The Bible, Theology and the Mellitus Experiment

Location: Nanjing Theological Academy, China

Date: 20140410

It is very moving to be here over thirty years since my last visit under the aegis of Bishop K.H.Ting of blessed memory. It was the early 1980’s and China was a very different place. I remember an epic journey by steam train from Hangzhou to Xian. As Secretary to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, I was equipped with an Olivetti portable typewriter with a sheaf of carbon papers for producing documents along the way. In this digital age such technology seems primitive although the type writer itself was a considerable advance on the situation when I was a boy.

I was the ink monitor in my class at school charged with filling the ceramic inkwells with which every desk was supplied. We learnt “copperplate” writing, using simple pens with steel nibs. Recently, when I visited one of our church schools in London [we have the privilege in partnership with the government of educating 55,000 London children a day in our diocesan schools] I was asked for a memory of my own school days. I recalled being the ink monitor and the children looked bewildered until the teacher came to my rescue and said “We have just done a project on the reign of Queen Victoria and there is an ink can in our historic display.”

The changes have been huge but I vividly remember visiting the Nanjing Theological Academy. We were given a very warm welcome and at the end of our visit the students stood to sing Danny Boy in our honour. We were astonished and moved. After some conversation with staff and students we emerged full of hope for the future of the Christian Church in this land and for the future of China. It is an impression and a hope that has never been effaced and I count it to be an honour and an encouragement to be with you once again.

More than thirty years on, my responsibilities are different. My principal reason for visiting China is as President of Bible Society. The Society, whose Patron is the Queen, was founded in London in 1804. From the beginning the Bible Society was resolutely post-denominational and concerned with the provision of the text of the Bible and its distribution in the various languages of the world. You will know that the first entire copy of the scriptures in Chinese was published in 1822 and that the Bible Society continued to be involved in the development of the Mandarin text before the appearance of the Chinese Union Version in 1919.

I also come here after being involved in the foundation of a Theological College in London, a younger brother for the Nanjing Theological Academy. Our college is named after one of my predecessors as Bishop of London, St Mellitus, who built the first St Paul’s Cathedral in 604 AD.

Founded only in 2007, the growth of our college has necessitated constant reflection on the shortcomings of theological education in our context and a revaluation of our approach to the Bible in the formation of ordained ministers.

St Mellitus College initially served the dioceses of London and Essex but has now expanded and a hub has been established in Liverpool in the north. The intention is to use the resources of modern technologies to grow further and to enter into mutually enriching dialogue with other institutions of theological education world-wide. Different Christian traditions are accessible to one another in a way unprecedented in history and in this educative “fusion of horizons” [to use a phrase of Hans-Georg Gadamer] a dialogue of equal respect with the theological tradition in China is clearly of huge significance as the world-wide Christian community seeks to live a faith that communicates an authentic vision of hope for the 21st century.

St Mellitus College has a number of godly ambitions.

As well as those training for ordained ministry we want to make theological training accessible to those seeking to articulate “a reason concerning the hope” that is in them. [IPeter III:15] We currently have more than 500 people taking our courses.

As well as preparing for traditional forms of ministry we are also concerned to help the church adapt to a rapidly changing world and to a new information order. We have a particular brief to support and develop those who are called to plant new churches.

We believe in academic rigour and excellence and as well as recruiting a first rate staff we draw on the experience of distinguished visiting lecturers but at this point we reach the nub of the matter and the main thrust of what I want to say.

The foundation of St Mellitus College owes much to dissatisfaction with the way in which theology is understood and taught in other parts of the Academy. In mediaeval times our universities were at one and the same time communities of prayer and places for the cultivation of the intellect. In our own day it is perfectly possible for academic theology which has been assimilated to the dominant methodology derived ultimately from the natural sciences to be taught by non-believers. In the process the language of theology has become excessively technical and remote from the concerns of the community of believers. It is even the case that the modern university has largely edited out of its curriculum of study the question of what it is to live the good life; an enquiry deemed too subjective to be pursued as a credible academic discipline.

St Mellitus is a College which re-unites the life of Christian community in prayer and theology in the spirit of Evagrius Ponticus, one of the foremost teachers of the spiritual life in the early church. One of his apothegms sums up our intention – “If you are a theologian, you pray truly and if you pray truly you are a theologian”. Christian prayer is a movement of the mind in the heart toward God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. For some spiritual traditions, meditation or contemplation are spiritual activities which are seen to be valuable in themselves and need no further justification. Christian prayer is by contrast an engagement with the source of our faith, a source which is in some way apprehended or known. The mind is involved in Christian prayer and as believers, we do not just feel something, we know something.

Prayer involves waiting on God with the mind in the heart – the spiritual heart that is, which the Hebrews placed in the vitals; prayer leads to an openness to God of the whole person in stillness. The stillness and the waiting are crucial because the God and Father of Jesus Christ is not a god we discover but rather a God who reveals himself, who comes in annunciation.

