God is no captious sophister eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.

— Richard Hooker, Anglican priest, March 1554 – 3 November 1600

It is with the Servant, and the theology of the whole of Isaiah 40-55, that we find the explanation for the otherwise bizarre idea of one person standing in for the many (which, as Dr John says, we might otherwise find incomprehensible and deeply offensive). The sense which penal substitution makes it does not make, in the last analysis, within the narrative of feudal systems of honour and shame. It certainly does not make the sense it makes within the world of some arbitrary lawcourt. It makes the sense it makes within the biblical world, the Old Testament world, within which the creator God, faced with a world in rebellion, chose Israel - Abraham and his family - as the means of putting everything right, and, when Israel itself had rebelled, promised to set that right as well and so to complete the purpose of putting humans right and thus setting the whole created order back the right way up. And the long-promised way by which this purpose would be achieved was, as hints and guesses in the Psalms and prophets indicate, that Israel’s representative, the anointed king, would be the one through whom this would be accomplished. Like David facing Goliath, he would stand alone to do for his people what they could not do for themselves. It is because Jesus, as Israel’s representative Messiah, was therefore the representative of the whole human race, that he could appropriately become its substitute. That is how Paul’s logic works. ‘One died for all, therefore all died,’ he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5.14; and thus, seven verses later, ‘God made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,’ he concluded seven verses later, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (5.21). And it is within that argument that we find the still deeper truth, which is again rooted in the dark hints and guesses of the Old Testament: that the Messiah through whom all this would be accomplished would be the very embodiment of YHWH himself. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5.19).

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The Rt. Rev. Dr. Thomas Wright, Bishop of Durham, the entirety of which is at Fulcrum.

Creation

The doctrine that God is the creator of heaven and earth is the Magna Charta of Christian education. God’s creation of all things means (as people like Justin, Clement, and Donne affirmed) that all truth is God’s truth wherever it may be found. It also means that the Christian is free to pursue this truth anywhere and anytime.

It is helpful to distinguish three distinct ‘moments’ within God’s act of creation. The Christian doctrine of creation affirms, first, that God is the origin of all that is. Second, every major Christian theologian has further affirmed that each created thing has its own existence and its own power to act upon other created things. The existence and power of a created thing, while totally dependent upon God’s divine existence and power, are nonetheless numerically distinct from that divine existence and power. And third, all creation is called to serve and glorify God and is to be judged by its obedience to that call.

The second point in the doctrine of creation is worth considering in some detail. The second point may be called the ‘secular’ moment in Christianity. That is, each created thing has its own identity and can truly interact with other creatures. This secular dimension of the Christian doctrine of creation is one (but only one) of the primary causes for the development of physical science in Europe.

Christian scholars in late medieval Europe drew an important conclusion from their doctrine of creation: because God created each entity with its own integrity and power (this power being dependent on God while remaining numerically distinct from God) and because these entities can truly interact, a science of causes between created things was possible. Thus, when the necessary technological and economic advances had occurred and when the Greek heritage of mathematics, logic, and dialectic had been recovered, the Christian doctrine of creation resulted in the evolution of modern science out of the soil of Christian Europe.

Several important implications for education flow from the existence of this secular moment within the Christian doctrine of creation. Christians are free to accept the truth about the world that emerges from any source, such as modern physics or sociology, even if that source makes no religious appeal. We may even say that there is nothing in principle to prevent one from learning philosophy, say, from Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists. Christians should also be taught to delight in exercising their own creative powers, whether in music, writing, physics, mathematics, painting, or architecture, for these powers are both truly their own and yet also a gift from God.

And yet the secular moment is neither the first nor the last point in the Christian doctrine of creation. Creation begins in God, and its end is to serve and glorify God. The Christian must never be content with purely ‘secular’ knowledge, for it is radically incomplete. The truths of modern physics or of ancient Zen art must be related to and tested by their origin in God and must be made to serve God. If this is so, then even in the case of the obviously secular disciplines such as physics or anthropology, it is always appropriate to relate the contents of these disciples to their divine source and goal. While this need not be a daily endeavor, it surely needs to be attempted regularly during the student’s education. Moreover, it is important that the teacher of physics or anthropology be intimately involved in the process; otherwise the theological perspective becomes a mere ‘add-on’ and not an essential part of the student’s education in physics or anthropology.

