Recollections

I recently read one of N. T. Wright’s new books, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. Compared to other works I’ve read by Wright, like The Challenge of Jesus for example, I found Simply Christian somewhat disappointing. This may be simply because it does not seem to add much to things that Wright has said elsewhere. But the book also had a hurried feel to it, perhaps owing to the fact that Wright has also released two other books recently. Wright is someone who typically takes years between the publication of massive tomes, and it almost seems as though he is self-consciously awkward taking on a short volume like this one, aimed at a much more general readership than he has ever had before.

Perhaps because of its compact size, Simply Christian also highlights Wright’s penchant for metaphors. I like a metaphor as much as the next reader, and in fact, I have a weakness for them in my own writing as well. But nothing tends to annoy a writer like seeing his own tics in someone else’s writing. That’s not to say that metaphors are merely tics: they can be very useful communicative tools, particularly when you are trying to introduce an idea to someone for the first time. It could be that Wright was consciously modeling this book on C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (the publishers, at least, beg you to draw that analogy on the cover jacket), a volume that showcased Lewis’s gift for well-chosen literary devices. (Incidentally, Lee has found a free recording of Lewis’s wartime BBC addresses, which contains a few of the don’s choicest metaphors.) But sometimes Wright’s metaphors overwhelm the point he’s trying to make instead of elucidating it. Take, for instance, this paragraph on the Bible from p. 174:

Tragically, the history of Christianity is littered with ways of reading the Bible which have, in effect, muzzled it. The computer I’m writing on right now will do a thousand things, but I use it only for writing and for access to the Internet and email. In the same way, many Christians–whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations–have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it only to sustain the three or four things they already do. They treat it as a form of verbal wallpaper: pleasant enough in the background, but you stop thinking about it once you’ve lived in the house a few weeks. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t exploit more than a small amount of my computer’s capability. But to be a Christian while not letting the Bible do all the things it’s capable of, through you and in you, is like trying to play the piano with your fingers tied together.

So, to summarize: many Christians treat the Bible as though they were sitting in a room with bland wallpaper, while under-utilizing a computer with one hand and trying to play the piano, fingers tied, with the other. To be fair, that’s a particularly striking example of Wright’s tendency to stir a bunch of metaphors together, but metaphors course, even cascade, throughout the book. To be fairer still, I just used several metaphors in one sentence myself. And fairest of all, one could point out, in Wright’s defense, that talking with metaphors is a time-honored tradition in Christian writing that stretches back to the gospels themselves. In John 10, for example, Jesus goes from being a sheep-gate to a shepherd, all in the course of a dozen verses, and that’s not to mention the fact that he eventually becomes a lamb.

Maybe there’s a deeper reason, then, why Wright’s over-use of metaphors was bugging me. Maybe it’s because it’s not clear to me how metaphors should work in religious language. On the one hand, there is a standard theological position that all of our talk about God is metaphorical: when trying to talk about the transcendent God, language and experience fail us, so we turn to similes and approximations to describe him (realizing at the same time that even to call him “him” is to deploy a metaphor). Wright himself addresses the problem of talking about the supernatural in the introduction to The Resurrection of the Son of God, where he uses, appropriately, another metaphor (”imagine someone trying to shoot arrows at the sun …”) to get at the subject.

I have a deep sympathy with this idea that all religious language is metaphorical. But on the other hand, by employing metaphors too frequently, one runs the risk of undermining the reason for using them in the first place. If the point of using metaphors is to recognize God’s utter transcendence, the risk of using metaphors is that they relate God to our own categories, idioms, and experiences. We resort to metaphors because we do not wish to anthropomorphize God, but our resort to metaphors seems to do exactly what we intend to avoid. There is the merest of lines between a metaphor that reverences God’s otherness and a metaphor that asserts his likeness to temporal things. But perhaps the mystery of an incarnational God lies precisely in the thinness of that line.

Susan Wise Bauer has an interesting review of Inspiration and Incarnation, by Peter Enns, posted at Books and Culture.

Bauer begins the review with a striking example of Sumerian poetry that anticipates a famous line from the biblical book of Isaiah. Such echoes of Scripture in other ancient texts can be troubling to evangelicals, she says, because they seem to suggest that certain stories and forms in the Old Testament did not originate with God. Equally discomforting to evangelicals, says Bauer, are the hermeneutical practices of the apostle Paul, who often seems to rip Old Testament verses out of their contexts in order to establish a theological point about Christ.

But Enns’ book apparently argues that both of these kinds of discomfort are produced by a misguided approach to the inspiration of Scripture. He argues that Scriptural inspiration can be usefully compared to Christ’s incarnation: in both cases, God’s revelation did not take place in a vacuum, but wrapped itself in human form:

In other words, the God who spoke to man through Christ also speaks to man through Scripture, and in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself. We cannot insist that there is a separate, ahistorical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible that somehow triumphs over all contemporary thought and custom. This, Enns writes, is a modern version of the ancient Docetic heresy, which held that Christ only seemed human. “What some ancient Christians were saying about Christ,” he writes, “… is similar to the mistake that other Christians have made (and continue to make) about Scripture: it comes from God, and the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away.”

I find that allusion to Docetism thought-provoking, and I wonder if Enns follows up on it in the book.