Dr Barton's book is at first sight unexciting. It consists of a number of essays and addresses written or delivered on various occasions, with, as a connecting theme, the understanding of family and community by the writers of the New Testament. On a first reading, I was not very impressed. I thought it would have been better to ‘cannibalise’ the collected essays and make a new book out of them. Subsequent readings discovered other half‐hidden themes, which are not fully developed, but which give the book a stimulating quality.
The book is divided into three parts: ‘Family and Sexuality’, ‘Community’ and ‘Interpretation’. In the first part, Barton's problem is to see how it can be said that the New Testament is still normative for Christians in these matters, when our family structures and understanding of sexuality are so different from those of the first century or, indeed, many others of the Christian centuries. Barton tries to find a suitable middle way, between a more or less fundamentalist effort to use texts to justify one particular family pattern, and the opposing rejection of the bible teaching as being hopelessly patriarchal, even though this may be combined with an admiration for Christ and St Paul as life‐giving personalities. This leads him to look at the presuppositions of the historical‐critical method, the dominant form of contemporary exegesis, and to find them wanting, since simply reading texts as texts falls short of making them effective guides to action. He takes as an example the wedding feast at Cana, which contemporary critics tend to consider simply in relation to the question of the sources of St John's gospel, but which the Latin and Greek Fathers considered as illustrating the sanctification of human marriage by the Incarnation.
The essays included under ‘Community’ have a slightly different focus. Differences between the gospels, which were once ascribed to different attitudes and experiences on the part of the writers, are now explained by their being the products of different, apparently autonomous, Christian communities. As early Christianity is classified as a ‘sect’, it is not surprising that it should have a number of potential sects within it. Barton, quite rightly, calls all this into question. Anyone who wants their writings to be read will have some kind of audience in mind, but this does not justify any supposition that the audience either constituted a bounded group with a clear‐cut identity of its own, or that it imposed its view of things on the author. The essay on ‘Early Christianity and the Sociology of the Sect’ is particularly valuable, since Barton shows, very carefully and very politely, how attempts to look at early Christianity as a sectarian movement are extremely naïve, both politically and sociologically. The closing words of the essay point to ‘the inevitably political nature of the act of interpretation’(p. 138).
The final essay, ‘New Testament Interpretation as Performance’ uses an idea advanced in rather different ways by Nicholas Lash, Rowan Williams and Frances Young, that the New Testament can only be understood, not by the meticulous analysis of texts, but by seeing believers put the New Testament into practice. Charmingly, Barton comments on the ideas of Lash, Williams and Young: ‘where the Roman Catholic theologian finds in the Eucharist the epitome of the Christian ‘improvisation’ on Scripture, and where the Anglican archbishop finds it in the festal cycle culminating in Holy Week, the Methodist theologian finds it in preaching!’(p. 237).
I wrote earlier of half‐hidden themes not fully developed. One of these would be the way in which the sacraments create community and help us to see community in action. Another would be the ‘tradition’, in the older sense of the empowerment of the believing community to read Scripture authentically. Another again, mentioned by Barton in a quotation from Frances Young, is the existence of different ‘senses’ of Scripture, which permits us to give a valid meaning to a passage, even if it was not intended by the original author. Let us hope that this will not be Dr Barton's last book.
