124 - Wolf in the Sheep Fold: The Bible as a Problem for Christianity

Wolf in the Sheep Fold: The Bible as a Problem for Christianity
By Robert P. Carroll
London, SPCK, 1991. 159 pp. $9.99.

The high irony of this book is that the author delights in Pascal's hidden God, but the voice that speaks here is the voice of Descartes. Professor Robert Carroll of the University of Glasgow is a distinguished, learned scholar who delights in combative writing. In this book, he attacks the way in which the Bible is used in church theology. He concludes that church interpretation is deeply distortive of the Bible and devastating in its outcomes in the shaping of Christian readers. The book is set up to articulate a contrast between "church reading" and "modern reading." The latter is held by Carroll to be completely critical, scientific, and responsible, in contrast to church reading, which is intensely ideological. This rather simplistic way of setting up the problem is reflective of older Enlightenment attacks on church authority. Such a simple contrast reflects neither actual church

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practice nor current interpretive issues. While Carroll's concern is that the church has "belled" and "domesticated" the Bible, Carroll himself is not fully certain that the problem is the church's use of the Bible, or the Bible itself.

In a series of brief studies, Carroll takes up a number of interpretive issues. In each case, the church comes out heavy-handed, self-serving, and irresponsible. There is no doubt that the church has much for which to answer. It does seem, however, that Carroll has uniformly chosen the most outrageous examples of church usage. As a result, what is rather uniformly offered is, in fact, an unfortunate caricature, which is unhelpful in getting at the real crisis of interpretation. Among the issues Carroll takes up are the following:

(1) The Bible is opaque, but church interpretation wants to make it plain and simple.

(2) The Bible is in fact a collection of many books and no unified book, but the church wants to make it coherent and unified.

(3) The God of the Bible is hidden, violent, and laden with contradiction, but the church wants to make God acceptable and benign.

(4) "Biblical Christianity" is an ideological construct, but the church wants to pass it off as a recoverable historical reality.

(5) The Bible offers a grotesque sexual ethic that the church wants to make normative.

(6) The New Testament is anti-Semitic, and the church, in its christological fervor, shares that anti-Semitism. The church is uncaringly indifferent to its implication in this cause.

(7) The Bible is not more "life changing" than any other text, but the church imagines it is the Word of God.

In each case, Carroll has taken an abuse that is already well-known (so that little is gained here in the polemic, even for a lay reader) and has overstated it in uncritical fashion. Because Carroll sets up the problem as a contrast between "church" and "modern scholarship," it is difficult to know the purpose of the book or for whom it is intended. People who share Carroll's view have already reached such conclusions. People who practice the kind of extremist interpretation here described will not read the book. And the main body of church believers are well beyond Carroll's analysis in their sophisticated awareness of and struggle with interpretive issues. Carroll has missed an important chance, because he has failed to give any nuance to his polemic. There are two ways that he could have helped readers to struggle with what are the real issues.

First, Carroll is unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the important work and real gains made by church interpretation on many of these issues. Thus, he writes, "When one listens to the public

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declarations of churches in the West today ... the messages are invariably bourgeois." Presumably, Carroll does not know about the courageous work of the church on matters of anti-Semitism and sexuality, as well as issues of authority. In my considerable interaction with church pastors and lay people, I know of no representatives of the views Carroll assigns to the church. Moreover, in his guardedly favorable citation of Pascal and Barth, Carroll does not seem to notice that the best work on the issues of hiddenness are from within the church, not outside. Nor does he ponder the "silliness" (his word) of the modern intellectual claims that Pascal and Barth were facing. The struggles listed could be more usefully presented if the tone were less combative and the real day-to-day church, with its strengths as well as its failings, were in purview. Over time, the church has much for which to answer, and its long interpretive career is not unmitigated obscurantism and ideology.

Second, Carroll's favorite positive adjective is "modern," by which he means Enlightenment criticism that gives no deference to faith. Perhaps he is unaware of current discussion of the devastating inheritance "modernity" has left us. Moreover, if worry about the "domestication of the Bible" is the issue, critical study (including much of Carroll's own work) is committed in principle that "this book is like any other." That is, critical study cannot allow that the book, or its subject, is "other" or "alien." Modern critical study programmatically has dismissed any claim voiced in the Bible that does not fit Enlightenment rationality. Thus, if Carroll in fact wants the Bible to be taken as an awesome "other," he will more likely find allies in the church than in the critical modernity he champions. While he assaults obscurantist authority, I know of no "modernist" reading that has greatly opened the "danger" of the text. The present book would serve us better if the critique were aimed at both the tyranny of the church and the tyranny of the academy. This book is yet another case of modernist criticism being willing to criticize everything except its own criticism.

The tension between faith and criticism is not an easy one, even if it is a very old one. On the one hand, the church's practice of faith has often been heavy-handed and authoritarian, evoking the sort of dismissive criticism voiced in this book. Many times that dismissive criticism is warranted. On the other hand, that same tension has often produced criticism that is not led by the text, but is nihilistic. I would make no defense of fideistic interpretation. I am convinced, however, that the twin of fideism, nihilistic interpretation, is not any appreciable gain. One would hope that from the positions of responsible faith (which is not inherently obscurantist) and attentive criticism (which is not intrinsically hostile to the faith claims of the text) the issues one-sidedly stated in this book can be superseded. In my judgment, the

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crisis of culture now faced (on which see George Steiner's Real Presences) is of a very different sort, requiring a knowing, but bold alliance of critical faith and faithful criticism.

Carroll is a first-rate scholar who has seen much rightly. He is capable, however, of a better, more carefully nuanced, more helpful book. Perhaps he did not want to write that sort of book. I hope he will move beyond this polemic to help us think about an undomesticated Bible, one not in the service of an ideological church, one not in the service of reductionist criticism. Our cultural situation needs more than silly faith or silly criticism (see his discussion of "silly"). It needs the danger of the hidden God, the one in the text. Carroll could help us, but it would require a different, better book.

Walter A. Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia