T, where T represents Christian Theology.The human quest for meaning cannot be satisfied without concurrently pursuing that for intelligibility. Our intellectual, moral and spiritual capacities are not neatly separable into discrete compartments. Any meaning or significance we might find in the world has to be based on the most reliable knowledge we possess of that world and of human beings in it. The methods of science have revolutionised this quest for intelligibility with regard to nature and humanity over the last 350 years, especially the last 150 years. Consequently, in our theological quest for meaning – in any exploration towards God – it would be wise for us to examine what resources and methods have proved to be suitable for the scientific quest and to what extent they might be applicable to the theological one. This is imperative even before we consider the impact on theology of the content of the worldview generated by science. We begin with the disparity of intellectual esteem between science and theology in recent decades and its implications.
The science-and-theology dialogue has been dominated recently by what I might call the ‘bridge’ model. Just as the Golden Gate bridge throws an apparently frail, but actually immensely strong, bond between the solid rock of the land to the north and south of the sea outlet of San Francisco Bay, so the interaction of science and theology has been pictured as building a bridge between two solid established disciplines. Across the bridge, dialogue is conceived to occur with the hope of achieving at least consonance and, maximally, even integration. However, that picture represents only the Christian medieval enterprise of relating natural philosophy to revealed theology.
In those medieval times, be it noted, one had to change vehicles halfway across, from ‘science’ to ‘religion’ as reason was left behind and the deliverances of a revealed faith took over. The Golden Gate bridge operates traffic in both directions, but the reverse route from theology to science was soon rendered impassable, from the point of view of later scientists, by certain notorious interventions of the Church in purely scientific matters. Since the Enlightenment, this bridge building has proved to be hazardous, and the attempt has often been abandoned altogether. For although the foundations on the science side of the gulf seemed solid rock enough to the modern mind, those on the theological side were regarded as but shifting sand, having little solid rational basis.
For many decades now the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity. Our unbelieving contemporaries have often been the ‘cultured despisers’ with whom Schleiermacher felt impelled to deal. There are also many wistful agnostics who respect Christian ethics and the person of Jesus but also believe that the explicitly realistic baggage of Christian affirmations can be dismissed as not referring to any realities.
This deep alienation from religious belief of the key formers of Western culture in recent times has been almost lethal to a Christianity that has usually based its beliefs on authority of the form ‘The Bible says’, ‘The Church says’, ‘The Magisterium says’, even sometimes ‘Theologians say’! Educated people know that such authoritarian claims are circular and cannot be justified because they cannot meet the demand for validation from any external, universally accepted viewpoint. One can no longer today appeal to what is said in the Bible or in the teaching of the Church simply by asserting that they are ‘authoritative’. Propositions in theology, as in all fields of enquiry, have to be justified in terms of their content and not their source, however eminent or revered. I may well come to believe what, say, St Paul has written by virtue of its content being cogent and well based, but not simply because he wrote it. The latter may have been possible in the past and might still be so in appropriately shielded and conditioned social groupings, but authoritative claims can no longer justify public belief. For the diffusion of critical questioning has become too widespread, at least in the West, through better education, the influence of the media, and knowledge of science.
No one expressed it better than John Locke:
For our simple ideas, then, which are the foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and knowledge, we must depend wholly on our reason; I mean our natural faculties; and can by no means receive them, or any of them, from traditional revelation. I say, traditional revelation, in distinction to original revelation. By the one [original revelation], I mean that first impression which is made immediately by God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set any bounds; and by the other [traditional revelation], those impressions delivered over to others in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions one to another.1
Traditional revelation is, for Locke, revelation from God which is handed down from its original recipient through others by means of already designating words and signs. His subsequent percipient comments on the relation of faith and reason could not be more relevant:
Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true; no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge; which can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty. There can be no evidence that any traditional revelation is of divine original, in the words we receive it, and in the sense we understand it, so clear and so certain as that of the principles of reason: and therefore Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.2
I find myself warming to such passages as one for whom the inheritance of the Enlightenment is regarded as irreversible in its effects on theology – not in the exaltation of ‘Reason’ alone to Olympus, but in the pursuit of reasonableness, of ‘reason based on experience’ as the Anglican tradition in Christianity has stressed. As the redoubtable Bishop Joseph Butler asserted, probability is indeed the ‘very guide of life’ for belief as well as for action, about which he went on to affirm, ‘For surely a man is as really bound in prudence to do what upon the whole appears, according to the best of his judgement to be for his happiness, as what he certainly knows to be so.’3
By the criteria of reasonableness, theology in the twentieth century has been weighed in the balance of modern intellectual inquiry and found wanting, not only by many of those with a scientific training but also by those trained in philosophical and historical critical methods. The content of theology has become regarded as not worthy of reasonable assent by modern thinkers as inheritors of the Enlightenment – however much respect the person of Jesus of Nazareth and Christian ethics might command.