Sin

The Christian faith affirms not only the goodness of creation but also its corruption in sin. The modern notion of sin makes it something personal and, usually, private. The classical doctrine of sin, in contrast, asserts that sin has corrupted all of God’s creation.

The doctrine of the fall or sin implies that even our capacity for knowledge has become distorted. There is no uncorrupted and undistorted knowledge available to us. The bleak, ominous shadow of sin is particularly unwelcome in the context of the liberal arts, for it implies that we must look skeptically at all human activity, including the secular sciences as well as philosophy and theology. Our creativity in the arts, divine gift that it is, must be cross-examined in the light of our propensity for sin. Most dramatically, the reality of sin prevents us from knowing our own identity, from knowing at the deepest level who we are.

What are the educational implications of the doctrine of sin? First, all human knowledge, both about ourselves and about our world, is to be held tentatively and with some skepticism. Only God can provide certain knowledge.

Second, it is therefore quite impossible to obey fully the Delphic oracle to ‘know thyself’ unless God gives us such knowledge. Disciplines such as biology, psychology, history, and literature offer the student some degree of self-knowledge. But in a Christian context, the student should be encouraged to view the insights of these disciplines as something less than definitive. Because of our sin, we can establish our deepest identity only when God chooses to disclose it to us.

Third, even when we turn away from the inner knowledge of the self to the external knowledge of the world, the student must never be encouraged to assume that the methods of contents of the disciplines are beyond criticism. Even the scientific method itself is not above suspicion; and the master artist, while appropriately delighting in the divinely given powers of creativity, necessarily distorts that creativity. Thus, as a teacher one of my educational goals would be to cultivate a wise and humble skepticism towards one’s own achievements, whether academic, artistic, scientific, or athletic.

Fourth, the reality of sin implies that we need some criterion by which to measure our achievements. As a Christian, I believe that God has provided such a touchstone in Jesus Christ, who embodies truth.

Redemption

The last of the three main motifs of the Christian religion is redemption. Christian faith holds that God has provided for the redemption from sin of his creation through the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

First, as God’s act of self-revelation, Jesus Christ reveals perfect selfhood to us. This perfect selfhood is expressed not only in Christ’s divinity but in his humanity as well. For this reason, Christianity asserts that Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, gives us a model of true human selfhood and that he shows us our own truest and deepest identity. When we look at the life of Christ, we discover the potentiality for growth which God gives to us when he creates us; but when we look at his crucifixion, we discover the depths of degradation into which sin thrusts us. Anything that biology, psychology, anthropology, or literature claim to teach us about our human identity can, therefore, be put to the test — the test of Christ.

The adolescent and the adult are alike in that, while the project is newer to the adolescent, both are looking for a self to be. Christian teachers in any of the disciplines mentioned will point to Jesus Christ as the model and test of true selfhood, and yet such teachers will also affirm the legitimate insights of their disciplines (the doctrine of creation, as we said, alerting us to the possibility of true insights into human selfhood emerging from secular disciplines or even from a non-Christian religion that makes no first-order theological claims, such as Buddhism).

Second, for the Christian, salvation is both already completed in Jesus Christ and, at the same time, is yet to be completed. But when God’s redemption of the world does come to its final completion, it will be totally the result of the accomplishments of Jesus Christ. The implications of this for education are enormous. Cultural achievements, even of Christians, are ambiguous. Luther said that throughout our lives, we are simul justus et peccator (simultaneously saints and sinners). Since redemption is not yet final, the dialectic between creation and sin has not yet ended. On the one hand, we are not to despair. Christians, and others too, can achieve some success in the sciences and can express a beauty in art that is not merely illusion. The reality of Christ’s conquest over death and decay proves that the goodness of God’s creation is not lost. On the other hand, since Christ’s victory over sin, while complete in outline and in principle, is yet to be finished in detail, we must be careful to continue a healthy skepticism toward all cultural achievements, especially our own.

