I'm grateful for your open letter, your generous comments and the critical questions you raise. Two general concerns seem to emerge, and it is to these that I shall respond here. The first is that I am too dismissive of the real value of the historical-critical method. Rightly objecting to its ‘hegemony’ in modern biblical studies, I'm in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The second is that the theological orientation that I bring to biblical interpretation is too ‘cerebral’: this makes me insufficiently attentive to the provisionality of our knowledge of God and to the particularities of a place called ‘the real world’.

Ian Markham's contribution to the Cambridge New Studies in Christian Ethics considers plurality rather than pluralism. The distinction is important for Markham. The latter concept is identified with the relationship of Christianity to world religions and with the thought of john Hick. The former is concerned with the fragmentation of culture, both intellectually and morally. Can there be a distinctive, if not exclusive, Christian position in such a world? Plurality is therefore defined phenonemologically: “the reality of differing and conflicting traditions (or world views) arising in differing communities with different histories”. The definition appeals to the divergence of communities, each with distinctive worldviews and identities. Propositional beliefs form only a part of such an identity. Nor does it carry any theological judgment on its desirability.