More recently the intellectual climate has changed, the attitudes of postmodernist thinkers apparently softening towards theology. This is because in a pluralistic society, postmodernist attitudes have allowed theology – in company with most other metaphysically based systems of thought, not excluding science – to be regarded as a permitted, socially contextualised discourse within religious communities, but to make no claim to relate to any general, public realities. I will argue that this is a poisoned chalice that must be refused by theology, which is in the business of exploring and affirming divine realities just as science is exploring and affirming natural ones.
The ‘modern’ Enlightenment situation, one might say plight, of theology – as not meeting the intellectual standards of rational inquiry – continues. However, recently, for causes obscure and to me themselves irrational, the very word ‘rationality’ has come under a cloud of suspicion. The gale of postmodernism blows in from who knows what alien strand and not only removes, it would claim, any need for a bridge between science and theology, but pulverises the foundations on each side of that putative bridge into shifting quicksands.
Or so it is said.
‘Relativism rules’ is all the cry, so that some theologians retreat into spelling out the ‘grammar’ of their received, confessional, indeed parochial (even when called ‘catholic’) traditions and are thereby self-exonerated from justifying their beliefs in the arena of public discourse. So the supporting bases for structures on the theological side of the bridge are deemed to have crumbled under the onslaught of postmodernist relativism. We shall have to return later (p.30) to this counsel of despair about the state of theology but, at this stage, enquiry into the relation of science to postmodernist critiques is especially rewarding for any reassessment of the theological enterprise.
So we ask: what about the other side of the gulf? Scientists still believe that they are exploring a reality other than themselves; that, even after the demise of positivism, their researches aim to enable them to depict reality, namely, the entities, structures and processes of the natural world; that they do so fallibly, making use of metaphors and models that are revisable; and that, because their procedures make it possible to predict and sometimes even to control natural processes, their efforts enable them to depict nature with such increasing verisimilitude as is available to finite human minds.
They would point out that even the postmodernist literary critic or sociologist relies on solid-state physics being true enough for the chips in his PC to function as a word processor. I well remember, at a 1979 meeting convened by the Church and Society section of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Boston on ‘Faith and Science and the Future’, the indignant reply of an astronomer from Australia to delegates from developing countries in the South who, based on their unhappy experience of multinational corporations using technology to exploit their countries, criticised the integrity of science. He affirmed, with some passion, that ‘quantum theory does not change as you go South across the Equator’.
The philosophical debate about scientific realism which raged a decade ago has quietened down considerably. Some kind of real reference of scientific terms, involving entities, structures, processes and often theories, seems to be widely accepted, with ‘realism’ preceded by various adjectives (such as ‘critical’, ‘qualified’, ‘convergent’). None of these forms of realism is what has been called ‘naïve’. They do not assert that terms in scientific theories are literal descriptions of the entities, structures and processes to which they refer; that there are facts to which all scientific propositions correspond; and that scientific language can exhaustively describe the external world. I judge that, as against some other philosophies of science, realism is still the majority view of philosophically informed practising scientists, who would not pursue their exacting profession if they did not think they were uncovering real aspects of the underlying mechanisms and relationships in the natural world. (Those most at risk would be the cosmologists, whose theories are, and always will be, grossly underdetermined by the facts. Theologians need to remember this in dialogue with them.)
Scientific realism is a quite limited claim which purports to explain why certain ways of proceeding in science have worked out as well as they have. A formidable case for such a critical realist interpretation of science can be mounted based on the historical fact that in many parts of natural science (e.g. geology, cell biology, chemistry) there has been over the last two centuries a progressive and continuous discovery of hidden structures in the entities of the natural world, processes that account causally for the observed phenomena.