So prayer and worship are at the heart of St Mellitus College as we seek to study the scriptures and to be open to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in the church and in the world.

Without the context of true prayer, biblical exegesis and theology can easily become just a technical exercise and the energy for transformation latent in the bible cannot be released because the text lies in bits and pieces, in a study of sources and literary forms, dis-assembled even atomized upon the scholar’s desk.

Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher/theologian asserts that “The first naiveté of primordial openness to religious symbolism has been lost to modern people but a second naiveté of belief founded on traces of the sacred in the world of the text is possible.” It is possible with intellectual and spiritual integrity to enter into a second innocence in which we do not tyrannize over the text but encounter it as a living word with a claim upon our attention.

For Christians the Bible is revelation because it is a unique witness to the one who is the Word of God made flesh, and because it enacts a productive clash or sometimes a fusion between the story of Jesus Christ and the story of the persons and the community of those who have been inspired to follow him.

It is vital to read the scriptures in community and one that embraces other cultures and times. In the Church of England in our reading of Holy Scripture, we give special emphasis to doing so in the light of the creeds, the statements of belief derived from the General Councils of the early church. Studying the word together generates a deeper experience of community. St Mellitus deliberately aims to embrace the many theological and spiritual traditions in our Church in a spirit of generous orthodoxy.

One of our graduate students, the Global Tax Policy Director for a major multi-national corporation recalled the anxiety felt by representatives of the various theological traditions in the church at the time of the launch of St Mellitus. Previously we had trained ordinands in Colleges devoted to a particular part of the spectrum represented in our church. St Mellitus brings together the full diversity of life in the church and in the words of our student “we began to realise that whatever the label, the Spirit was at work in all of us. And we began to come together in mutual respect as a stronger unity. It wasn’t about homogenization of traditions. It was a realisation that God works in different, wonderful ways through all of us but to the same end.”

This is of course only a beginning and we are conscious of how much we have to earn from Christians in other parts of the world. The Spirit who comes in tongues of fire at Pentecost does not eliminate the many languages in the known world, making them one and simply reversing Babel but rather enables the gospel to be proclaimed and heard in all of them. As the proclamation proceeds the gospel is illuminated by the contrasts between human languages. This is why the work of the Bible Societies is so thrilling. Translation is also a theological adventure and not simply a mechanical process. The Chinese version of the scriptures is an especially important landmark in pointing to Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh in whom, there is as St Paul says, “no East or West”.

Translation has always been for Christians, part of indigenizing the Word in all the world. We hold to the truth that the Word of God is “uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures” but it is illuminating to compare the Christian understanding of scripture with that of Muslims in whose tradition translation of the Quran from time to time has been a capital offence. In London I am glad to be involved in an interfaith dialogue called “Scriptural Reasoning” in which Muslims, Jews and Christians are presented with some common challenge in our life together and draw on the resources of our scriptures to make a constructive response. The participants do not argue but they do speak accountably in one another’s presence. The result most often is that one’s own religious identity is confirmed and clarified but in a way that deepens respect for dialogue partners. There is sometimes a tendency to describe the followers of all three faiths, which in their different ways relate to Abraham as a spiritual ancestor, as “peoples of the book”. Christianity, however, is not properly speaking a religion of the book; it is a religion of the Word but not uniquely nor principally of the word in written form but of the Word made flesh, here and now living among us. The Christian scriptures are a unique witness to the Word but must be distinguished from the role played by the Quran in Islam. Translation has often been forbidden in Islam because for Muslims the Quran itself is to be compared with the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ as the very Word of God.

But what are the conditions for a genuine encounter with the Word through the witness of scripture?

Modern biblical study has frequently been marked by what the literary critic, George Steiner, called the “the fallacy of imitative form”. The historical/critical method has paid a sometimes unwilling tribute to the success of the methods used in the natural sciences in arriving at public and incontestable truth. Historical/critical analysis been used to establish the “original meaning” of the various texts woven together in the bible; to identify the authors’ intentions and the understanding of the original readers.

In his great book Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer questions the plausibility of the effort to establish the original meaning of the author of a text originating in a very different time and context from our own. On the contrary he argues that any work of literature is the creation of a tradition – what is handed on.

“What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin and made itself free for new relationships. Normative concepts such as the author’s meaning or the original reader’s understanding represent in fact an empty space that is filled from time to time with understanding.”

The conditions for a fruitful reading of the bible go beyond the conscientious use of methods imported from other fields of study but involve the spiritual growth of the reader.

Let me illustrate by referring to an encounter between Jesus Christ and Pilate which is recorded in St John’s Gospel. In chapter XVIII: 38, Pilate brings his examination of Jesus to a close with the question “What is truth?” but having posed the question, he immediately turns away and once again addresses the crowd. Pilate’s question is not being asked seriously but dismissively. The very first words of Jesus in the Gospel of John are, “What are you looking for?” The question at the end in the garden of the resurrection is “Who are you looking for?” Pilate asks his question but then immediately turns away from the one who can answer it. John in many ways in his gospel suggests that what we would normally regard as an intellectual enquiry – the pursuit of truth – and what we would not primarily regard as an intellectual matter at all – the development of a human relationship – are closely related and deeply interwoven.

