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SALISBURY CATHEDRAL LENT LECTURES 2004 - LECTURE 1

Bishop John Baker (Wednesday 7th April 2004)


'WRITTEN FOR OUR LEARNING': THE USE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE BIBLE
Lecture One: 'The People of the Book and the Book of the People'

What is the issue threatening the very existence of the Anglican Communion today? Some would say, sexuality. Others, the role of women. Yet others, like Dr Edward Norman, who has just left us for the Roman Catholic Communion, see it as a dispute about authority. All these are indeed matters of current controversy, but they are secondary. The issue at the root of all our present distress, an issue from which Anglicanism has been running away for 150 years is the understanding and use of Scripture. For surely it is plain that the reason why we cannot agree on matters of morals, doctrine and church order is that each side in every argument, like the Devil, quotes Scripture to its purpose, but with quite different ideas of its authority and how to use it.

To justify that sweeping statement, let me take ten minutes for a brief outline of the history which has brought us to where we are.

Our story starts in 1860 with the publication of a volume of theological papers called, harmlessly enough, Essays and Reviews. There were seven contributors, soon to be labelled by their opponents 'Seven against Christ', but two chapters in particular provoked a volcanic outburst of fury. One was the essay in which a sentence inserted at proof stage hailed Darwin's Origin of Species as a 'masterly volume' which 'must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of Nature'. The other, entitled, 'The Interpretation of Scripture', welcomed the basic ideas of biblical criticism which had been developing in Germany over the previous fifty years.

The outcry, led by Bishop Wilberforce with the wounds from his notorious debate with Huxley still fresh upon him, was violent to the point of persecution. Two contributors were deprived of their preferments by the Church courts for questioning the doctrine of eternal punishment, though their conviction was overturned on appeal by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in a judgement which was wittily said to have 'dismissed hell with costs'. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York had voted against this judgement, and were rewarded by a letter of thanks signed by 137,000 laity. In addition, out of 25,000 clergy, 11,000 signed an affirmation of belief in the inspiration of Scripture and in eternal punishment. Perhaps the really interesting statistic is that 14,000 didn't sign; but in the light of this protest the Convocations of Canterbury and York passed what was called a 'synodical condemnation' of Essays and Reviews. That was the high-water mark of opposition; an attempt three years later to get a Fortieth Article added to the Thirty-Nine, affirming the harmony between God's world and his works, met with no success.

We move on 25 years. Another collection of essays appears, called Lux Mundi. In it is a chapter by Charles Gore, entitled 'The Holy Spirit and Inspiration', which argues that belief in the inspired nature of the Bible is perfectly compatible with the findings of biblical criticism as applied to the Old Testament. Only a small minority protest. There is no official condemnation of any kind.

In fact, as it turned out, the censure of Essays and Reviews was the last time the Church of England as an institution took any such action. The temper of the 20th century (though matters have already changed in the 21st) was increasingly against anything that might be called a 'heresy trial'. Yes, there were demands from time to time for official censure in particular cases, such as Honest to God or The Myth of God Incarnate or the 'Sea of Faith' network but the powers that be preferred to leave doctrinal development to the operation of the free theological marketplace. In such a climate constituencies of the like-minded were free to teach their own particular lines without being exposed to any critique. Gradually, we have built up in the Church, so far as Scripture is concerned, two nations with radically different approaches to the sacred text. Behind masks of distant courtesy the Church of England has become deeply divided.

Another factor which has encouraged this state of affairs is the absence of any official teaching on the subject. In 1922 a Commission had been set up to produce a statement of belief for the Church of England in the modern world. It took 16 years over the task, and in 1938 published a Report which still today contains much of value, not least its opening section on the authority of Scripture. But inevitably much had to be cast in the form 'Some of us think this and others think that'. The Report, entitled Doctrine in the Church of England, predictably had a mixed reception and never attained official teaching status. It was simply commended for study.

Since then there have been other reports dealing with this problem. In 1976 the Doctrine Commission produced a document called Christian Believing, comprising forty pages or so of agreed text, setting out the difficulties felt by many people today in relating to the distant past and in using Christian language both generally and in Scripture and the Creeds. This was accompanied by a number of essays by individual theologians indicating how they would tackle these difficulties. This Report never even made it to the agenda of General Synod. In 1981 the Doctrine Commission tried again with a Report called Believing in the Church, which contained a number of agreed essays dealing with aspects of corporate belief in the modern world, and giving detailed attention to the Scripture. The Report also asked the Church to make some positive official teaching statements but the invitation was ignored. Again the Report was simply commended for study. But this will not do. You cannot treat the Church as though it were a supermarket trolley filled with a pile of different beliefs and hope to get away with that by calling it 'the genius of Anglicanism'.

This refusal to tackle the question of Scripture in the modern world has had serious effects, not least in the bland and ambiguous way in which the Bible has been used in discussions of other topics. But it was obvious that one day subjects would come up where the use of the Bible could not be fudged any longer. The first of these was the controversy over the ordination of women and now we have the issue of homosexuality. What gives these subjects the explosive power to blow the Anglican Community apart is not what they are in themselves. It is the way they force us to face our widely differing approaches to Scripture.

All this explains why the subject we shall explore on these four evenings could hardly be more urgent, more relevant or more difficult for us as Christians. What matters is that we should do that exploring together and this means that the time for questions after the lectures will be of special importance. The lectures themselves simply express my own mind after years of study and teaching. But, to tell you my starting point, let me say this. People like to stick labels on each other but on this subject I refuse to accept any label. I love the Bible dearly. Next to Our Lord Himself it is God's greatest gift to us. But to understand and use it well we must first be as clear as we can what kind of material is in it.

Which brings us to tonight's topic which I have called 'The People of the Book and the Book of the People'.