But how has this consensus among philosophers of science, and even more among scientists, withstood the gales of postmodernism? Very well indeed, I would judge. In concord with that Australian astronomer at the WCC meeting, it is still the experience of scientists in all fields that in global congresses the criteria for good science transcend all ethnic, religious, political and social backgrounds. Clearly these latter affect the provision of grants, the scientific questions selected for study, and the imaginative and intellectual resources available to scientists – but not the eventually accepted content of science.
In America academics need no reminding of how the postmodernist critique of science was false-footed by the famous hoax in which Alan Sokal published, in the American cultural studies journal Social Text, a parody article crammed with nonsensical, but unfortunately authentic, quotations about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals of the postmodernist school. In their Intellectual Impostures, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont4 recount the full story and demonstrate that ‘postmodern science’ is a vacuous concept. To be sure, the role of the social context in the historical development of science cannot be controverted. Individuals and groups of scientists depend and feed on social resources of funds, institutions, symbols and concepts and the general Zeitgeist, like everyone else. Nevertheless the justification of scientific theories and the putative existence of the entities, structures and processes to which they refer is subject to rigorous sifting in the scientific community which eventually makes their enterprises an exploration of reality. Human beings may indeed make mistakes, but there is no merit in the idea that they can make nothing but mistakes.
Let us return to that bridge hopefully spanning the gulf between science and theology. It now seems that the science side is certainly not quicksand but more like a lava flow from a volcano, which inexorably moves forward in a fluid manner (often destructive of preconceptions lying in its path) but leaves behind an increasingly solid base of established knowledge about the natural world. My conclusion, so far, is that science has proved a bastion against the gales of postmodernism. Science serves to preserve, and even restore if we strayed so far, a conviction that the processes of rational inquiry, fallible though they are, are not always fated to be engulfed in relativism, social contextualisation, and even nihilism. By its very success in withstanding the weasel words that lead to abandoning any search for justified belief about what really is the case, science challenges humanist disciplines, including theology, to live up to its intellectual standards in their use of the data specifically relevant to those disciplines.
There has, of course, been much debate about whether or not any basis for a common rationality is now possible in these non-scientific disciplines. None of us now want to be foundationalists who urge that all our beliefs can be justified by appealing to some item of knowledge that is self-evident or indubitable and serves as an unchangeable core. In theology this leads to fideism (the core belief is the faith as delivered by the religious community) or fundamentalism (the core belief is the content of the Bible or other writings regarded as sacred). So which way do we go from here? Curiously, certain perspectives in modern biology indicate that the exercise of human rationality is not likely to be fruitless and to result in an unreliable, relativistic circularity of affirmation.
Evolutionary biology can trace the steps in which a succession of organisms have acquired nervous systems and brains with which they obtain, store, retrieve and utilise information about their environment in a way that furthers their survival. That this information so successfully utilised must be accurate enough for their survival has led to the notion of ‘evolutionary epistemology’. This is the idea that how we know reliably and realistically is a consequence of the evolutionary process. If living organisms successfully survive natural selection to reproduce, then it must be because what they are aware of in their particular kind of interaction with the environment is real. Awareness and exploration of the external world reach a peak in Homo sapiens, who, through the use of language, visual imagery, and mathematics, is able to formulate abstract concepts interpreting the environment. The natural environment, both physical and social, is experienced and becomes an object of what we then call ‘knowledge’ – information that is reliable enough to facilitate prediction and control of the environment, and thereby survival. Our sense impressions must be broadly trustworthy, and so must the cognitive structures by which we know the world; otherwise we would not have survived. In human beings a number of cognitive functions, which are also found in animals and which make their own individual contributions to survival, are integrated into a unique system of higher order.
