MetaCatholic

Pressure groups you will always have with you, but we seem to have more than ever before in church and society. I confess to being a jaundiced and inveterate non-joiner of organisations, so I tend to have mixed reactions when groups come along that are doing things I regard as worthwhile. I always have a “yes, but …” reaction to them. I am sufficiently theologically idiosyncratic (you may think this is a kind euphemism for confused) to feel both attractions and disagreements with groups like Fulcrum and Affirming Catholicism.

Now there’s another such group (HT Dave Walker) to give me that old mixed reaction feeling: Affirming Liberalism. No doubt in Oxford Diocese, spiritual home of Anglican Mainstream, the liberals feel in need of some affirmation. (Am I the only one who can’t avoid the disrespectful thought, when I see AM’s founding fathers Philip Giddings and Chris Sugden being interviewed together, that they look like a crotchety gay couple?) Part of me is very pleased to see people sticking up for the “L” word. Not only do we believe in the liberality of God, but we believe we should love him with all our minds, and that our rationality is a part of being made in his image. Another part of me always thinks liberal is a better adjective than it is a noun, a flower rather than a root.

But I like so much of what they affirm:

Affirming faith in Jesus’ life, teaching, death and resurrection as revealing God’s limitless love for all humanity in this life and the next.

Affirming the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit in the world in dispersing this divine love throughout the world.

Affirming the positive impact of biblical, literary and historical criticism for our engagement with Scripture and Tradition.

Affirming appreciation of the distinctive nature of religious language in vibrant worship which connects us to the divine.

Affirming a philosophical approach to Christian faith and the search for truth through God-given reason.

Affirming the positive insights of the natural sciences and mathematics in the formation of a Christian world-view and understanding of the universe.

Affirming the positive impact of the social sciences for understanding human nature and society, and developing Christian ethics.

Affirming the vitality of the performing and creative arts in shaping a dynamic Christian vision of life lived in relation to God.

Affirming open, creative conversation with Evangelicals and Catholics as a means of enriching our understanding of the Christian gospel.

Affirming open, creative conversation with other faith traditions and cultures as a way of deepening our understanding of God.

(Emphasis as in the original)

There are things not explicitly there that I miss, and would always have more positive statements about: Scripture, the Church, the Sacraments and the Saints, faith both communal and personal, are fundamental to my affirmations. Nonetheless, all but three represent affirmations (which among others) I can make without any qualification. Which, you may ask, are those I have some problems with?

The last affirmation is one I would want to qualify.I believe that any dialogue with any position whatsoever can always enrich my understanding, and any human encounter can help deepen my understanding of God. That enrichment can happen through agreement or disagreement, a new way of looking at things, or a conviction that my own stance has become clearer in contradistinction. Primarily it happens through the making of new relationships, and not totally abstractly in the intellectual content of the conversation. I would not necessarily want to privilege faith traditions over non-believing philosophies in that dialogue, nor would I wish to assume that just because someone believes in God, a god or gods, that they are in some way on a par either with each other or with Christianity in the search for truth, and somehow above others. The wording, as it stands, seems to imply that, though I am unsure whether it be the intention.

I also have my doubts about exactly what the affirmation on worship means. I could affirm it, but I’d need to unpack and interpret it first. For me, worship is more about something we get caught up in, or join in, than about something we do. It is less that we connect with the divine, than that God connects with us, and invites our response. I have no problems affirming the distinctive nature of religious language, I just wouldn’t want to see worship reduced to a language-game (though in Wittgensteinian terms it is one) or indeed a purely linguistic activity.

The one I really have problems with, however, is the second:

Affirming the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit in the world in dispersing this divine love throughout the world.

There is, in a whole range of thinking – which may or may not be implied here, what I regard as a rather inadequate account of the Holy Spirit, as an inchoate, nameless, incorporeal and intangible presence seemingly divorced from the action of God in Christ. The Holy Spirit, it seems, may be identified with anything we approve of. I think this entirely overlooks the strong identification of the Spirit of God with the Spirit of Jesus, most tersely expressed in the Fourth Gospel: “there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39). That is not simply a proof-text, for it forms a significant theme in the Johannine narrative, and one which is echoed in different ways, and with different emphases, by both Luke and Paul. The characteristic emphasis of the New Testament is on the Spirit as the eschatological life of God’s presence and power gifted through the crucified and risen Lord. Talk of the Spirit is rooted in the gospel story.

