 Fernseed and Elephants. This paper arose out of a conversation I had with the principal one night last summer. A book of Alec Wittler's happened to be lying on the table and express my reaction to the sort of theology it contained. My reaction was a hasty and ignorant one, produced with the freedom that comes after dinner. One thing led to another, and before we were done, I was saying a good deal more than I had meant about the type of thought which, so far as I could gather, is now dominant in many theological colleges. He then said, I wish you would come and say all this to my young men. He knew, of course, that I was extremely ignorant of the whole thing. But I think his idea was that you ought to know how a certain sort of theology strikes the outsider. Though I may have nothing but misunderstandings to lay before you, you ought to know that such misunderstandings exist. That sort of thing is easy to overlook inside one's own circle. The minds you daily meet have been conditioned by the same studies and prevalent opinions as your own. That may mislead you. For, of course, as priest it is the outsiders you will have to cope with. You exist in the long run for no other purpose. The proper study of shepherds is sheep, not save, not save accidentally other shepherds. And woe to you if you do not evangelize. I am not trying to teach my grandmother. I am a sheep telling shepherds what only a sheep can tell them. And now I start my belating. There are two sorts of outsiders, the uneducated and those who are educated in some way but not in your way. How you how how you are to deal with the first class if you hold views like Luzi's or Schwitzers or Boltman's or Tellich's or even Alec Wittler's, I simply don't know. I see and I'm told that you see that it would be it would hardly do to tell them what you really believe. A theology which denies the historic historic city of nearly everything in the gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia which either denies the miraculous together or more strangely after swallowing the camel of the resurrection strains at such nuts as the feeding of the multitudes. If offered to the uneducated man can produce only one one or other of two effects it will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. What you offer him he will not recognize as Christianity. If he holds to what he calls Christianity he will leave a church in which he is no longer taught and look for one where it is. If he agrees with your version he will no longer call himself a Christian and no longer come to church. In his crude course way he would respect you much more if he did the same. An experienced clergyman told me that what that most liberal priests faced with this problem have recalled from its grave the late medieval conception of two truth. A picture truth which can be preached to the people and an esoteric truth for use among the clergy. I shouldn't I shouldn't think you will enjoy this conception which when you have to put it into practice I'm sure if I had to produce a picture truth to a parishioner in great anguish or understand fierce temptation and produce them with this seriousness and fervor which his condition demanded. While knowing all the time that I didn't exactly only in some pick-wicky and sense believe him myself I find my forehead getting red and damp and my collar getting tight but that is your headache not mine. You have all you have after all a different sort of collar. I claim to belong to the second group of outsider educated but not theoretically, theologically educated. How one member of that group feels I must now tell to tell I must now try to tell you. The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of the vines engage in New Testament criticism. The authority of experts in this discipline is the authority in difference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass of beliefs shared in common by the early church the fathers the middle ages the reformers and even 19th century. I want to explain what it is that makes me skeptical about this authority. Ignorantly skeptical as you will all too easily see but the skepticism is the father of the ignorance. It is hard to perceive in a close setting close study when you can work up no prima faca confidence in your teacher teachers. First then whatever these men may be as biblical critics I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literally literary judgment to be in in perceptive about the very quality of the text they are reading. It sounds strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives but that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of the New Testament texts and of other people study of them whose literally your experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genuine experience of literature in general is I should think very likely to miss the obvious things about them. If he tells me that something is a gospel in legend or romance I want to know how many legends or romances he has read. How well his palette is trained in detecting them by the flavor not how many years he has spent on that gospel but I had better turn to examples. In what is already a very old commentary I read that the fourth gospel is regarded by one school as a spiritual romance a poem not a history or to poem not a history to be judged by the same cannons as Nathan's parable the book of Joa Paradise Lost or more exactly Pilgrim's Progress. After a man has said that why need one attend to anything else he says about any book in the world. Note that it regards Pilgrim's Progress a story which professes to be a dream and flots its allegorical nature by every single proper name it uses as the closest parallel. Note that the whole epic panoply of Milton goes for nothing but even if we