In a nutshell, our cognitive faculties qua biological organisms must be accurate enough in their representations of reality to enable us to survive. In the case of human beings these cognitive faculties include the representations of external reality we individually and socially make for ourselves. Hence these representations have at least the degree of verisimilitude that facilitates survival in the external realities of our environments. The extent to which evolutionary biology will help us understand the cognitive processes by which this reliable knowledge about the environment was acquired is still an open, indeed confused, question. However there can be little doubt that there is continuity in the evolution of Homo sapiens between:
The scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or other domains of human knowledge. Detectives, archaeologists and plumbers – indeed, all human beings – use the same basic methods of induction, deduction, inference and assessment of evidence as do scientists. Science just does it more systematically and through carefully contrived experiments, which are often not available in other spheres of human activity. There is a similarity in basic approach, as becomes even more evident when the science is concerned with inferring the nature of past events, as in evolutionary biology and geology. We must recognise, but not overplay, the apparently esoteric and counter-intuitive character (notoriously in quantum theory) of the conceptual content of scientific explanations, dependent as they are on an informed understanding of a long chain of reasoning based on experiments. This is not to detract from the special character of the human capacity for abstract thought which must nevertheless result from integration of the simpler modes of ratiocination that operate in ordinary life and at earlier stages of evolution.
The central consequence for this enquiry is enhancement of our confidence in the reality-referring capacity of the cognitive processes that evolution has provided us with. It warrants postulating the existence of a general rationality in Homo sapiens which yields, for the purpose of living, reliable knowledge and justified belief. However, biology gives few clues about the evolution of human cognition. Moreover, this enhancement by evolutionary considerations of confidence in the possibility of human ratiocination providing reliable knowledge does not in itself exonerate us from enquiring into the validity of the information resulting from human ratiocination and also from asking about the criteria that should operate. To this we must now attend.
We are obtaining from evolutionary epistemology the stimulus to take seriously once more the results of the processes of human cognition and rationality. Can we discern any features of these processes that are common to biological survival, everyday experience and our explanatory accounts of the activities that constitute human culture in the sciences, the humanities and theology? It is hardly necessary to remind any student of postmodernism of the controversies that rage around such a seemingly innocent question. I have given grounds why I think science has been able to resist the siren calls of postmodernism. The continuity of its procedures with those of reasonable decision making in ordinary life, which can be attributed to their common biological origin, is significant for our assessment of human rationality in general. When one analyses these two kinds of exercising of human rationality, a strong case can be made for asserting that such deliberations are not purely deductive, nor purely inductive, but a composite of a particular kind, namely, inference to the best explanation (IBE – sometimes called abduction). According to IBE, we infer what would, if true, provide the best of the competing explanations of the data we can generate. Such inference may often involve imaginative guessing of the answer to the question ‘If X were true, then would it not cover appropriately the range of experience, or experiment, I am trying to explain?’, and then proceeding to say, ‘Let us postulate X, see if it works and then see how much more it might explain.’5 Inference to the best explanation accounts in a natural and unified way both for the inferences to unobservable entities, structures and processes which characterise much scientific research and for many of the inferences we make in ordinary life. In IBE, the process of argument is to present those features of a case which severally cooperate in favour of the conclusion. Decisions have, of course, to be made about which is the best of competing, plausible explanations, but note that strict falsifiability is not emphasised nor any absolute requirement for novel predictions. Hence it is particularly apt for theology to adopt this IBE model, which is so adequate for science and everyday life, since overt falsifying of theological affirmations is notoriously unavailable.