I do not want to over-emphasise this point. It is a traditional and sound maxim that where one Person of the Trinity is at work, all three Persons are at work. But it is more true, I think to the story and some of its early developments to see God’s presence outside the Church in the Word which enlightens every one who comes into the world. (That may be a tendentious translation of John 1:9, but it has been a very influential one on theology.) As is revealed in the culmination on the cross of the Word’s dwelling among us, Christ is the God who goes where God is not.

We are therefore looking primarily for a Christocentric and cruciform shape of God’s working in the world when we are seeking God at work outside the accustomed, conventional and covenanted ways the Church is familiar with. As Archbishop Michael Ramsey once said “God is Christ-like, and in him is no un-Christ-likeness at all.” It is less that the Spirit disperses divine love throughout the world, and more that the Spirit is the divine love, encountered though Christ, wherever he may be found, and it is this Word, made flesh in Jesus, who addresses us and draws into that relationship of love from which and for which the world was made.

James McGrath follows up his posts on Q with a suggested Synoptic meme. He’s partially right that we’re talking about paradigms (a much overused word that I’m not entirely sure isn’t a bit too overblown for discussing models) for viewing the gospels here, where any individual piece of evidence won’t work. The crucial piece of evidence is a bit like that moment on a flight. Your hearing’s all weird as you take off, and then at a certain point, your ears pop, and hearing is restored to normal. What James is after is those moments in Synoptic study when our ears pop. What passage was the proximate cause?

It’s a great idea, and I’m afraid I can’t oblige him, which is probably just another illustration of the ways in which we’re all different, but let me say why.

I have, since I first began to engage in critical study, always believed in Markan priority. I guess that says something about my teachers, including the parish priest of my parents’ parish, who didn’t believe in hiding these things from the simple and unlearned. I’ve never come across an argument or exegesis that seriously made me question that.

When it comes to the second half of the problem, the relationship of Matthew and Luke, I haven’t really got an ear-popping moment either. I am, and I’m sure this is a disgraceful thing to say, a “don’t know”. There are some passages which make me think a direct literary dependence is a good explanation, as in my previous post on the infancy narratives. There are other places where Q appears to be the most economical explanation: “the finger of God” (Luke 11:20) is one such. Luke’s version seems to fit his theology less well than Matthew’s version would have.

This latter could, of course, be explained by Luke knowing this particular tradition well already from an oral source, and falling back on the more familiar wording. But once you do that, you’re admitting that neither the Farrer theory, nor the Two Document theory, are entirely adequate explanations. In fact, I think that’s right, they can’t be, without reducing what must have ben a more complex process to a literary theory. Either theory needs some chastening supplementation from oral tradition. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the underlying model one works with.

What has made me receptive to the Farrer theory (apart from sitting in the pub with Mark) is something different. It’s the dogmatism of those who talk about “The extant text of Q.” It’s the faux-archaeological literary approach of those who detect layers within a non-existent text. It’s the assumption that between them Matthew and Luke left hardly anything out of Q. Things like that. In short, it is less a case of evidence than irritation. The evidence is constructed by the theory which explains it. The attraction of the Farrer theory is that (even chastened by the acceptance of an ongoing interplay with oral tradition) it doesn’t mean constructing a literary source, but working with the ones we’ve got.

I am aware that falls well short of an argument, but it increasingly seems to me that the most sound approach would be first to explore the literary relationship between the texts we have, and only when it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Synoptics cannot be accounted for in those terms, should we turn to postulating hypothetical documents. The problem with the 2DH is that it took the field in advance of that exploration, before, as it were, it earned the right to do so. I am becoming ever more persuaded by Mark and others that Q was premature, and that a good case can be made for the Farrer theory.

I’m not quite there yet. But the Q hypothesis doesn’t need attacking: the Farrer theory needs exploring. If Farrer can be shown to offer a reasonable and reasonably full (not complete) account of the evidence, then Q is simply redundant.