Faith and reason: Through a glass darkly

Trevor James says that when detractors of the Christian faith cite differences between the gospels as evidence of their unreliability or proof against Christian faith, they repeatedly fail to grasp the unique character of these texts.

In one form or another Scripture Wars seem always to be with us.

True, Christians no longer literally kill one another over interpretations of scripture, but there are acrimonious divisions.

For instance, consider the bitterness with which some fundamentalists defend their view of the inerrancy of scripture against the historical scepticism of the Jesus Seminar.

Yet beyond the intensity of such hermeneutical feuds is a wider society in which knowledge of scripture is poor and often muddled by what are seen as its inconsistencies: as a correspondent in the Otago Daily Times recently complained, "Why are preachers like Dr James remaining silent? Why do they not expose the many shortcomings of the Bible to the whole world?"

Virtually all acts of reading involve our anticipation and expectation: so we anticipate finding a friend's number in a phone book because our expectation of phone books tells us that is where we look for such things.

We get miffed or muddled if our expectations seem betrayed.

For instance, I might buy a book with the title To Cast a Fly expecting it to be about trout fishing, but on reading find it is a political thriller.

I might still enjoy it, but my anticipation of its reading must change because my expectations were askew.

Something like this is an underlying problem when we try to read the Bible, or even, just the gospels.

What do we expect of the gospels?It is not at all clear what sort of books the gospels are; what we should expect of them, or how we should then read them.

They are neither histories nor biographies, though aspects of those genres can be found in them; they are neither dogmatic texts nor systematic theology; still less are they works of fiction, but in each a shaping purpose, narrative sense and imagination are clearly present.

How do we read these books? What are they?A reader who approaches the Bible with an expectation of a definitive account of Christ finds four gospels, not one; and, remember, none of them biography or history.

Over the centuries countless scholars have explored the complex textual connections between the gospels and the different traditions and contexts that lie behind each of them.

The general experience of the church has been that the differences between the gospels have proven to be not a shortcoming but richness.

The gospels are a web of story that taps into a common well of memory and experience but in each case speak with a distinctive voice and theological slant that indicate particular authorial sources and contexts.

So, when detractors of the Christian faith cite differences between the gospels as evidence of their unreliability or proof against Christian faith, they repeatedly fail to grasp the unique character of these texts.

The mystery about which each gospel turns remains enigmatic and irreducible.