Fashionable opinions

Press, 25 May 1984, Page 13

Fashionable opinions

Marnie Barrell: It mystifies me that scholars can devote a lifetime’s study to the Bible and conclude that it teaches that God's nature should not be described and that the supernatural cannot occur, when every Biblical writer is at great pains to declare the exact opposite. Only the prior (and seldom stated) conviction that God never interacts with the material world could have produced such a conclusion. Unless they are prepared to expose such a crucial assumption to proper examination, liberal theologians take a lot upon themselves to dismiss traditional Christianity as the province of the credulous and theologically uneducated. Professor Geering implies that radical theology embodies the pinnacle of Christian enlightenment in such phrases as “ . . . contemporary theologians are moving towards . . . ,” “scholarly Christianity of the liberal kind ..." This appears to mean no more than the pitting of a fashionable opinion against an unfashionable one; it does not clarify the actual issues at all to belittle the holders of the orthodox belief.