that the reading tradition has established a closed canon of scripture with a unitary text seems a singularly casuistic argument. Many rival versions of scripture are presently read in churches. Lectionaries are, and always have been, particular constructions of scripture. But it may be more to the point to observe that here Dr. Williams could be understood to make a claim of orthopraxis rather than a claim of orthodoxy. If so, he might also be understood to ratify the conviction that what unites us as Anglicans is The Book of Common Prayer. Indeed Dr. Williams specifically evokes the prayer book elsewhere without mentioning it by title.

But Dr. Williams announces too that his “aim is . . . 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” (emphasis added). I should have less difficulty with Dr. Williams’s argument (though I should still have some) if I could take him to mean that the church receives scripture in a particular creedal context during the celebration of the Eucharist: that is, as we make the memorial Christ has commanded us to make. But Dr. Williams seems clearly to claim that our entire practice as Christians must be informed by a “world in front of the text” in which we are at one with the founding of the Eucharistic community but not with “what the community now senses itself to be or to have achieved.” I think there is serious ethical difficulty with this view. Here is how it plays out in Dr. Williams’s treatment of the possibilities inherent in rereading scripture:

At the same time, a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation. It is fruitful of renewed communication in a way that the spoken word alone cannot be. So to identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate.

But,

The closed canon establishes the same texts as the material for public reading for indefinite time; these texts have the indisputably ‘closed’ character of the historical past, pointing to an act already definitively enacted, an act to which future reception must respond. Opening the canon (itself a strained use of language if you think about it) would mean that something was being negotiated that was not primarily and essentially response to an act already performed. We should have a hybrid view of revelation as text plus supplements — additional elements, written or unwritten, uncontrolled by the limits of a text whose identity is fixed as historical. This is the substance of the Reformation objection to certain decadent views of tradition, views decisively rejected by later Catholic thought also.

This argument seems to be addressed to the possibility of novel interpretation, a possibility that Dr. Williams’s own language might be taken to embrace at one point: “At the same time, a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation.” But where this leads is not where the plain sense of Dr. Williams’s own text points. God is present in the assembly gathered for worship, but because God’s word is mediated by a closed text, God isn’t going to say anything new. Moreover:

The summons to the reader/hearer is to involvement in the Body of Christ, the agent of the Kingdom, as we have seen; and that Body is what is constituted and maintained by the breaking of bread and all that this means. For Paul, exploring it in I Corinthians, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is strictly bound up with the central character of the community: what is shown in the Eucharist is a community of interdependence and penitent self-awareness, discovering the dangers of partisan self-assertion or uncritical reproduction of the relations of power and status that prevail in the society around.

It isn’t my purpose to say where or whether I think the Holy Spirit may be leading us today in the Anglican Communion, but it seems clear that our history is offering us two rival conceptions of Christian community. Those of us who view the Church as a collegial body characterized by dissensus generally stand accused of “partisan self-assertion and uncritical reproduction of the relations of power that prevail in the society around” already. As I reflect on the whole of Dr. Williams’s argument about “the nature of Christian identity,” I am forced to disagree with the commentator I have quoted at the beginning of this essay. I believe Dr. Williams couches his discourse as a reproof of liberals and liberalism. This is bad news, perhaps, but it isn’t new news.

My own view of scripture is primarily historical rather than theological. I don’t understand theological extrapolations based on a unitary view of scripture, and I tend to think unitary views are based on selected traditions. But I think I understand Anthony Grafton, who has recently published a beautiful review of “In the Beginning,” an “exhibition of Bibles from before the year 1000 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.” I’ll quote one relevant paragraph.

Scholars have known that the texts varied radically for a long time — at least since the Christian scholar Origen, in the third century of the Common Era, arranged six texts of the Old Testament, Hebrew and Greek, in parallel columns. And there was no end to this glacial movement, this astounding capacity of the text to slip and change. In late antiquity, great libraries, such as the one at the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, held many different versions of the Bible, Greek and Latin, Arabic and Georgian and Slavonic, each with its own textual tendencies and patterns of decoration; and these sometimes flowed together in unexpected ways as scribes and illuminators developed their crafts in dialogue with colleagues hundreds of miles away. And of course the commentaries that filled margins and crept into the spaces between lines, the prefatory letters by Fathers of the Church, and the illustrations suggested, and sometimes imposed, distinctive new senses on the biblical text at the center of the page. For all the efforts to fix a canon, both the words and their meanings remained amazingly labile.

I believe this account resembles the view of scriptural tradition that Dr. Williams characterizes as decadent, but Professor Grafton concludes with an appreciation of “the men and women — Jewish and Christian, Eastern and Western — who first wrote [the] books [of the Bible], and their successors through the centuries, who read them and reproduced them with a care and an artistry that are foreign to our own civilization.” For Grafton the Biblical tradition on view in the Sackler Gallery exhibition is historical but hardly fixed, and it has a lesson to teach.” The only reason to believe that a particular Christian (or Hebrew) Bible represents the Truth is that it supports beliefs drawn from other sources of conviction.”

I am inspired and comforted by Professor Grafton’s words. There is a largeness of spirit in them that I cannot find in Dr. Williams’s theology. Says Grafton, “The sons and daughters of men have given us the Word of God, and kept it for us, in many forms, always believing that they were capturing the highest of truths as they did so.” And his valediction might be mine as well: “That is all the inspiration that history can reveal. But in its way it is divine.”