Living with Diversity:
Scripture, Tradition and the Present
by Trevor Hart
1. Title and task
I should say at the outset that I interpret the word ‘present’ in my title as a substitute for the more traditional ‘reason’, rather than simply a reference to the temporal juncture at which we find ourselves. In other words, ‘present’ refers to the wider pattern of intellectual and cultural factors which form part of the matrix for the doing of Christian theology. I shall offer reasons for such a reading in due course.
In the available time I take it that I cannot reasonably be expected to offer an exhaustive overview of, or even a comprehensive systematic proposal for managing, the complex relationships existing between Scripture, tradition and the resources of various historical ‘presents’ in Christian theology.
Nor do I take it to be my task here to offer a distinctively ‘Anglican’ approach to this set of relationships. While such an approach (a characteristic Anglican ‘method’ in theology) has often been held to be identifiable (see, e.g., Ramsey, 1991, 23-34) I am persuaded that it is largely a chimera. Appeals to some more or less consistent application of the ‘threefold cord’ since the sixteenth century in reality mask a multitude of diverse understandings and practices (and no doubt some sins!) not least in the recent past (the ‘present’ of which our title speaks); although it may be possible and even important to insist on there being a distinctively Anglican ‘standpoint’ from which theologising (and other things) may (and arguably ought to) be pursued (so Sykes, 1978, 44-52; 63-75).
In what follows, I shall restrict myself to the less ambitious task of provoking our reflection, and do so by identifying some of the more obvious concerns and questions surrounding the so-called threefold cord, especially noting some insights and challenges peculiar to our own present; and I shall try to do so with a view to the main question on our agenda – diversity, and its limits in communion.
2. Reconsidering the threefold cord
Quite apart from the diverse (even incompatible) approaches to theological construction which its bare statement permits, there are other manifest inadequacies with appeal to this threefold pattern itself.
Hooker, who lays no claim to originality in his appeal to a threefold appeal, is nonetheless usually taken as the locus classicus, presenting us with the threads out of which the cord is to be woven. But he can be appealed to too quickly and in ways which mask the sometimes significant discontinuities between his own context and concerns and ours:
(1) He does not use the polysemous term ‘tradition’, but refers to ‘the voice of the church’, which is at best a very specific instance of tradition, and may actually overlap with Hooker’s appeal to ‘reason’, in so far as that appeal is to the use of ‘human authority’ within the church, and he clearly has in mind the intelligent exegesis of Scripture to settle disputed questions of (authoritative) meaning.
(2) By way of allusion and response to Trent, Hooker refers to ‘traditions’, i.e. unwritten sources of alleged antiquity (another of his preferred terms) and ultimate apostolic descent. These, he insists, even when they may be supposed authentic, are not “a part of Supernatural necessary truth” (136). They are quite distinct, and have a quite different role from other possible manifestations of ‘human authority’ in the life of the church. It is difficult, then, to lump together some coherent conglomerate under the rubric of ‘tradition’ from Hooker’s writing, and ascribe to it some consistent theological function. In this, his treatment may prove to me more nuanced than some of those which have subsequently attempted to tidy things up.
(3) Hooker’s concern in context is not in any case with establishing a general (or even an Anglican!) theological method, but with the specific questions arising from the twin errors of the Catholic and Puritan approaches to questions about the ‘sufficiency’ of Scripture for communicating that which is ‘necessary for salvation’ (Cf Article 6 of The 39 Articles of 1571). The way one understands or orders the relationships properly pertaining between Scripture, ‘reason’, and ‘the voice of the Church’ in wider theological contexts can hardly be based on his directives without further question or consideration. More needs to be said and done.
(4) The question to which many appeals to the ‘threefold cord’ appear to offer an answer (what are the relevant sources of authority – or criteria – for Christian theology, and how are these to be ranked and ordered relative to one another?) may not reflect Hooker’s way of thinking about things once we translate it into a different milieu. This need not invalidate it, but we need at least to take stock of the difference. For Hooker the supreme authority of Scripture within the life of the church was an absolute given, and the main concern. The introduction of the subsidiary ‘authorities’ of reason and ‘the voice of the church’ was really part of an audit of the process whereby this same authority of Scripture functioned. This involved recognition of the obvious fact that, in order to function authoritatively, the text of Scripture must be read, interpreted and applied by human beings within the church. In some sense, then, its authority must be held to be contingent upon other sorts of ‘authoritative’ activity within the community of faith. But these secondary authorities are understood as functions of, encompassed within and derived from, Scripture’s own authority and not independent of it. The question to be answered was about the nature of the complex contingency. In what sense was it true, and in what senses was it not true, that God’s authoritative speaking through Scripture in the church required these other subsidiary (but authoritative as aspects of the overall ‘speech-act’) phenomena? Only in situations where Scripture was silent was it considered legitimate to treat reason and ‘the voice of the church’ as having any seemingly free-standing authority. But even here, Hooker’s assumption is that the exercise of such authorities would be shaped from first to last by what the fathers would have called the ‘mind’ or the ‘scope’ of the Scriptures. There could be no serious question of their competing or conflicting with this primary authority. This, I suggest, constitutes a considerable difference from assumptions in our own context.
(5) It is thus important to note that Hooker presupposes what we today generally do not; namely, that the various authorities to which he alludes will work together in harmony in order to feed the life of faith. He does not propose some Hegelian emergence of truth out of competitive struggle or conflict. And those who, in his day, saw potential conflict between Scripture and tradition (the Puritans) did not propose some dialectical progress towards higher synthesis, but the abandonment of tradition. Before the Enlightenment, of course, the appeal to ‘reason’ in theology was largely for clarificatory or supplementary rather than critical purposes (contrast, e.g., Macquarrie, 1977, 17). Since the middle of the eighteenth century, though, the ‘threefold cord’ has been rendered rather more prone to spontaneous unravelling, as ‘reason’ has generally been identified with the significantly reduced canon of credibility permitted by various philosophical compromises between rationalism and empiricism, and has more often than not been granted significant (even if tacit rather than explicit) primacy in the triangular relationship. Scripture has been rigorously submitted to its scrutiny, and ‘tradition’ all but banished as a source of intellectual irresponsibility. It is all rather more like a working model of ‘the survival of the fittest’ than the balanced and harmonious ecology envisaged by Hooker.
At this point, partly on the basis of what we have already seen, and partly by way of anticipation of what is to come, I want to propose that a different question might be formulated. The problems with that posited above are numerous, but include its easy disentanglement of Scripture, tradition and reason from one another, its tendency to slip into treating them as things of a similar sort or on a similar level to be related to one another, and (perhaps most significantly) its exclusion of all sorts of other elements which, while they may not readily be located under the rubric of ‘authorities’ or criteria for theologizing, are nonetheless essential parts of the complex process whereby Scripture functions authoritatively within the church. If, then, we asked a different question (e.g. ‘What different factors may be identified in the authorizing of Scripture within the church by the Spirit?’) we might get a more satisfying and adequate answer than versions of the threefold cord have tended to provide. Answering it is likely to suggest a much more complex and matted bunch of fibres altogether.
3. Peculiar insights and challenges of the present
I want here simply to list some of the more obvious insights of recent intellectual endeavour which support this case. Much more could and needs to be said about each.
