In this essay I shall be discussing William Styron’s depiction of a theologically significant incident in his recent novel Sophie's Choice (London: Corgi Books, 1979). Since our discussion will approach this novel from a theological, as opposed to a purely literary, standpoint, it behoves us to begin by specifying the theological context of the argument that we hope to develop in this essay. This essay is concerned with the doctrine of the Atonement. More specifically: we shall argue that Styron’s narration of the episode which gives his book its title provides a basis for a criticism of all purely ‘subjective’ interpretations of the Atonement. The adherent of a purely ‘subjective’ conception of the Atonement emphasizes the manner in which the believer makes the work of Christ his own — the saving significance of Christ’s work is reckoned by the ‘subjectivist’ to lie in the ways in which individuals appropriate that work. That is to say, Christ’s saving work takes the form of a ‘subjective’ process; it is, in the words of Donald Baillie (a notable modem proponent of the ‘subjective’ conception), a “reconciling of us to God through a persuasion in our hearts that is ... a realizing of His eternal love”.

‘Subjective’ understandings of the Atonement have come to prevail in recent years. This is mainly because ‘objective’ conceptions are invariably bound up with incarnational christologies, and incarnational christologies no longer totally dominate the theological consensus. Instead, so-called ‘functional’ christologies tend increasingly to be in vogue, and since a ‘subjective’ understanding of the Atonement accords better with a ‘functional’ christology than it does with a fully incarnational (or ‘ontological’) christology, there has been a recognizable drift away from ‘objective’ conceptions of the Atonement.

It is hard to imagine a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, reading, with mounting excitement, the latest work by one of the present episcopal bench of the Church of England. One should of course be less surprised to discover that a book by one of their 18th century forebears has been a stimulus on the recent French philosophical scene. The work in question is The Divine Legation of Moses; written by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester and literary controversialist in 1738. It was first set upon by Frenchmen in 1744, when the section of the work dealing with the origin of language was removed from its original theological context and translated by Leonard des Malpeines as the Essai sur les Hieroglyphes des Egyptiens. Warburton’s subsequent influence on thought concerning language has been compared to that of Saussure in our own day, it is felt at many places in the Encyclopédie, and in the writings of Condillac and Rousseau. With the revival of interest in the problematic of the origin of language in the climate of Post-Structuralism, Malpeines edition was republished in Paris in 1977, smothered with critical commentary by Patrick Tort and Jacques Derrida. For the latter Warburton has proved a significant influence.

In what follows I am going to give a brief outline of Warburton’s thoughts concerning the origin of language in the original context of his concern with biblical exegesis. Then I shall describe what is made of his reflections by the Post-Structuralists. Finally I will call in not one but three Samaritans, intellectually alien for Warburton in his own century, whose insights may yet rescue him from his 20th century predicament.

In this article I shall be making some attempt to look at Christian ritual from the particular angle of its nature as a medium for the communication of theological ideas. Ritual, and particularly sacramental ritual, is itself a specific kind of human discourse, one particularly suited to the description of religious experiences and the codification of religious thought. Ritual is a language. The structural principle according to which all language operates is the identical principle underlying any kind of human understanding: the neurological function of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate between percepts. Just as the formation of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate ‘this’ from ‘that’ - whatever ‘this’ and ‘that’ may actually be — so the communication of ideas both to oneself and to other people has discrimination and differentiation as its main purpose, for the action of distinguishing is also the action of relating, and once we are able to hold the objects of perception in tension we can organise our experience into articulated statements about the world: we can relate our own experience to that of other people.

A language, then, is a way of distinguishing between experiences in order to relate them to one another. By relating one thing to another, we are able to alter the meaning we ascribe to similarity and division, so that we now see connections when we were once only aware of oppositions, and logic where there used to be nonsense.

Friedrich Heiler’s Classic essay on prayer — Das Gebet — first appeared in 1919: several times reprinted and revised, with an abbreviated translation into English published in 1931, this vastly influential work helped to popularize and to fix in the theological mind a sharp distinction between two antithetical styles of spirituality, the ‘mystical’ and the ‘prophetic’. The distinction owed something to William James, something to a group of Lutheran scholars interested in the history and phenomenology of religion, of whom the most significant is probably the great Nathan Söderblom (whose general influence upon Heiler is very considerable). Heiler enumerates a variety of ways in which what he and his teachers thought of as a basic polarity in religion might be characterized — as a tension between the healthy and the diseased, the active and the passive, or (with Söderblom) between a mysticism of the affirmation of personality and a mysticism of the denial of personality. For Söderblom, this ran parallel to the distinction between ‘salvation-religions’, with the notion of escape or release at their centre, and religions of revelation and prophecy. For Seeberg, working in the same tradition, it was the gulf between the ‘contemplative’ and the ‘voluntarist’ approaches. Heiler, understandably, sees no point in speaking of two kinds of mysticism here, and so frames his own version of the confrontation in terms simply of the mystical in general (understood as involving ‘radical denial of the world and the ego’) and the ‘prophetic’; and he proceeds to develop a detailed and intriguing typology of spiritualities, which has remained probably the most influential section of his work.