This is also one of Gadamer’s themes. Much of what he has to say about the apprehension of truth in a literary text, and by extension, the bible, is derived from an analogy with three different kinds of conversation. It is an illuminating analysis for our study of the bible.

The first kind of conversation is reflected in Pilate’s encounter with Jesus. Jesus is an object for Pilate who observes him and attempts to categorize him in terms of his own context as military governor of Judaea, responsible for order in Jerusalem. It is a context which does not allow the conversation to develop at all. Gadamer suggests that such an approach approximates to the methodology of the so called social sciences – people are the objects of study but they are treated as units, which operate under laws which await discovery.

The second kind of conversation flows from a recognition of the other person as someone who is not simply material for enlarging my understanding of human nature. In an effort to understand the other person perhaps better than he understands himself, I withdraw my own personhood and seek not so much to listen precisely to what the other person is saying as to attend to what he is “really thinking and feeling” by “reading between the lines”. There are clearly some therapeutic conversations like this and for very good reasons but as an approach to the bible it also represents an attempt to deny one’s own historical conditioning and to assert control over the past by claiming to reconstruct the historical context of the author and thus attain an understanding of the author which ideally transcends the author’s understanding of himself.

The third kind of conversation is a better model for our engagement with scripture. This sort of conversation is described by Andrew Louth in his fine book Discerning the Mystery 1983. It is a conversation which develops,

“when I not only recognize the otherness of another but also recognize his claim over me and listen to what he has to say to me. I am not trying to ‘understand’ him and thus dominate him: I am seeking to understand what he has to say. I am open to learning something from him.”

This is analogous to the true way of seeking to understand the past which Gadamer wishes to commend.

“I must allow the validity of the claim made by tradition, not in the sense of acknowledging the past in its otherness but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open in this way to tradition sees that the historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather if it reads texts ‘historically’ has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand so that the criteria of our own knowledge can never be put in question by tradition.”

For Gadamer, history is a medium of consciousness rather than an object of conscious study.

What is requisite in studying the bible is not to find a way that will enable us to achieve objectivity but rather a sensitivity to our own historical situation and all that has contributed to it so that we can engage with the past in a fruitful dialogue.

At points in the history of Western there has been a very strong sense that we stand on a pinnacle of enlightenment and from this vantage point we have the right to judge all other times and places. It is view that is expressed in the hymn of one missionary to the East, Bishop Heber: –

“Can we whose soul are lighted with wisdom from on high,

Shall we to souls benighted the lamp of life deny?”

Gadamer remarks that:

“A person who imagines that he is free of prejudices, basing his knowledge on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself influenced by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo. A person who does not accept that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what is shown by their light.”

We study in community which transcends our time and place to enlarge our own provincial understanding of the scriptures. With an approach informed by prayer, a proper humility and awareness of our own place in space and time we can unlock the transforming dynamism of the scriptures.

This dynamism illuminates our own life story through the biblical narrative of the drama whose author and conclusion is God. Without a narrative, a person’s life is merely a random sequence of unrelated events. Engaging with the Bible whose oldest creed begins with the words “a wandering Aramaean was my father” can empower the move from our being a nomad without a destination to being a storyteller of our own life in the light of the Word made flesh; Emmanuel, God with us. For energy to be released however the bible must become a dialogue partner rather than an object of study, confined within our frame of vision and reference.

Sometimes in the past bible study has been seen as a series of problems to be solved but a genuine encounter with the Word brings us into the presence of mystery. It is vital to be clear about the distinction between problems and irreducible mystery. Gabriel Marcel in his book Being and Having has a helpful reflection on mystery and problem.

“A problem is something met with that bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery on the other hand is something in which I find myself caught up and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this province the distinction in me and before me loses its meaning.”

We are always tempted to turn a problem into a mystery and vice versa but in reality a mystery is all enveloping and not susceptible like a puzzle to “any solution by the little grey cells”. I am involved in and participate in mystery.

The heart of the Christian mystery is the fact of God-made-man; God-with-us in Christ; words even his words are secondary to the reality of what he has accomplished. To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something but to be something and to experience something. In Christ there is a new creation. The role of the Church then is not simply as the contingent vehicle in history of the Christian message but as the community through belonging to which we come into touch with the Christian mystery.

I pray for and look forward to a growing partnership in this adventure of faith. There is one world, one history objectively speaking but never just one perspective. I have come to China as a student and I am grateful to you for permitting me to share some of my own experience of ways in which the transforming dynamism of the bible and of theological understanding have been unlocked and have deepened our desire to be in an ever closer dialogue with believers in modern China.