Third, we participate in this redemption only through faith. Salvation is always God’s gift and never our own achievement. This means that our cultural accomplishments are never the means of redemption. Christians do not engage in education in order to bring in the Kingdom of God; that is, Christians must not view education as a means of salvation.

Fourth, What then is the positive role of human culture and education? My answer is that for the Christian, the successful artifacts of culture — religion, medicine, law, business, management, art, music, science, and marriage at their best — are all parables or expressions of redemption. For example, Marxist critics from Western Europe have argued that Tchaikovsky’s beautiful and harmonious music, which was written under the numbing cruelty of the Czars, is merely escapist and therefore utopian art. They reason that since this harmony did not reflect the objective situation, and since it could not contribute to the objective realignment of political power, its beauty was misleading, dangerous, and inauthentic.

While I don’t doubt that for some nineteenth century Russians, attending a Tchaikovsky ballet was merely escapist, it is also possible that its beauty helped keep alive the hope of God’s redemption, where that redemption will include perfect harmony and beauty. One could also argue that works such as Tchaikovsky’s (or, for example, the landscape paintings of Ming dynasty China) provide hints of a salvation already partially accomplished and present. As Christians, we believe we’ve received news announcing where that salvation is accomplished — at the cross and empty tomb of Jesus. To my way of imagining, an education in the arts ought to climax in a recognition of Jesus Christ as the one towards whom all beauty and harmony ultimately points.

Fifth and lastly, God’s redemption in Jesus Christ required the incarnation. Christian salvation is not, as the Gnostics would have had it, a purely ‘spiritual’ reality, but rather it includes the physical presence as well. This physical presence is to be found in the historical ministry of Jesus; it is ‘there’ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist; it is in some sense symbolized in the priest’s bodily presence, and this physical presence continues in the holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Thus education insofar as it claims to be ‘Christian,’ requires the physical presence of the Christian teacher.

Without that physical presence of the Christian teacher, no educational method can adequately teach a student how to integrate faith and learning; that is, how to integrate the incarnate salvation of Jesus Christ with academic discipline and the life of the mind. One of the highest priorities of a Christian education, therefore, would be the recruiting and retention of faculty who evince a classical and eclectic kind of Christianity, who are competent teachers, and who can embody the integration of the Christian faith with their various disciplines.

[I wrote this eighteen years ago while under consideration for a faculty appointment in the Religion Department at Phillips Exeter Academy. Most of what I wrote that long ago now seems to me naïve and requiring serious reconsideration. This survives discarding.]

I think Lilla exaggerates the importance of Hobbes, but he is right to see him as one thinker in the chain of those who developed what I have called the modern moral conception of social order. A more apt founding figure for this outlook is Grotius. It sees human beings as both each pursuing their own goals, of life and prosperity, in potential conflict with others, while at the same time they are sociable, meant to live with others. Our social morality can be derived from this predicament. Those social rules are correct which can enable humans to live together; which can in other terms harmonize their projects, so that they become mutually strengthening, instead of causes of conflict and hence destruction. This is if you like a derivation of social rules from purely human considerations, and Grotius even makes the (in)famous claim that these rules would be valid, even if God didn’t exist. But in the way these ideas were worked out, in say, Locke, or Pufendorf, or the framers of the American Declaration of Independence, they were not disconnected from theology. The assumption was that God had made human beings so that they could achieve harmony by these rules, whether this was established by reason, often in a Deistic mode, or shown by Revelation (and for many people, of course, the fact that these truths were doubly guaranteed made them all the more credible). “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

Where I agree with Lilla is that this new ethic of order could be detached from a theistic anchoring. It could be seen as inscribed in Nature (Jacobins), and then later as what our instincts and intuitions as they have developed in civilization suggest to us. What I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation, as it were, a crossing of a stream. Even today, our sense of this liberal order of equality, rights and democracy is sustained by what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” in which people support the same principles for a host of different reasons, Kantian, utilitarian, but also theological. Now in fact, it is hard to think across these gaps; for a believer to understand an atheist, and vice versa. So people always fall into imagining that their grounds for upholding the consensus are the only valid ones. Certain people on the US right think that Christianity is the only possible basis; certain members of the liberal academy think that if you aren’t some kind of Kantian you have no good reason to believe in Liberalism. These beliefs help to generate the kind of Kulturkampf from which the US suffers. But the fact is that our civilization is anchored in widely incompatible “comprehensive views,” to use Rawls’ term. Only if you forget this can you believe that “we” have crossed a deep divide, and that we are now threatened with regression. It seems to me that the reality is more mixed and less dramatic than that.

