Myths & metaphors: Janet Soskice on reason, religion and language

Christian Century, Nov 1, 2005 by Rupert Shortt

JANET MARTIN SOSKICE of Cambridge University has been at the forefront of a theological movement (largely inspired by Karl Barth) that asserts a renewed confidence in the intelligibility of theology. Her book Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford University Press) argues for taking biblical metaphors seriously and for not translating them into some other idiom. She is coeditor of Feminism and Theology (Oxford) and Medicine and Moral Reasoning (Cambridge University Press). She is working on a book about naming God.

I'd like to begin by asking about your early life.

I was raised a nominal Anglican in western Canada. We lived in a ski town, and most of my winter was taken up with skiing. My friends and I certainly didn't make a dent in that to go to church on Sunday. I was nevertheless confirmed in the Anglican Church. The priest instructing me must have thought I had some disposition toward theology because he got me reading Tillich. I couldn't make anything of it, other than to think that maybe there was something more to explore. But my puerile conclusion from all this was that if God was so great, so loving and wonderful, then God wouldn't hold it against anyone who didn't know if they believed in God--and so what difference did it make?

Looking back on it, I had very condescending attitudes toward religious believers. I assumed that they were all people who needed some kind of emotional or social crutch and couldn't manage on their own--which is, of course, precisely true. What changes when you become religious is that you realize you're one of those people, and that Promethean heroic autonomy is a bit of a flight of fancy.

I'm somewhat timid about saying this, but I am one of those people who then had quite a dramatic religious experience which led to conversion.

How would you describe this dramatic religious experience?

It was like being wrapped in an enormous loving mystery: I had a terrific sense of presence and of mystery, but a Presence to whom I could speak.

We have a notion--we learn it from Bible stories in our children's illustrated Bibles--that God speaks to people, but what's startling is feeling you're in the presence of a God to whom you need to speak back. But it wasn't with words. I didn't hear words, I didn't see anything.

I don't want to compare my experience to that of Moses, since I was only called to open my heart, but I find the scriptural account moving in that when Moses first notices the burning bush--a moment we have come to think of as a great theophany--the impression given by the text is more humdrum. Moses notices a bush that is burning and not consumed, and he is curious, rather like you might be when you see a cookery display at the end of the supermarket aisle. What's going on? It's only when Moses takes some steps forward and is addressed by name--"Moses, Moses. Take off your shoes. The place you are standing is holy ground"--that things fall into place.

What happened during your university years?

I continued studying philosophy at Cornell. I started going regularly to services. At the Anglican chaplaincy there was great excitement about the fact that the congregation included the philosopher Norman Malcolm, one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's former students. So we all marveled over this, much as you might marvel over an elephant standing on a washbucket. Here was the greatest philosopher at the university, and he was a Christian. How did this work? The regnant assumption was that only idiots or the completely socially depraved believed in that sort of thing. His presence was naturally quite encouraging to me. I thought it vital at this stage to find intelligent people who were both Christian and literate: Christians who'd read Proust, that sort of thing. It sounds so awful now, but that's the way it felt at the time.

I didn't plan to be a theologian. I'd hardly heard of theologians, and I certainly didn't think there were such things as women theologians. But having admitted to myself by this time that I was a Christian, I thought I should apply myself to theology.

You became a Roman Catholic at this time. Why was that?

To me it feels as though I discovered that I was a Catholic. I gradually began to see that Christianity is not about solitary seekers after troth who just get together once in a while for a chat: other people are very much part of the divine scheme of things--even scripture has come down to us through the agency of other people. It was Catholic material that really inspired me--the Metaphysical poets, C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce and the works of Gerald Vann, O.P. Malcolm Muggeridge, a friend of our principal at the Plymouth Brethren college in Vancouver, visited and spoke about how he had become a Catholic. Some found this very shocking, but I did not. I picked up an old Everyman edition of John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua in a secondhand bookshop, and, reading it, discovered that there was a beautiful and spiritual rationale for Catholic sacramental theology.