What are the criteria for deciding which is the ‘best’ explanation among any set of plausible proposals, the one that would, if true, provide the most understanding of the topic in question? Bearing in mind the intention to use IBE in theology, I prefer to distinguish the following as the criteria for deciding on a best explanation:
It would be naïve to think that these criteria, depicted with such a broad brush, do not need further detailed analysis, justification and development. Moreover, they often have to be held in tension with each other. Discussion of them has been grist to the mill of the last few decades of the philosophy of science and of epistemology, the field of philosophy concerned more generally with the nature of knowing. I cannot pretend to do justice to that complex discussion – though I do note that the term ‘inference to the best explanation’ has become broadly acceptable to the practitioners of a wide range of disciplines in the sciences and the humanities. Various elements – e.g. experience, understanding, judgement and deciding – have been distinguished in the processes of knowing the variegated multiplicity of physical objects, concepts, processes, persons, symbols, texts, histories, etc. (the list is endless) that constitute the web of beliefs of the knowing consciousness. This web of beliefs and knowledge – including those about God and God’s relation to humanity – will be susceptible to revision and even replacement as new experiences, new experiments, and so new knowledge, impinge upon its outer edges. The process of adjustment of this web to new inputs has been likened by N.H. Gregersen6 to the gradual enlargement and reconstitution of a raft of planks of different types (the candidates for truth) by the addition of new planks that strengthen the structure. No plank forms the raft in itself but each is significant in its contribution to the whole. The addition of new planks may have repercussions that necessitate, for the coherence of the whole, the undoing of parts of the raft previously in place and the reconstruction of particular older planks. As Gregersen says, this demand for coherence, for that is what it is,
implies for theology that it should be able to clarify how, and in what sense, developments in science have reverberated for the understanding of faith, and how theology should cope with these reverberations in terms of eventually revised internal self-descriptions, in terms of external descriptions of scientific data and theories, in terms of appropriate thought models and scientific elements of worldviews, and in terms of a potential exchange of metaphors.7
In opting for the pre-eminence of IBE in the present context, in no way do I wish to discount the subtlety and complexity of the many aspects of the knowing process in relation to the variety of what human beings can experience – in particular, their significance for the interpretation of religious experience. Of course, religious beliefs (and particularly Christian ones), even when expressed in theological language, start from assumptions and premises that, although not yet fully reasonable, may be said to seek reasonableness. Like any other beliefs, one can pursue this goal only by the feedback obtained from critical and rational discussions of these beliefs with others. The theory or rationality expressed here is
best understood in terms of the ‘inference to the best explanation’ model adapted from the philosophy of science. On this view, many Christian beliefs are potential explanations: they tell why certain data that need to be explained are the way they are; they account for certain facts about human existence. When I believe them, I believe they do a better job of explaining the data than the other explanatory hypotheses of which I am aware. The task of rational discussion is to weigh competing explanations, whatever their respective sources, and to select the one or more that do the best job of explaining the data at hand ... Accomplishing this task involves making religious beliefs available to intersubjective assessment – translating them into the terms, and connecting them with the kinds of evidence, that will make them genuinely discussible by a broad community of inquiry that comprises believers and nonbelievers alike.8
I urge that IBE is the procedure that best leads to public truth about the relation of nature, humanity and God which is both communicable and convincing by its reasonableness through reflection on our most reliable and generally available knowledge of nature and humanity. To most in Western culture such knowledge is preeminently forthcoming from the sciences. Such an approach might even open a path towards God for the many wistful agnostics and the ‘cultured despisers’ of any form of theism.
Earlier I drew attention to the parlous state of the reputation of theology as an intellectual discipline. A large proportion of educated people do not find Christian (or any) theology reasonable: it is not seen by them to meet the standards of modern intellectual life, not least in its relation to science.
So I would describe the first key critical issue for theology, exemplified supremely in its relation to the natural and human sciences, as follows:
Dare theology proceed in its search for even provisional ‘truth’ by employing the criteria of reasonableness that characterise other forms of human enquiry, in particular the sciences?
In the natural and human sciences, a strong case can be made that they achieve their aims of depicting, revisably and metaphorically, the realities of the natural and human worlds by IBE. Because of the epistemological revolutions of our time, it is now essential that the theological pier of the bridge to science be subject to the same demands for epistemological warrant and intellectual integrity as other disciplines, especially science – and to relinquish any unestablished confidence that the content of traditional theological affirmations is divinely warranted.
Theology needs to be truthful, free and critical; and to deal with and interpret the realities of all that constitutes the world, especially human beings and their inner lives. Dare theology, by using IBE, enter the fray of contemporary intellectual exchange and stand up and survive in its own right? To do so, it has to become an open exploration in which nothing is unrevisable.
The bridge model for science-and-theology must go, and be replaced by that of a joint exploration by IBE into a common reality, some aspects of which will prove, in the end, to be ultimate – and pointers to the divine. Let us now look at how theology is actually practised.
What do we find? A variety of theological procedures that do not meet the above criteria:
If Christian (indeed all) theology is to meet the intellectual standards of our times by, for example, utilising IBE and not relying on authorities or claimed a priori notions, it will have to take account of:
S |
the realities of the world and humanity discovered by the Sciences; |
CRE |
the Jewish and Christian communal inheritance of claimed Classical Revelatory Experience; |
WR |
the perceptions and traditions of other World Religions. |
Hence the data of theology are S + CRE + WR.