So on “our” (modern liberal) side of the river, “political theology” has never been wholly absent, and has often been very prominent. Unless we choose to forget abolitionists in Britain and America, the Civil Right movement, all the Second World War rhetoric about “defending Christian civilization,” etc. It is more or less prominent at different times and in different milieu, but it is always there.

And symmetrically, the kinds of philosophical considerations which we rely on today were very present on the “other” shore. One has the impression at times that Lilla sees the pre-modern age as dominated by the Guises and the Münzers. There were far too many then, but then we’ve seen quite a few in our day, not just those with a “theological” outlook, but also Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Lilla never undertakes to describe the “other shore”, but the odd hints he does offer make me wonder. He speaks of contemporary recurrences to political theology as being unlike those of earlier days; they don’t “appeal to miracles, or biblical inerrancy, or divine providence, or sacred tradition.” Later he mentions “fanciful cosmologies.” But Biblical inerrancy is an invention of modern evangelical Protestantism; miracles were not standardly appealed to in political theory, even with a “divine nexus” (it’s true that they became very important in apologetics in the 18th Century, hence the punch in Hume’s deflationary arguments on this score); providence played a big role for thinkers of “British and American Liberalism,” of which Lilla says that for two centuries they “stayed well within the philosophical orbit that Hobbes had circumscribed.” This would certainly have surprised many of them.

Charles Taylor, on Mark Lilla’s *The Stillborn God*. The rest is at The Immanent Frame.

My proposal to you is that we should not be frightened of the postmodern critique. It had to come. It is, I believe, a necessary judgment on the arrogance of modernity, and it is essentially a judgment from within. Our task is to reflect on this moment of despair within our culture and, reflecting biblically and Christianly, to see our way through the moment of despair and out the other side. That is why I want to talk to you about the resurrection and about the Emmaus Road story; that is why I want to do so through the lens of the poem that we call Psalms 42 and 43, which (despite its customary division in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin Bibles) is actually a single poem, with its refrain:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my help and my God. (42:11)

This psalm contains a magnificent prayer, which we do well to echo as we consider our own calling:

O send out your light and your truth;

let them lead me;

let them bring me to your holy hill.

and to your dwelling.

Then I will go to the altar of God,

to God my exceeding joy;

and I will praise you with the harp,

O God, my God. (43:3-4)

Let me take you quickly through this poem, so that we see its shape and its thrust. The whole is about being in the presence of God. At its most obvious level, it is about someone who has experienced the presence of God in the Temple in Jerusalem. The poet remembers the excitement of being close to God and feels a deep ache and a sense of loss because he is not there any more.

So, in verses 1 to 5, he is in a state of what we might call depression. He is thirsty for God, like a deer in the desert longing for cool water. He finds himself in tears twenty-four hours a day. His memories of happier times only make him feel worse. All he can do is engage in an inner dialogue: Why are you so heavy? Hope in God—I shall again worship him.

Then, in 42:6-11, he remembers what it was actually like, being in the presence of God. He is a long way away from Jerusalem, in the land of Jordan or up on Mount Herman. He knows that in theory YHWH is there with him, even in exile, and he can pray to YHWH, but still the poet feels as if he is a very long way off, that his enemies oppress him and people taunt him, “‘Where is your God?” There is no evidence of the presence of YHWH. So the poet longs to be back in Jerusalem, where one could sense God’s presence and grace where everyone was caught up with worship and adorations again the poet reminds himself that he must hope. (Telling yourself to hope is not, incidentally, the same as hoping; but if it is all you can manage, it is a good deal better than nothing.)

