Centre for Public Christianity (March 2025)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted a ‘Life and Faith’ interview (here) with Rod Dreher on his most-recent book:

‘Life & Faith kicks off 2025 with an eye-opening interview with journalist Rod Dreher, author of Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. In this wide-ranging chat, Rod talks about the budding religion of technology worship, the experience of art and beauty as a gateway to enchantment, the possibly malign spiritual forces at work in our world, and his increasing conviction that the world is not what you think it is.’

On the Coronavirus Conspiracies

The below is an excerpt from an email written for the congregation where I am one of the pastors.

By now, you’ve probably heard some of the conspiracy theories around the ‘real cause’ of Covid-19. Perhaps you’ve read an article or been sent a link to a video by a well-meaning friend.

In some cases, it has to do with a plot on the part of China to develop biological weapons. Or it has to do with the rollout of the 5G data network (which has led to acts of vandalism and arson against mobile phone masts). Or Bill Gates is said to be using the virus as part of a plot to control the world’s population through immunisation. For Christians, permutations of these theories often get combined with a large dose of the book of Revelation!

You might think differently, but – even apart from the fact that there is no credible evidence for any of these links – I tend to sit light to such theories.

In times such as these, there’s an innate human tendency to want to find explanations for what’s happening or to attach blame in some way. There is something about a sense of powerlessness which generates the need for some overarching explanation.

So far as we can tell, this has happened throughout history. Writing in The Guardian, Tim Adams notes that ‘at the time of the great plague in London, the spread of miracle cures and scapegoating prophecy was almost harder to contain than the infection itself’. Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, set in London in 1665, records the popularity of superstitions during that deadly time: ‘The apprehension of the people were likewise strangely increased by the error of the times... They were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams and old wives tales than ever they were before or since.’ Examples could be multiplied many times over.

Sadly, conspiracy theories like this often tap into suspicion of ‘foreigners’. Again, there are many historical examples. In the spread of syphilis across Europe in the 1390s, it was known as ‘the French sickness’ in Germany, ‘the German sickness’ in Poland, ‘the Polish sickness’ in Russia, ‘the disease of the Christians’ in Turkey, ‘the disease of the Turks’ in Persia, and so on. As Richard Evans points out, ‘since pandemics by definition spread across the globe, everywhere they arrive they come from somewhere else’.

Conspiracy theories perpetuate the sense of powerlessness and isolation people feel, feeding the idea that ‘evil forces’ are at work, offering little sense of hope.

It’s understandable that this period should raise questions that many people – Christians included – have not grappled with before. But Christians are able to reflect on the issues in a different way. Our faith in Jesus and the salvation he brings provides true hope, not because it ignores reality, but because it points to a deeper reality. We of all people know that God has addressed the sin and suffering of the world head on. We of all people know that Jesus’ death and resurrection are the climax of God’s plan to restore the whole of creation back to himself.

We can be people of truth, wisdom, and hope at this time, not because we have everything stitched up, but because we know the one who does – and his love is stronger than death itself.

On Finding a Purpose

The below is an extract from an email sent to my church.

Beyond the ever-changing daily headlines, questions of hope and meaning are never too far away.

Several of my friends have linked on Facebook to a thoughtful article in this week’s The Spectator magazine, by the journalist Douglas Murray, who asks, ‘In this strange new world, where do we find purpose?’

Murray himself concludes that ‘we are most likely to find meaning in the places where meaning has been found before. That what has seen our forebears through, and nourished them, will see us through and nourish us in turn’.

While Murray has elsewhere admitted to having a respect and admiration for Christianity, he is also a self-professed non-believer. But his sentiment here has the ring of truth about it, and it strikes me that Christians of all people know where real ‘meaning’ is found.

In his first letter, Peter encouraged his first-century readers to ‘give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have’ (1 Peter 3:15). It’s good to be able to tell others how we became a Christian, but Peter is expecting us to be able to say why. Why do we have hope? Not, in the first place, because we have a better philosophy or a better morality. The reason, ultimately, is Jesus. As Peter has said earlier in the letter, we have been born ‘into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade’ (1:3-4).