Here we have, regretfully, to put WR on one side but let it be noted here that a second critical issue for Christian theology in relation to the sciences is the ways other religions have related to the scientific worldview and what can be learnt from them.
But for our present purposes let our data be taken to be only S + CRE.
If we put these together, we are faced with a third critical issue, namely, that a very radical revision of past notions concerning what Christians can in future hold as credible, defensible and reasonable becomes imperative.
We have had
CRE T, where T represents Christian Theology.
But now, we have to pursue
S + CRE RT, where RT represents a radically Revised Theology, which will not live at all comfortably with the theology, T, promulgated by many churches and in most pulpits. (Eventually, of course, we need
S + CRE + WR GT, where GT represents a global theology.)
Deployment of IBE in the dialogue between the scientific understanding of the world and the theological quest for meaning as represented in RT will be very different from the ‘natural theology’ which was the classical prelude to ‘revealed theology’, based on CRE, and on to which it was grafted. The traditional ‘natural theology’ (especially in its eighteenth-century English form of physico-theology) sought to deduce the existence and the attributes of God from natural phenomena. Such deductive links now prove to be weak and overplayed in the classical theological schemes. Today the process of relating our understanding of nature to the theological enterprise has to be more subtly nuanced. As I have argued above, we can only infer to the best explanation and no claim can be made for logical proof in this process (as claimed in the classical Five Ways to prove the existence of God). This non-availablity of hard proof applies even to the natural sciences (or to history, for that matter), in which IBE is the dominant procedure. Proof in the hard sense is possible only in logic and mathematics, which deduce from stated axioms. Hence the exploration in which we are to be engaged must not be confused with the old ‘natural theology’ – and it would be misleading even to call it a new or revised or resuscitated ‘natural theology’.
What is needed is careful attention to scientific knowledge of the world as we apply IBE in our reflection upon it in relation to the theological quest for meaning. How, then, should we conduct such a dialogue of the sciences with theological formulations of the content of religious experience and the traditions of the Christian community?
Here we encounter a fourth set of critical issues concerning the methodology of this process. Those of us engaged in the interaction of science and theology must be especially committed to certain norms, for the formulation of which I am indebted in large part to Willem Drees.9
We should aim:
I cannot help wondering if, in spite of the honest efforts of many of us, we have always maintained such standards.
A fifth critical issue in any exploration towards the divine is that today we have to take into account that the current study of all religions and their sacred resources – especially Christianity with its distinctive historical foundations and its Bible – has been revolutionised over the last 150 years by critical historical, archaeological and literary investigations. Neither the Christian New Testament nor the Jewish scriptures of the so-called Old Testament can now be read unreservedly as containing, in their historical narratives, veridical history and the actual words of those depicted as uttering or writing them. Careful, analytical judgement is required in assessing such ancient literature, much of which was written simply to reinforce the ideologies and beliefs of the communities to which they were presented. Hence much is simply persuasive literature (propaganda even), whose historical veracity is very hard to assess today – and, even if this were established, it would be difficult to discern its significance for us in our quite different cultural situation. Too much Christian theology (Christology, to be precise), for example, has been based on the dubious assumption that the utterances of Jesus as reported in the fourth Gospel were his actual words – piling a mountain of interpretation on uncertain foundations. Nevertheless, again and again sequences in both the Old and New Testaments can light up the reader with an intense insight by virtue of that perception and inherent wisdom that make the whole corpus of the Bible the most remarkable compilation concerning the experience of God which we possess. It remains an irreplaceable resource in our exploration towards God. Yet critical judgement of its content is always necessary in the light of scholarship – combined with openness to its sitting in judgement on the reader.
Such considerations become crucial in relation to Christian assertions about the significance of the life, death and claimed resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in one’s exploration towards God. For it will never again in Western culture be intellectually defensible simply to claim authority for propositions by asserting that they are ‘biblical’. They have to stand on their own feet as warrantable and justified. This stance towards the biblical literature will be presumed in what follows – not least because it is the only fair-minded and open one from which plausibly to set out on any exploration towards God today. Interestingly, modern investigations demonstrate that the biblical authors and redactors themselves again and again did not hesitate to revise and reinterpret their biblical predecessors – the biblical ‘tradition’ is one of continuous dialogue with the past and frequent revision of it. With this critical background in mind, let us start the exploration.