Confessing Evangelical

One of the most interesting points made by Peter Jensen in his book, The Revelation of God (see previous post), comes when he looks at the challenge to the Gospel of postmodern ideas about "the death of the author", reader-response etc. He completely turns this on its head, so that rather than mistrust of language being a challenge to the Gospel, the Gospel is instead the vindication of human language.

As Jensen points out, the current mistrust of language has some unfortunate consequences, particularly in the area of human relationships:

In our culture we are making heavy weather of the business of reading. There is a distrust of words and of our capacity to relate through words ... [B]ut our unwillingness to accept the authority of the human author ... leads to the corruption of relationships at all levels. Cynicism and love cannot co-exist. Where words fail, love fails too.

But the Gospel consists of promises that establish a relationship, and promises can only be conveyed in verbal, propositional terms*. This has important consequences for human language generally:

If God is able to use words that we may trust, and to develop a deep relationship through words, there is hope for human language. We may not be able to do all that he does, but he points to the possibility that there is such a thing as truthful speech, which may be trusted, and through which genuine human relationships may come.

In the search for such speech it may be that the form of the promise can provide the basis for the rehabilitation of language. Promises demand an assessment of truth; they serve to relate persons; they initiate a narrative of hope and fulfilment; they evoke commentary, discussion, literature and poetry. When our culture abandoned the Bible as its standard of life it may have done far more damage to its roots than it could have imagined. The way back will be through a commitment to the widespread knowledge of God in his word.

The sentence I've put in italics is key to understanding why the Bible takes the form it does, with such a varied range of content - because, as Jensen argues, that is the effect that promises have, and the Bible is fundamentally a covenantal book, the book of God's promises to His people.

[* you may say to that, "What about the Sacraments? Don't they convey God's promises in physical, i.e. non-verbal form?" The answer to that is that the Sacraments are physical elements combined with God's Word, and indeed always used in conjunction with God's Word ("I baptise you in the name of the Father, etc.", "This is my body").]