It is that hope which has nourished those who have gone before us, and it will continue to nourish us through this season.

Vern S. Poythress on Biblical Interpretation

Westminster Theological Seminary has gathered together five articles published by Vern S. Poythress between 1986 and 2014, and made them available (here) as a single pdf, under the title Issues in Hermeneutical Foundations: Selected Articles on Hermeneutics and Biblical interpretation.

As Poythress notes in the Introduction, the articles ‘address the nature of interpretation from a God-centered point of view’, from the assumption that he is present and is significant to how we read texts: ‘what kind of differences does our knowledge of God generate in our understanding of interpretation?’

2009 Gifford Lectures

I’ve just seen that the 2009 Gifford Lectures are available online.

They were delivered this year by Alister McGrath under the title of ‘A Fine-Tuned Universe: Science, Theology and the Quest for Meaning’.

The synopsis says that the lectures explore ‘the human quest for meaning in the universe, especially in the light of its apparent “fine-tuning” to permit the origination of life. Why do we long to make sense of things? Do we possess some kind of “homing instinct” for heaven?’

The individual lectures are available as pdfs here:

Lecture 1 – Introduction: Yearning to Make Sense of Things

Lecture 2 – Why We Still Need Natural Theology

Lecture 3 – The Mystery of the Constants of Nature

Lecture 4 – The Enigmas of Evolutionary Biology

Lecture 5 – Natural Theology and the Quest for Meaning

Lecture 6 – Conclusion: Clues to the Meaning of the Universe?

Aspects of Theological Interpretation 5

[This is the fifth of twelve posts outlining a number of streams in the current interest in theological interpretation, paying particular attention to recent treatments. For earlier introductions to theological interpretation, see here, here, and here.]

#1 – Its uneasy relationship with historical criticism

#2 – Its disputed overlap with biblical theology

#3 – Its natural affinity with precritical interpretation

#4 – Its noteworthy exemplar in Karl Barth

#5 – Its relative comfort with multiple interpretations

With some exceptions (to be noted), those interested in theological interpretation allow for more diversity in interpretation than those nursed in the arms of historical criticism are comfortable with. Arguing for an ‘underdetermined interpretation’ of Scripture, rather than a determinate or anti-determinate interpretation, Stephen Fowl seeks to move from debates about the ‘meaning’ of a text to ‘accounts of our interpretative aims, interests, and practices’.

[Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 32-61, citation from 56, and cf. also his ‘The Role of Authorial Intention in the Theological Interpretation of Scripture’, in Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds.), Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 71-87.]

As we saw in an earlier post, Fowl turns to the multifaceted notion of the ‘literal sense’ in Aquinas for support.

[Stephen E. Fowl, ‘The Importance of a Multivoiced Literal Sense of Scripture: The Example of Thomas Aquinas’, in in A.K.M. Adam, Stephen E. Fowl, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Francis Watson, Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 35-50; Engaging Scripture, 38-40.]

Likewise, according to Adam, hermeneutics has been held captive to the metaphor of interpretation as translation of a one-to-one equivalence sort.

[A.K.M. Adam, ‘This is Not a Bible: Dispelling the Mystique of Words for the Future of Biblical Interpretation’, in Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, Fernando F. Segovia (eds.), New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millennium (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 3-20; ‘Poaching on Zion: Biblical Theology as Signifying Practice’, in Adam et al., Reading Scripture, 17-34.]

Elsewhere, he writes of the ‘myth of subsistent meaning’, which treats ‘meaning’ as ‘an immanent property of a text’.

[A.K.M. Adam, Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 3.]

Rather, he argues, ‘we infer meaning from the experience of attempting to arrive at a shared understanding’ (Faithful Interpretation, 5). Far from being stymied by this, such a procedure is beneficial for those with theological interests in the Bible:

‘Freed from the impossible task of pinning down a single correct meaning for each biblical passage, scholars might devote their efforts to spelling out what makes their proposal the best among various legitimate hypotheses’ (Faithful Interpretation, 10-11).

Texts can’t mean anything, but ‘a hermeneutic that respects the full catholicity of meaning needs to start by accepting abundance as a positive condition’ (Adam, ‘Poaching on Zion’, 25).

