The Misuse of Metaphor
To use the language of physics to represent a theological proposition is to make a fatally false claim: false because theology is not concerned with observable, empirical phenomena but with matters of faith whose object is a mystery, fatal because the categorical mistake involved, discredits our enterprise altogether. Much as we might quarrel with the massive freight of symbolism which Patristic and Medieval theologians loaded onto the Scriptural texts, at least they were extremely conscious of mystery and limitation. The major claims made for theology by Saint Augustine ((his reference is in the wrong place)) and Saint Thomas Aquinas[i] were underpinned by deep humility. Ever since the supposed 'enlightenment' the humility has evaporated. Biblical studies, in particular, and notably on the so-called 'evangelical' wing of Christianity has increasingly made claims based on Biblical texts as if they were in the same category as physics. Let me outline one fairly trivial and one massive claim.
The fairly trivial claim is to derive a doctrine of "male headship" on the basis of etiological commentary in Genesis 3.16. The passage is not prescriptive, it simply describes how things have become what they are; but even if you take it as prescriptive, it can only apply to the private circumstances of marriage; it simply can't be extrapolated, particularly if you think of the text literally, to mean the way that men and women behave in society, let alone in a church; the words simply are not strong enough to carry that meaning.
The much more substantive claim is that which refers to the way in which the death of Jesus was salvific. Saint Anselm's[ii] speculations about penal substitution have, for some, become the only way of understanding the mystery of Christ's death, shutting the door to further discussion. I will return to this topic because it seems to me that if we could spend less energy discussing the mechanics of salvation we might have more energy to preach its benefits to a sceptical world.
Another consequence of this supposedly empirical approach to Biblical text is that material which is not empirically derived from it is rejected. Not long ago when I was discussing the Lectionary for August with a Priest I asked whether he preferred the Readings for the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady into heaven or the ordinary readings for that Sunday after Trinity. "The ordinary," was the reply. "The Assumption isn't in the Bible, is it?" Well, no it isn't in the Bible but it is a classically 'received', organic, 'bottom up' piece of doctrine recognised both in Chartres Cathedral and the Cathedral in the Kremlin. The paradoxically Sola Scriptura argument can only be sustained if the readings are not confined to the literal, to the text as physics. The combination of Sola Scriptura and the empirical approach stultifies any notion of mystery but, much more problematic, it involves paring back much of the theological development of the last two millennia and asks the question: what's left? Nobody really committed to this approach could accept the Nicene[iii] or the Athanasian[iv] Creeds.
But for the librarian, the issue isn't so much the theological inconsistency but the problem with language. You simply can't say to a punter, "here's a book which will explain the Crucifixion" in the way that you can say "here's a book that explains gravity". The category distinction is, except by faith, unbridgeable.
But to go further, it is precisely the empirical approach which puts us onto a sticky wicket with atheists. They may laugh us to scorn when we invoke mystery but when we don't they wipe the floor with us intellectually.
It is, then, bad enough getting horribly confused over "male headship" but getting into a muddle over salvation is catastrophic. Nowhere have we to be more careful with language than when we talk about the birth, death and Resurrection of Jesus and about the gift of his Sacraments. At both extremes of the Christian spectrum from Evangelical to Catholic, the claims are both unsustainable and outrageous in the way they are put. You cannot take the sum total of individual faiths and distil them into a general proposition; neither can you promulgate your particular proposition and impose it on the faith of others. The purpose of theological proposition is to find ways in human language to discuss the mystery of God so that we can mutually support each other in building the kingdom. Fundamentally for the Christian, the purpose of free speech, for language, is constructive. Its purpose is to expand dialogue and to include more people and more ideas. But to do that, the language has to make only modest claims; language, like everything else, is always deeply vulnerable to the sin of pride. Further, we might recall the incompleteness theorem of the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century, Kurt Gödel[v]: the more complete a theorem the less universally applicable it is.
The argument over "male headship" has been almost farcical and although it has done some damage, the muddle over salvation has been much more damaging for Christ's mission because it has transformed the Good News into an ethics code primarily concerned with genital activity. I will return to this in another guise later.