(1) Literary theory, studies of translation and semantics have taught us that the notion of an objective meaning located ‘within’ a text “like wisdom teeth within a gum, waiting patiently to be extracted” by any skilled interpreter is problematic (Eagleton, 1983, 89; further Steiner, 1992, Thiselton, 1992). We have to recognize the vital contributions of what communities of readers and individual readers bring with them to the event in which meaning happens, as well as what the text furnishes. For a text to function with authority for a community there would seem, prima facie, to have to be some level of agreement about its meaning. Fluidity of an unbounded sort seems inevitably to lead to terminal diversity and chaos. But fluidity as such, in dialectic with a responsible recognition of the relatively fixed form of the text and the ethical obligation to listen to what it is saying through established conventions of interpretation, may actually provide a model for Scripture as a living Word spoken afresh to the church in ever new contexts (Hart, 1995, 135-142). The alternatives – either a word with sharply fixed semantic boundaries, spoken long ago and once for all, or a word which says no more than we ourselves bring with us to the text – are unattractive.
(2) Studies in the sociology of knowledge have drawn attention to the social and historical particularity of what counts as ‘reason’ (see, e.g., MacIntyre, 1988). Reason is thus better construed as an intellectual tool working within the horizons provided by particular sets of assumptions about what is possible, credible, meaningful, etc., than as some transcendent set of truths to be applied with equal validity in any time and place (an intellectual equivalent of Bill Gates’ Microsoft software, preloaded into the hardware of the human mind). Thus, what has counted for ‘reason’ in Christian theology has in fact variously meant ‘everything from Platonism to Vedantic philosophy or the critical theory of the Frankfurt School’ (Bauckham, 1988, 140). Again, recognition of this fact need not entail capitulation to utter relativism and its consequences. Total incommensurability between differing intellectual contexts is contradicted by our experience of the capacity to communicate across the boundaries which distinguish them (MacIntyre, 1988, 350); but significant levels of incommensurability and ‘untranslatability’ (Steiner, 1992) may and do nonetheless exist. Hence Bauckham suggests that we cease to use the term ‘reason’ and substitute for it the more inclusive and less misleading term ‘context’ (Bauckham, 1988, 140).
(3) The same studies have insisted that the neat distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘tradition’ is no longer sustainable. ‘Reason’ in the sense articulated above is always related directly to some tradition of intellectual and practical endeavour. Tradition is not something over against which it stands in a relationship of potential contradiction, but furnishes the conditions within which alone reason may operate. Rational inquiry is both‘tradition-constituted’ and ‘tradition-constituting’ (MacIntyre, 1988, esp. 349-369). Tradition furnishes the standpoint, the place from which intelligent reflection is prosecuted.
(4) Studies of tradition insist upon a broad rather than a narrowly intellectual definition of the term. Traditions are manifest and expressed not only in intellectual ‘creeds’, but in all the forms of life: rituals, art, architecture, social and political institutions, codes of dress, hopes and aspirations, and the ways people behave in general (MacIntyre, 1988, 355). (Of course, such a broad definition becomes impossible in practice to distinguish from ‘context’, except in so far as a particular context may be shaped by more than one significant tradition.) Theological appeals to ‘tradition’ as part of the threefold cord are as imprecise as concomitant appeals to ‘reason’. It would seem to be sensible to opt for a wide definition of the term, and allow it to embrace not only conciliar creeds and confessions, but the wider patterns of Christian existence including liturgy, hymnody, preaching, acts of service, anything, indeed, which might properly be said to constitute a form of faithful ‘interpretation’, performance, or actualization of the Gospel message within the church in the midst of the world. For all this bears significantly upon the way in which Scripture functions authoritatively within the church, as well as being the product of that functioning. In a sense (which may well have to be more carefully defined than is possible here) it is ‘Scripture-constituting’ as well as ‘Scripture-constituted’. One gain of such a broad definition of tradition is its recognition that even a church which has no peculiar confessional heritage may yet have a distinctive doctrinal standpoint, a fact which may serve to make some of its theologians less comfortable rather than more so (see Sykes, 1978, 41f.). But the very breadth of the definition raises sharply the question of where the relevant thresholds of identity lie, and what sorts and levels of diversity may be permitted before they must be held to have been crossed.
