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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
What questions is a non-professional critic entitled — indeed, bound — to put to the scholars concerning the current debate about the New Testament? What kind of comments is he entitled to offer? The studies in question are complex and specialized; they involve languages which he does not know and disciplines which he has not practised. The complexity is such that individual scholars will tell you that no one of them can master it; one has to concentrate, for example, on a single topic, such as textual study, or on only a part of the New Testament material. Communication between the scholars has become difficult, as it has in other learned disciplines, and perhaps no conspectus of what is being done in the field as a whole is possible. And yet the layman cannot leave it to the experts, since the debate concerns the documents which purport to record the events from which his faith derives, and the reactions of those who witnessed them. It is the recognition of this that leads some people to protest that the questions that scholars feel bound to ask should not be asked at all. It is felt that they undermine the faith of those who do not follow the debate but are aware of its repercussions when they reach a wider public, probably in some over-simplified and distorted form. I assume that the questions which scholars (or others) feel bound to ask ought not to be repressed: that intellectual honesty demands this, whether they are answered well or ill. I assume, equally, that the layman should not simply accept the answers that the experts offer him. He could, in fact, hardly do so, given the diversity of opinions which obtains among them. The notion of a consensus of the faithful is important, if Christians are to believe that they are, in some sense, one in Christ; but it cannot, in our present situation, be founded on a consensus of the scholars. So what is he to do if, on the one hand, he cannot ignore the debate while, on the other, it provides him with no firm and indisputable conclusions?
1 I have discussed the definition of myth (with particular reference to The Myth of God Incarnate) in my article, ‘Myth and Truth’, Theology, July 1980.Google Scholar
2 Patterns of Faith, 1977, pp 66ff.
3 Explorations in Theology 7, 1980, especially Chi. The Use and Abuse of the Bible, 1976, especially Ch 4.
4 cf. Houldenm, Patterns of Faith, Ch 1.
5 The Two Horizons, 1980, p 11.
6 Nineham is much concerned with this problem (Use and Abuse of the Bible.) He believes that we can only try to understand how men interpreted their religious experience within particular cultural totalities' (in Troeltsch terminology), though clearly he does not think that their experience (however expressed) is altogether alien to us. But whatever we can say may need to be expressed in new terms (‘a new story’), and we ought to be open‐minded as to how the stories that we might tell (p 252ff) would relate to those of traditional Christian doctrine; whether they could be given a single meaning, and whether they could be reconciled with each other.
7 ‘Neues Testament und Mythologie’ in Kerygma und Mythos, ed. Bartsch, Hamburg 1951, ET Vol 1 1953, Vol 2, 1962, pp 41, 46Google Scholar. Bultmann produced a good many later essays and papers on the subject without, so far as I can see, significantly modifying his opinion.
8 The Crucified God, 1972, p 201ff.
9 The Experiment Hope, 1975, p 11.
10 Houlden, Patterns of Faith, p 70.
11 Philosophical Investigations, 1, 66.Google Scholar
12 In What about the New Testament? ed. Hooker, and Hickling, , 1975, p 143.Google Scholar
13 The Bible and the Modern World, 1973, pp 61–2.Google Scholar
14 Philosophical Investigations, 1, 127, 89, 23.Google Scholar
15 Thiselton offers a helpful exposition and a demonstration of how the method can work in practice in Chrs 12 and 13 of The Two Horizons.
16 Philosophical Investigations, 1, 127, 121, 124.Google Scholar
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