Scripture and Culture

Huw Williams | 08:34, Monday 12 October 2015 | Turin, Italy

I recently finished reading through J.N.D. Kelly's "Early Christian Doctrines", and what a fine piece of work it is. Kelly gives an excellent and scholarly overview and commentary of the development and formalising of Christian doctrine over the first five centuries or so of the church. I can't give a full account of my reflections on a five-hundred page page book of historical theology here, but here's just one, perhaps my biggest single reflection on what I have read here.

What is abundantly clear as one reads through this book is how, as doctrines were formed, developed, discussed, debated, rejected or accepted and recognised by the church, a constant in the whole process was how philosophical presuppositions formed the framework for virtually all of the protagonists and their arguments. Most notably the figures of Aristotle and Plato loom large over five centuries and more of Christian thinking (continuing to this day in many circles.)

So to take an example, many theological thinkers of the period adopted Aristotle's view of the impassibility of God as an unquestionable given. In this school of thought God is understood as the unmoved mover, pure thought and rationale, and totally dispassionate - for Him to feel passions would leave Him weak and vulnerable to a whole host of problematic emotions. Hence whenever the Bible uses language to describe the passions of God, these needed to be accommodated, explained away (usually as figures of speech) and so on.

To many modern minds such a predisposition to classical philosophy in Christian thought, which could effectively trump the revelation of God in the Bible seems strange. The obvious danger here is that of what C.S. Lewis calls "chronological snobbery" and the tendency (particularly prevalent in modern and post-modern minds) to consider the thinkers of history as primitive and stupid. But of course nothing could be further than the truth, as even a cursory reading of the early church fathers will make very clear - these were in many cases, brilliant minds wrestling with theological and doctrinal issues for the first time.

Perhaps a better response for the contemporary reader is to consider what our own blind spots are, where our contemporary culture and philosophy so permeate our thinking with "givens" that we simply do not question them, and which causes us to read scripture around it, or worse still to bend scripture to fit with our own view of the world. At this stage I don't offer to hold out many answers, but I am aware that as Christians we make bold claims for the revelation of scripture which demands that we take that revelation seriously and as a matter of primary importance.