From an initial gathering with Regent students during our airport pickup to question and answer sessions and hallway conversations, there was a consistent theme: how to navigate apparent conflict between modern biblical scholarship and classic spiritual exegesis. Although any school has its unique features, the challenge faced by these Regent students has become fairly typical at a number of evangelical institutions. Courses in biblical studies and (usually) hermeneutics teach how to exegete the Bible using modern tools of critical scholarship, perhaps with a measure of discernment about the presuppositions involved in the history of those tools. Meanwhile courses in theology and (perhaps) pastoral ministry or spiritual life teach what classic churchly interpreters did with the Bible and suggest (to varying degrees) that we should go and do likewise. The challenge of discernment becomes much more difficult as a result: can the students embrace a modern approach centered on historical reconstruction of the human author's intentions, simply making minor presuppositional adjustments that uphold the Bible's historical value and theological authority? Or must students fundamentally embrace a more classic understanding of spiritual exegesis centered on pursuit of the divine Author's intentions, simply making ad hoc use of modern historical tools when these seem helpful to churchly aims?

Despite their radical differences, these three books share one positive feature and one disturbing one. First, all stress (against one recent strand of opinion) that Jesus and his followers were steeped in the Jewish Scriptures, and understood what they were doing in relation to the intricate web of meaning thereby available. Second, however, in no case do we really face the central question of the gospels: what did Jesus mean by “God’s Kingdom”, and was he or wasn’t he successful in launching it? Pope Benedict highlights the “kingdom of truth” announced by Jesus to Pilate, but it looks as though this “kingdom” is, effectively, the Church, those who (supposedly) live under Jesus’s rule. Maurice Casey suggests that Jesus picked up the notion of “kingdom” that was around at the time, but then says that he told “pretty stories” about it, which we now find difficult to interpret because “we do not always understand the aspect of God’s kingship which they were intended to illustrate”. Bruce Fisk, who focuses on the standard questions (can we trust the gospels? was Jesus God incarnate? did he die for our sins? and did he rise again?), gives plenty of hints about “God’s rule” breaking in, but never provides the full-on discussion he gives to other topics. Perhaps the problem is that wherever you are in Western culture today – pre-modern, modern or postmodern, German, British, American or anything else – the dreaded word theocracy, even when radically redefined around Jesus and his cross, is a bridge too far. But until we’ve been round that loop, we have not really been paying attention to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Or, arguably, to Jesus.

Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”

Bibles for a soundbite culture?

(Robert Alter on R. Crumb's Genesis)