leave out the grosser absurdities and keep to Joa the insensitiveness is crass. Joa is a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job grotesque in incidents and surely not without a distinct though of course edifying vein of typically Jewish humor. Then turn to John read the dialogue that with the Sumerian woman as the at the well or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at his pictures Jesus if I may use the word Bodling with his finger in the dust the unforgettable unforgettable. I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legend, myth, all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views either this is a reportage though it may no doubt contain errors pretty close up to the facts nearly as close as Boswell or else some unknown writer in the second century without known predecessors or successors suddenly anticipated that the whole technique of modern novelistic realistic narrative if it is untrue it must be narrative of that kind the reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read I would recommend him to read Orbach. Here from Baltan's theory of the New Testament page 30 is another observe in what unsimulated fashion the prediction of the Paros mark 838 follows upon the predictions of the passion 831 what can he mean unassimilated? Baltan believes that predictions of the Parusia are older than those of the passion he therefore wants to believe and no doubt does he build does believe that when they occur in the same passage from discrepancy or unassimilation must be perceptible between them but surely he foists this unantexed with shocking lack of perception Peter has confessed Jesus to be the anointed one that flash flash of glory is hardly over between the dark prophecy begins over before the dark prophecy begins that the son of man must suffer and die then this contrast is repeated Peter raised for a moment by his confession makes his false false step the cushion rebuff get the behind me follow follows then across that momentary ruin which Peter as so often becomes the voice of the master turning to the crowd generalizes the moral all this fall all his followers must take up the cross this avoidance of suffering this self-preservation is not what life is really about then more defiantly still the summons to murder them you must stand to your tackling if you this the so Christ here and now he will the so you later logically emotionally imaginatively the sequence is perfect only a bolt head could think otherwise finally from the same Boltman the personality of Jesus has no importance for the Keegman either of Paul or of John indeed the tradition of the earliest church did not even unconsciously preserve a picture of his personality every attempt to reconstruct one remains a play of subjective imagination so there is no personality of our Lord presented in the New Testament though what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see what evidence have we that we he would recognize a personality if it were there for it is bolt boltman contra mondom if anything whatever is common to all believers and even to many unbelievers it is the sense that in the gospel they have met a personality there are characters whom we know to be historical but of whom we do not feel that we have any personal knowledge knowledge by acquaintance such as Alexander Attila or William of Orange there are others who make no claim to historical reality but whom nonetheless we know as we know real people false staff uncle Toby mr. Pickwick but there are only three characters who claiming the first sort of reality also actually have the second and surely everyone knows who they are Plato's Socrates the Jesus of the Gospels and Boswells Johnson our acquaintance with them shows itself in a dozen ways when we look into the apocalyptic apocryphal gospel we find ourselves constantly saying of this or that religion no it's a fine saying but not his that wasn't how he talked just as we do with all pseudo John Sonia we are not in the least put perturbed by the contrast which within each character the union in Socrates of silly silly and scabrous titters about Greek pedestrian with the highest mythical fervor and all homeliest good sense in Johnson of profound gravity and melancholy with that love of fun and nonsense which Boswell never understood though Fanny Burry did in Jesus of peasant shrewdness intolerable severity and irresistible tenderless so strong is the flavor of the personality that even while he says things which on any assumption then that of divine incarnation is the fullest sense in the fullest sense would be appallingly arrogant yet we and many unbelievers to accept him as his own valuation when he says quote I am meek and lowly of heart and coat when those passages in the New Testament with superficially which superficially and in intention are most concerned with the divine and least with the human nature bring us face to face with the personality I am not sure that they don't do this more than any other any others we believe his glory the glory as of the only begotten of the father full of graciousness and reality which we have looked upon and our hands have handled that wasn't quotes which is gained by trying to evade or dissipate the shattering in immediacy of personal contact by talk about quote that's significant which the early church found significance which the early church found that it was impaled to attribute to the master master and quote this hits us in the face not what they were impaled to do but what impaled them I begin to fear that by personality Dr. Boltman means what he should call in personality what you'd get in a dictionary of national biography articles or an obituary or a Victorian life and letter of Yeshua bar Yoseph in three volumes with photographs