The flawed hermeneutics of FCA

The launch of FCA has unsurprisingly provoked much comment. I found +Sydney's keynote address - with its declaration of "ideological war" - profoundly depressing. It's not just bad politics. It's bad evangelism. The irony is that his address was couched in terms of "how can we test your resolve to evangelize your people?" A declaration of culture war is not evangelism. It is politics.

However, what did particularly strike me was +Sydney's comments on hermeneutics. Admittedly it followed his assertion that "sexual ethics is where the contest is sharpest" between the Gospel and culture - an assertion surely worthy of challenge. There is not doubt that the God's purpose for His creation in Jesus Christ do challenge contemporary sexual mores - just as much as they did so in 1st century Rome or 5th century Hippo. But the suggestion that it is here - rather than, say, western Christian attitudes to money, power, conflict, the dignity of the human person, or the secularised public square - where "the contest is sharpest" is revealing. It demonstrates, to use the Archbishop's words, a "culturally captivated" analysis: he contends that it is not the market, not the state, not secular society, but the bedroom where "the contest is sharpest" between Gospel and culture.

Back to heremeneutics. +Sydney declared that two incompatible views of Scripture exist in contemporary Anglicanism:

"Those who hold that the Bible is the inspired word of God will see in it a unity which holds all things together. Those who regard it as a human witness to God, drawn together as a sort of library, will find contradiction and tension throughout".

Admittedly the Archbishop was constrained by time and content, so it might be unfair to read too deeply into those words. Nevertheless, they do appear to be very simplistic. On the one side are the liberals - they are the ones who see only contradiction and tension, because they do not recognise Scripture's status as inspired. On the other, the - what shall we call them? - traditionalists. Because they know Scripture is inspired, they are not hampered by any contradictions or tensions in the text.

The problems are obvious with +Sydney's choice of words. He demeans, almost overlooks, the human participation in the writing of Scripture. It appears to be a form of Docetism - it looks like a human document, but it's not. N.T. Wright's language that Scripture is "one of the points where heaven and earth overlap and interlock" (alongside the Incarnation and the sacraments) is a necessary correction to the Archbishop's words.

But there is the other problem - only liberals, he tells us, are hampered by "contradiction and tension" in the text of Scripture. Yesterday in the daily office lectionary in the Church of Ireland we had 1 Samuel 15 as one of the readings. It includes this verse, God's words to Saul:

"Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey".

The verse, 1 Samuel 15:3, is part of the Canon of Scripture. The church is not at liberty to deny its canonical status. But I found it impossible to read that text without experiencing contradiction and tension between it and the rest of Scripture, above all with the revelation of the God of Israel in the Incarnate Word. Affirming that Scripture is "God's Word written" does not remove the hard challenges posed by contradictions and tensions.

O'Donovan's A Conversation Waiting to Begin warns against any approach to Scripture which "tend to make the interpretation of Scripture seem superfluous". He emphasises the need to recognise the "hermeneutic distance":

"That term refers to the gap between the reader and the text, the gap that understanding has to bridge ... It is the characteristic 'conservative' temptation to erect a moment in scriptural interpretation into an unrevisable norm that will substitute, conveniently and less ambiguously, for Scripture itself ... the text and my reading of the text are two things, not one, and the first is the judge of the second".

It is the humility and patience urged by O'Donovan that appear to be lacking in +Sydney's summary of heremeneutics. The critique of the culture war declaration pales into insignificance beside this. The hard work, the challenge of reading Scripture in 21st century North Atlantic society (or 5th century Hippo or 16th century Wittenberg or 21st century Zimbabwe) appears not to be present in +Sydney's view. Perhaps such a heremeneutic inevitably leads to the other easy option - declaration of culture war, rather than the hard work of engaging with contemporary culture.