Others have not been persuaded to abandon the category of ‘meaning’.

[E.g., Murray A. Rae, History and Hermeneutics (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 132-40, noting that it is the ‘divine economy’ that establishes appropriate boundaries and context for the meaning of a biblical text; see further his ‘Texts in Context: Scripture and the Divine Economy’, Journal of Theological Interpretation 1, 1 (2007), 23-45, and cf. Brevard S. Childs, ‘Toward Recovering Theological Exegesis’, Pro Ecclesia 6, 1 (1997), 16-26, at 22-25.]

Vanhoozer draws on speech act theory to contest the claim that meaning is relative to the encounter between text and reader.

[Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Leicester: Apollos, 1998), passim, esp. 201-80. It might be worth noting that Fowl (‘Authorial Intention’, 76, n. 10) distinguishes between two streams of speech act theory, following on from J.L. Austin. Richard Rorty and Jeffrey Stout treat Austin as a ‘therapeutic philosopher’ who eliminates confusions about language by showing that words and utterances become intelligible because of the way they are used in particular contexts and social conventions, ‘not because words have meanings as inherent properties’. A second way is taken up by Searle, who seeks ‘to develop a philosophy of language and, at least implicitly, a metaphysic or ontology’. Fowl judges that Vanhoozer (and Thiselton) stand more with Searle, and places himself with Rorty and Stout. In fact, Vanhoozer utilises Searle’s speech acts along with Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Habermas’ social theory, seeking ‘to integrate all three into a comprehensive theory of literary meaning as communicative action’ (Meaning, 207).]

Vanhoozer argues that authorial intention is based on the notion of the author as a communicative agent. To describe meaning is to describe the author’s intended action, which is not to be confused with ‘what the author planned to write’ or ‘unintentionally brings about’ (Meaning, 259).

[Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 95-126 also utilises speech act theory in his argument that biblical texts have a single ‘literal sense’ which is ‘the communicative intention of the author’. See Scott A. Blue, ‘Meaning, Intention, and Application: Speech Act Theory in the Hermeneutics of Francis Watson and Kevin J. Vanhoozer’, Trinity Journal 23, 2 (2002), 161-84. In a more recent essay (‘Authors, Readers, Hermeneutics’, in Adam et al., Reading Scripture, 119-23), however, drawing on Augustine, Watson echoes Adam and Fowl in wondering whether theological hermeneutics ought to be more comprehensive in allowing a range of interpretive priorities.]

Texts are speech acts performed by authors, communicative actions of communicative agents, and one needs to understand what an author is doing – whether telling a story, making a promise, giving a warning, or issuing a rebuke. Vanhoozer also uses speech act theory to offer an account of the nature of Scripture as God’s communicative act.

[Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics (Leicester: Apollos, 2002), 127-203. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Timothy Ward, Word and Supplement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).]

God is a communicative agent, and Scripture is his communicative action, the book of the covenant – the covenant of discourse – which establishes God’s relationship with his people, and through which we enjoy communion with him.

[It should be noted that other scholars are less interested in exploring the notion of Scripture as a divine speech act, and more interested in using speech act theory to examine the communicative acts in particular biblical passages. See, e.g., Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992), 272-312, and Richard S. Briggs, Words in Action: Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation: Toward a Hermeneutic of Self-Involvement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). For useful surveys, see Richard S. Briggs, ‘The Uses of Speech-Act Theory in Biblical Interpretation’, Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 9 (2001), 229-76, and Brevard S. Childs, ‘Speech-Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation’, Scottish Journal of Theology 58, 4 (2005), 375-92.]

In a more recent essay, against Adam and Fowl, Vanhoozer defends the emphasis of his earlier work:

‘In sum: theological interpretation is the process of discerning the discourse, human and divine, in the canonical work. Whose discourse counts? I answer: that of the original historical author and the divine author who commissions, enables, authorizes, and accompanies it.’

[Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Imprisoned or Free? Text, Status, and Theological Interpretation in the Master/Slave Discourse of Philemon’, in Adam et al., Reading Scripture, 51-93, at 71.]