Then, in what we call Psalm 43, but which is actually the third and last stanza of the same poem, the problem comes more into focus. The psalmist is not just geographically distant from the home of God, he is surrounded by people whose whole way of life is radically opposed to God. They are ungodly, deceitful, and unjust. He is powerless before them, and God seems to have abandoned him. It is at this point, the low point in the whole poem, that he prays:

O send out your light and your truth;

let them lead me;

let them bring me to your holy hill

and to your dwelling.

Then I will go to the altar of God,

to God my exceeding joy;

and I will praise you with the harp,

O God, my God. (43:3-4)

He is far away from Jerusalem and needs to be led back with joy, like Israel in the wilderness being led by the pillar of cloud and fire, the strange symbolic presence the living God. “Light and truth” are what you need, not just when your intellect is curious and needs stimulating, but when your whole being is lost, downcast, depressed, and thirsty for God. Then he returns once again to the refrain:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my help and my God. (43: 5)

I want you now to hold this poem in your minds as we turn to the New Testament. We will use the language and imagery the poem supplies as the visual backdrop, or perhaps the musical accompaniment, to the story we are now going to examine, the story of the two disciples, on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35.

I should like first to consider the background to the events that Luke describes here. It is the afternoon of the first Easter Day. All sorts of strange things have happened in the morning—rumors of visions and of an empty tomb-and the disciples still have not a clue as to what is really going on. As the day wears on, two of them set off to go home to Emmaus. They are joined by a mysterious stranger, who engages them in conversation about the new events. If we are to understand this section historically, it is vital that we grasp the central point stated in verse 21. “We had hoped,” they say, “that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Where were they coming from? What was their problem?

They had been living out of a story, a controlling narrative, a “metanarrative,” as we might say. This story was built up from historical precedents, prophetic promises and of course from the songs of the Psalter. The Exodus was the backdrop. God’s subsequent liberations of his people from various foreign power, formed successive native layers all pointing in the same direction. When pagan oppression was at its height, Israel’s God would step in and deliver her once more.

Why are you cast down, O my soul

and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him.

In particular—and this is perhaps the most important point to grasp—most first-century Jews believed that the Exile was not yet really over. Yes, they had come back from Babylon, geographically. But the pagans were still on top: first Persia, then Greece, then Syria, and now Rome. No sensitive or intelligent Jew would have dreamed of asserting that the promises of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest had been fulfilled in the various paltry “returns” that had taken place. Israel still needed “redeeming”—which, in their language, was an obvious code for the Exodus. The Exodus was the great covenant moment; what they now needed was covenant renewal. So we may imagine that when they prayed Psalm 43, they had this situation in view and some very clear notions as to what they were hoping for: Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people; from those who are deceitful and unjust deliver me? … O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; … Why are you cast down, O my soul … Hope in God!

The Hebrew Scriptures thus offered to Jesus and his contemporaries a story in search of an ending. Jesus’ followers had thought that the ending was going to happen with Jesus. And clearly, it had not.

How had they thought it would happen? The pattern of messianic and prophetic movements in the centuries either side or Jesus gives a fairly clear and consistent picture. The method and the means would be quite simple: holiness, zeal for God and the Law, and military revolt. The holy remnant, with God on its side would defeat the pagan hordes. Thus it had always been in scripture, and thus, they believed, it would be when the great climax came, when Israel’s God would become King of all the world. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” The two on the road to Emmaus had been doing what the psalm told them to do: Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

The crucifixion of Jesus was therefore the complete and final devastation of their hope. Crucifixion is what happens to people who think they are going to liberate Israel and find out, too late, that they are mistaken. It is not simply that Jesus’ followers knew from Deuteronomy that a crucified person was under God’s curse. Nor was it simply that they had not yet worked out a theology of Jesus’ atoning death. The crucifixion already had, for them, a perfectly clear theological as well as political meaning: It meant that the exile was still continuing, that God had not forgiven Israel’s sins, and that pagans were still ruling the world. Their thirst for redemption for God’s light and truth to come and lead them had still not been satisfied. All of this we must, as historians, hold in our minds if we wish to understand the story of the road to Emmaus at its most basic level.

Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar, herewith