4. Particularity, diversity and continuity – what are the limits?
Traditions, in order to be identifiable as traditions at all, must have characteristic features and boundaries. In order for theological developments within the Christian tradition (in doctrine, ethics, matters of ecclesial order, or whatever) to be identifiably Christian, therefore, there must be the possibility of boundaries being trespassed over, and Christian identity being compromised. Diversity cannot be completely unbounded, or else the meaningfulness of tradition is compromised. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy must remain meaningful notions, even in an age besotted with pluralism as an ideology and not just an empirical fact. For interpretations or performances of the tradition to be particular to contexts cannot simply mean that ‘anything goes’. Even the metaphor of improvisation (appealed to enthusiastically, for example, by the Bishop of Edinburgh in his recent Godless Morality) cannot overlook the basic fact that an improvisation is utterly contingent on apprenticeship in a tradition and faithfulness to the basic harmonic and melodic pattern of a larger piece. Otherwise it is simply an impetuous and arbitrary show of technical dexterity with little to be said for it.
The description of tradition as a faithful ‘interpretation’ or ‘performance’ of Scripture appeals to such levels of continuity, and indicates that some identifiable (if not precisely specifiable) continuity of character or pattern is required. An interpretation of King Lear in which Edmund and Goneril do not appear, or in which Kent is portrayed as a scheming malevolent, can easily be adjudged a poor interpretation. In many other respects there is considerable latitude and license to be enjoyed by director and actors alike in their production. But such license is not without limits. So too, in the case of Scripture, we may acknowledge the legitimacy and even the vital importance of open-ended trajectories of meaning (rather than precisely bounded sets), while insisting that such trajectories must be able to be traced back identifiably to centres of gravity in the pattern of the objective form of the text of Scripture. (More may yet need to be said, for example, about hermeneutical strategies for reading the text – canon, inter-textuality, relations between the testaments, recognition of diversity and dialectic within the text, etc.) Thus Oliver O’ Donovan, for instance, urges that the authority and warrant possessed by tradition must lie in its capacity to illuminate the text (which can and must be returned to again and again). Reciprocally, the text verifies or challenges the authority of interpretations of it within the same relationship (O’ Donovan, 1986, 113-115).
Finally, it needs to be reiterated that we are not engaged in a merely two-dimensional exercise in which disembodied minds seek to relate two distinct sets of texts to one another meaningfully (‘reason’, Scripture, ‘tradition’). Diversity of some sort may be an ineradicable feature of the human epistemic condition this side of the eschaton. I am not at all sure that as Christians we are in any position to expect that it is an ontological circumstance attaching to God’s own reality or that of what he has made. This being so, in the midst of our diversity (of whatever sort and level) we should on the one hand remain committed to the task of the pursuit of a unitary truth which lies for now ever beyond us, and which for that very reason calls even our best reasoning and interpreting into question. Yet, we should not be unduly pessimistic about our capacity to grapple with what is real, and when we believe that reality is broken open for us more fully by one perspective, interpretation or tradition than another, we ought not be afraid to say so with confidence, and thereby to risk ourselves and our theology in a ‘wager on transcendence’ (Steiner, 1989). For reality is the final arbiter of our statements about it, and God of our theologies.
Trevor Hart
Texts:
Oliver O’ Donovan, On the 39 Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity (Carlisle, 1986)
B. Drewery and R. Bauckham (eds), Scripture, Tradition and Reason: A Study in the Criteria of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh, 1988)
Trevor Hart, Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology (London, 1995)
Richard Holloway, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics (Edinburgh, 1999).
Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Other Works (in 3 Vols., ed. Hanbury, London, 1830)
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London, 1988)
John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (London, 1977)
Michael Ramsey, The Anglican Spirit (Boston, Mass., 1991)
George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London, 1989)
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (2nd ed., Oxford, 1992)
Stephen W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (London, 1978)
Stephen Sykes, John Booty & Jonathan Knight (eds), The Study of Anglicanism (London, 1998)
Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (London, 1992)
