Like the Cambridge ladies of e.e. cummings’ poem, who ‘believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead’, we most of us indulge in the interdisciplinary performance of literary and theological study. Walking home from the Sunday morning service we appraise both the englishing of the liturgy and the structure of the homily without much thought of whether we are right to mix literary and theological judgments. In this we ought to be encouraged. And we ought to encourage others.

It is, perhaps, for such encouragement that an undergraduate asks when he puts his name down for a course advertised in ‘Literature and Theology’ like that proffered at the University of Kent. My acquaintance with such young men and women suggests to me that for them literature and theology are not at first differentiated as autonomous disciplines, for they are experienced as modes and moments of one conversation. Their centre is in the undergraduate talking.

Yet the self spinning at the centre is not enough. Those works of literature and theology about which the young people talk witness to the experiences of others and thus become encouragements for them to think of those others. The ‘blessed rage for order’ proclaimed by the poet and the theologian communicates to the undergraduate a sense of their strivings and of his own unordered existence. And, though I intend to indicate here only that ordering of experience which may be suggested to those who attend to literature and theology, I am aware that something of the same discontent affects men in many disciplines and that these have all an interest in the new order.

Theology is a deeply conservative discipline, which is why the panic that breaks out immediately at the threat of new questions must always seem so exaggerated to people trained in other fields of study. Any new approach is usually rejected at first on the grounds that there is no evidence for it. As soon as the exponent of the new approach has shown that there is indeed evidence for his interpretation he is at once accused of reducing all the evidence to fit his thesis, and of wanting to reinterpret the whole of Christianity in function of his new insight. Finally, when he shows that he has no such intention, he is told that what he has found out has been well known all along. The new approach is first rejected because it is impossible, then because it is illegitimate, and finally because it is old hat.

Gerd Theissen has undertaken a sociological analysis of the earliest phase of Christianity, which he defines as “the renewal movement within Judaism brought into being through Jesus and existing in the area of Syria and Palestine between about AD 30 and AD 70” (p. 1). Far from enjoying august and exalted status as Professor of New Testament in the University of Bonn, as the blurb proclaims him to be, he is (at the time of writing) still fully employed as a school-teacher. He gives lectures as a Privatdozent, for which of course he receives no salary. He thus has neither the leisure nor the technical apparatus to armour his research with the impenetrable shield of erudition and argument behind which most theological work is conducted. In fact, as he writes in the Preface, “the work came into being while I was involved in teaching religion and German, and is addressed to readers who are also involved in practical work of this kind”.

My justification for writing about an unpublished thesis is simply that people ought to know about the work of the Reverend Dr L. A. Adeolu Adegbola, and that publishing being what it is, the thesis is most unlikely to be published as a whole. Hence, an article like this could help in the circulation of ideas.

Dr Adeolu Adegbola is a Methodist pastor from the great Yor-uba people of western Nigeria. After considerable pastoral experience, he completed his thesis, “Ifa and Christianity among the Yoruba”, at Bristol in 1976, and is, at present, Director of the Institute of Church and Society at Ibadan, western Nigeria, which aims both at keeping Christians thinking, and thoughtful people, who either never were Christians or who have drifted away from the churches, aware that there is at least the possibility of a Christian response to the pressing cultural and social questions of contemporary Nigeria. In this article, I shall outline and comment on his thesis, and indicate some of the new ground it seems to open up. One further word of explanation, as to what “ifa” is. Ifa is the Yoruba system of divination. Unlike many other African systems of divination, there is in Ifa no element of spirit possession, nor does the client have to tell the diviner what his problem is. The diviner (in Yoruba babalawo, father of secrets) may throw down a rope or chain, on which are eight similar objects, capable of giving a heads-and tails arrangement, or he may hold sixteen palm-nuts in his left hand. He then tries to take them with his right hand, noting how many remain in his right hand, but has to do this eight times, whereas one throw of the divining chain will give him a sufficient number of signs to select the appropriate figure, or odu, which is then marked on the divining board.

Fundamentalism clearly is some kind of literalism, especially in biblical interpretation, a literalism sustained (for what are taken to be religious reasons) in the face of liberal amd critical reconstructions and reinterpretations of the text. In fact, of course, the critical reconstructions are often undertaken for equally religious motives. Fundamentalism expresses and exploits the worries of believers; the residually Christian popular audience takes the passion-play literalism of Zefirelli’s television film with the same uncommitted tolerance as the modernist musicals “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Fundamentalism is widely influential among some theologians too. From the time of the Modernist crisis to the run-up to Vatican II, the Biblical Commission and the Holy Office imposed something very like fundamentalism on Catholic biblical studies. Professor Barr’s book does not study such phenomena in detail, he is concerned with a Protestant fundamentalism of a more systematic kind, self-designated as conservative evangelicalism. But there is enough of a family likeness between the fundamentalisms for Barr’s critique to be serviceable in coming to terms with the recent past of Catholic biblical work, dead but not yet entirely prone.

There are three marks of the fundamentalism Barr has between his sights: the inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith and necessary test of the orthodoxy of otherwise acceptable Protestantisms; sharp hostility to modern theology and biblical criticism; and exclusion of those who fail the inerrancy test from the ranks of true Christians, (p 1) Rightly, one begins to suspect that Barr has little sympathy for his subject, regarding it as a mistake in theology and a resistance to known critical truths. Barr has no hope of persuading fundamentalists to change their minds, though he does hope to help students make theirs up in more intelligent and deliberate fashion.