Both offer exhaustive theories, replete with Biblical examples, of why opinion X is wrong or right. But Jesus himself has been sorted out of the equation: whether opinion X is demonstrably his own becomes immaterial. The Bible’s details become our picture of God, subtly supplanting the Master as the ultimate representation of God. Perhaps we see the Bible as explaining God rather than hearing Jesus Christ explaining the Bible. You think? This may be some fallout of the inerrancy wars, which left behind a reluctance to regard the stories of Jesus as more definitive than the writings of the apostles and prophets.

As the years go by, I find myself uncertain of more and more elements of theology, and even somewhat reluctant to proclaim them, for they appear so vaguely in Scripture. But I find myself more and more certain that God is there, and that every time he reveals himself to me he looks just like Jesus Christ, and that this Jesus is wanting to flood his presence into each synapse of my thought and action.

As for “liberal” and “conservative” – these things seem so pale and irrelevant!

Some of the arguments are so simplistic that I can’t understand why supposedly intelligent people use them. For instance, I have heard others referred to as not being Christian because “they have not been saved.” Yet the truth is that they ARE saved without anything being required of them. God has done it all, unconditionally through the death and resurrection of Jesus. They may reject Jesus, but have still been saved. Yet others tell me that unless someone steps forward to accept salvation it has not happened. My argument is that it is a matter of history that salvation has been given.

Last year I was in the home of a fundamentalist and I remarked how beautiful was the poetry in the Book of Job. “Yes,” he said, “and it’s all true.” I had to be polite and say no more. But I wondered how any intelligent person could state that the story of Job was actual truth and that there was a witness at the “Heavenly board meeting”. For my part I could see the truth the story was telling and this I think is the argument you are putting.

I have found this hard to put into words as my 15 year old grandson has kept putting his head round my study door, talking about fishing rods!

What characterises the consensus is an emphasis on story and narrative. The issue is to take with utmost serious how the evangelists (in the case of the gospels) construct their narratives. The task of interpretation is a “conversation” between 3 stories: the biblical story (of Jesus and the NT Church), the contemporary individual story and the contemporary communal/socio-politcal story. Brueggemann sees the role of the biblical story in this conversation as providing the “third world of evangelical imagination”, and I find that a particularly helpful way of characterising it.

When the emphasis is on narrative, a prime exegetical task is to pay the closest attention to how the story “works”. The underlying assumption is that the story is true, but “ture” in the sense that stories are true: they tell us truth in storied form. In other words, the biblical “truth” is inextricably narrative in form and content. This means that we are not into a “demythologisation” programme, because this would be a “de-storying” exercise (I’ve just thought: rearrange those letters and you get “destroying”!). We’re not constantly searching for “the historical kernel”, as though “true”=”historical”. Rather, we allow the narrative form to do its proper work. Let me give you a concrete example: Mark uses geography symbolically. The new approach allows us to concentrate on what he does it for, rather than to assume that Mark is either “correct” or “mistaken” about “what actually happened”. Similarly, he portrays Jesus as at war with “The Strong Man” (Satan). A narrative approach isn’t interested in how we ought to conceive of Satan outside the story, but rather how the Satan character functions within it. It may be fine to ask that other question: the point is that we needn’t spend hours and pages discussing it as part of the exegetical task!

This is something we’re finding really helpful in bridging the gap between liberals and evangelicals within the URC (lower or upper case!). I’d be interested in your response.

On the one hand we have the conservatives who will probably be the worst obstacle to climb when the emerging church emerges. So many of them are, by reference to their professions, intelligent people, but they keep their eyes closed and insist on believing their fundamentalist unsupportable beliefs.

As for the liberals, I thought I belonged to them by challenging everything I read in the Bible and finding solid explanations for what appeared to be miracles and picture language. Finally I realise that I am an evangelical who uses constructively the common sense I was born with.

It has taken some time but I now know where I stand. I suppose it is a case of letting the pendulum swing to one extremity and then the other before settling somewhere in between.

But I do see a problem with the wide apart stances of the liberals and the conservatives. How can we achieve a united reformed church (note the lower case) of Jesus Christ?