Sermons
Bible Sunday
1. Stoning And Joshua said Why did you bring trouble on us The Lord brings trouble on you today, And all Israel stoned him with stones, they burned him with fire, and stoned them with stones…thanks be to God. Are we really to respond to this account of barbarism (and there are many much worse, particularly against women) by thanking God for it being recorded in the Bible as his word?
2. wives be subject to your husbands…or…let a woman learn in silence with all submissivesness…and adorn herself not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire…after which reading the lady reading said well I shall not I think say This is the word of the Lord as it is clearly just St Paul getting het up, in fact one is tempted to say this is not the word of the Lord…
I would like to offer a few thoughts on the place of the Bible in modern Christian life, the Christian life offered to us by Christ through his body on earth, the Church.
I say modern Christian life in acknowledgement that whilst the words of the Bible have changed little over the centuries, almost everything about how Christians use the Bible has changed, and I will talk about the Christian life offered to us through the Church as it is the Church which shapes our approach to the Bible. It was the spirit-led church which formed the canon and it is the spirit-filled church which interprets scripture with authority in each age, be its methods allegorical, literal, or spiritual. It is the church which decided the extent of the writings, histories, love songs, law, gospels, and prayers that were to be included in what we now have between two covers and in the formation of the canon we see the life of the body of truth which is the catholic church forming through prayer the boundaries of the holy. It took several centuries for these boundaries to become clear and during that time the Church had to defeat many heretical approaches to the scriptures, approaches that sought either to diminish or expand the canon in line with doctrinal assumptions falling outside the parameters of orthodox Christian belief.
The most serious early attack came from a group called the Marcionites who would have left the Old Testament and large parts of the New to their Jewish heritage, arguing that the new religion of Christ had superseded the old, that the Mosaic law was fulfilled and rendered useless in the new Moses, Jesus. But Jesus himself and the men whom he called to form the apostolic foundation of the Church, the guardians of the deposit of truth, had great respect for the Jewish scriptures and whilst there were some major disagreements about what might prove itself accounted by God to be canonical, by the time of St Jerome in the late fourth century the early disputes had to a large degree settled down. The production of the vulgate (Jerome’s Latin translation of the scriptures that remained the bible of the church in the West for most of its history) did not end canonical debate, in particular the question of the place of the apocrypha rumbled on with most Protestants discarding these books at the Reformation and also producing the great gift of the availability of the scriptures in languages other than those known by priests, scholars, and lawyers.
Despite the stability of the canon there has been an astonishing diversity of interpretive approach across the centuries, there is as much difference between the approach of St Augustine and Duns Scotus as there is to be found between say Luther and Laud. What has changed significantly in the last three hundred years is the great impact that modern science and cosmology have had. An impact felt most keenly in the ways in which it is possible to discuss doctrines of direct divine inspiration of the scriptures, which actually were held in rather similar fashions by catholics and protestants alike at the time of the Reformation. Similarly modern critical approaches have opened up the texts of the Bible to great scrutiny; a process which has been often uncomfortable for the Church and for individuals but which is also a source of new wonder and new life. The so-called attacks of science and textual criticism on the Bible have revealed not how little truth there is to be found in the Bible but how very much more there was than we might have imagined. Nevertheless the Bible is often a source of dispute between Christians, disputes in which Biblical texts are often used in a pre-critical manner. There is often one side which says a practice can’t be commended because it isn’t so commended in the bible, and another side which will claim that its very absence from scripture prove how little God is interested in the subject. Allegory and generalisation are the tools of the liberal in these arguments, whilst the fundamentalists return to the text claiming, as it were, that nothing stands between the believer and the plain will of God.
I often think these arguments sound rather like that had in the story where several men are blind-folded and asked to feel a part of an elephant and describe the animal. They can’t in anyway agree, of course, one claiming the animal is long and thin like a snake, another that it is nothing but a large flap of dry skin etc, agreement cannot be reached and each man remains certain of his own perception whilst blinkered. There is a danger of treating the Bible as of uniform value for us, of playing sortes-virgilianae with it, of seeing only part of the whole picture. I would like to suggest that the Bible is not so much like a rule book, but a guide. It will always be in some sense completely normative for Christians, a source of absolute spiritual truth, truth about God whose revelation is Jesus Christ. But the Bible is not itself a source of revelation rather it points always and everywhere to Jesus. Its truths are found in its grand delineation of the salvific drama, in stories that speak of God’s will in creation, in the calling of the covenanted people of the Old Testament, in the incarnation as the climax of that people’s history, in the full revelation of God that is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and in the birth of the Church the continuing source of truth about God in the world. So, we find now that Genesis is not a history of cosmological events but it is a true record of the creative action of the God who takes pleasure in what he is fashioning, who sees that His creation is good. We shouldn’t be surprised or worried that the Bible turns out to be full of this sort of record because the Bible was written by real people struggling to discern the nature of the God we worship, by people who found that nature to be one of non-coercive love, a nature sometimes apparently hidden. The scriptures were not drawn together in order to provide a ‘How to Live’ book in which we might look up any aspect of our lives and find there an easy-to-follow rule, for we do not follow a rule but a person and we hear the voice of that person in the words of scripture and in the church. The love that God offers us is not forced on us as might be a law, but proffered to us with the desire that we accept the invitation. God creates us free to turn aside from him as those first characters in the Bible, Adam and Eve did, but the Bible witnesses to the faithful God who is fully committed to his creation and to our part in it, even though we mar that creation by our sin. Our lives indeed are made up of the very stuff of sin and death but the Bible points us in the direction of the new life available to us in Christ’s body, the Church, the life of regeneration in baptism, the new life given in the forgiveness of sins, the nourishment of Christian life in the eucharist, and the pouring out of the risen life of the Son which bestows healing and which beckons us onward to the renewal of all things in Christ at the end of the age. Perhaps in that fulfilling of all things the Bible will no longer find a place because then its promise will be complete.
I hope you find joy in reading the Bibles and in delving into the mysteries of God to be found in them, and if you perhaps feel you would like to read the Bible a little more and you are wondering about renewing your commitment to reading the scriptures I close today with one very small practical suggestion – buy a lectionary. Copies, such as this can be bought very cheaply and provide you with lists of all the scripture to be read at all the church services on Sundays and during the week. You might like to take the Sunday readings and study them, or read each day the portions set aside for morning or evening prayer, they are read in churches up and down the country, often by clergy alone or sometimes with others. The promise of the Bible is one of utter hopefulness in the renewing of all things in Christ, let us take today as an opportunity to commit ourselves again to the prayerful study of the word of God, the word of hope, the word of salvation bu it is not there to tell us to approve of stoning people to death or to approve of keeping women in subjection.