How well do you know your Bible? It is Rogation Sunday and you are sitting in church before Matins when a churchwarden comes up and murmurs to you 'Afraid Jack's not well. Would you mind doing the first lesson?' With which he thrusts a piece of paper into your hand and slips away to the back. You open the paper and it says, Zephaniah 3.14-20, but when you get to the lectern the Bible is firmly shut. How familiar are most of us with the Bible as a whole as distinct from the famous parts of it? Were we truly 'people of the Book', ought we not all to be devoted to all of it?
Actually, the phrase People of the Book' is a quotation from the Qur'an, which applies it to the members of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the 29th Sura (chapter), entitled 'The Spider', it enjoins Muslims: 'Be courteous when you argue with the people of the Book, except with those of them who do evil. Say "We believe that which is revealed to us and which was revealed to you. Our God and your God is one. To Him we surrender ourselves".' Jews, Christians and Muslims are given this designation because they all accord a dominant role in their lives to Scripture and, to some extent, the same Scriptures, for the Jewish Bible is identical with what we call the Old Testament, and both the Old Testament and the Gospels are important to Muslims, who venerate Jesus as the greatest prophet after Mohammed himself.

Nowadays we are used to being reminded that the Bible is by no means a single book but a whole library, but the world Church does not in fact agree what exactly to admit to that library.

In the majority of Anglican Bibles today there are, as you know, three sections: the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. The word 'apocrypha' is Greek and means 'the hidden things', and was applied first by St Jerome to those works which were found in the earliest Greek translation of the Old Testament, but which were not extant in the Hebrew. For many centuries they were included with the Old and New Testaments as authoritative Scripture, but at the Reformation most Protestant denominations demoted them to some kind of appendix. Since they mostly were written in the period between the latest books in the Old Testament and the beginning of the new, the Church of England very sensibly put them in a separate section between the two, but laid down in the 39 Articles that they could be used only for ethical instruction not to establish any doctrine. In the early 19th century the British and Foreign Bible Society (as it was then called) decided not to include the Apocrypha in the Bibles it distributed and, as a result, many publishers omitted it. Modern English versions vary - NIV omits them, the Good News Bible includes them. Roman Catholic Bibles include them in the main body of the Old Testament. The New Revised Standard Version has included not only the full Roman Catholic list but also two works (3 and 4 Maccabees) found only in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles of the Eastern Church. For our purposes I shall deal mainly with those works recognised by everyone, that is, the Old and New Testaments in the Anglican and Protestant Bibles, but include material from the Apocrypha where that seems helpful.

The contents of the Bible cover a very wide span of time. The oldest fragments probably go back to around 1200 BC, like this song celebrating the digging of a well:
Spring up, O well!
Sing to it!
O well sunk by princes
Dug by the nobles of the people
With sceptre and staff
A gift from the wilderness!

That is preserved in Numbers 21 and is almost certainly a genuine oral tradition from the time of Israel's wandering in the wilderness. The oldest major piece of writing is probably the so-called Song of Deborah in Judges 5, unquestionably a masterpiece which still grips us today more than 3000 years after it was written. At the other end of the Old Testament the latest writing seems to be the second half of the Book of Daniel, which clues in the text place in the year 168 BC. Other late pieces are Ecclesiastes and Psalm 119.

When we turn to the New Testament, the range of dates is obviously much, much shorter. It was at one time the fashion in scholarship to put dates as late as 180 AD on some books, but the general consensus today would put all the contents somewhere in the 1st century. St Paul's Letters are the easiest to date, because he was martyred in 64 but some attributed to him are considered not to be his. The most interesting shifts in opinion in recent years concern the Gospels of Mark and Luke, now put back by some to 45 and 60 AD from earlier estimates of 65 and 80.
Not only is the whole Bible the product of some 1300 yars of history but individual books may themselves be the work of several centuries even where they bear one writer's name. Take, for instance, the book of Isaiah. It tells us when Isaiah himself lived - in the 8th century BC - and some of the book is certainly his work. But other sections almost equally certainly are not but come from 200 years later. Again, as I mentioned, there are very convincing reasons for placing part of the book of Daniel as late as the year 168 BC but the book itself tells us that Daniel lived and worked 400 years before that. In the 19th century scholars expended great efforts on analysing the first five books of the Bible, the ones that constitute the Jewish Torah or Law, and came to the conclusion that they were a compilation of several different sources of material, written over a period of 500 years and that only very little of that material, if any, was actually from the hand of Moses.

Some Christians still feel that statements of this kind imply either that Scripture is in error on matters of fact or, much worse, that the biblical writers have been guilty of deliberate falsification. It will be as well, therefore, to say a word about this before moving on, for otherwise we shall fail to grasp one very important fact about the Bible.

Take the case of Isaiah. The book itself makes it clear that the prophet was the head of a circle of disciples who were charged, among other things, with keeping safe his predictions. Preachers have been in the habit of telling us that the prophets were not foretellers but forth-tellers, that is, that prediction was not their concern so much as teaching about the will of God here and now. This was a way of getting the prophets off the hook when history showed that their predictions had been wrong and so saving the reputation of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, the prophets themselves would not have approved! They made their predictions not by some magical technique like looking in a crystal ball or at the stars but on the basis of their reading of God's character. Thus, because God was a God of justice and Israel's society was unjust, God would visit his people with disaster as a punishment and to bring them to repentence. But if the nation was to draw the right lesson from the disaster when it came, they needed to have a certified record of the prophet's warning. This could be written down or kept in oral tradition in the memory of his disciples - Isaiah used both and also gave his children symbolic names like the unfortunate Maher-shalal-hash-bax, meaning 'Speed spoil! Haste prey!' Jeremiah paid a secretary to write his oracles down and when the king burnt the scroll to avert the promised doom, Jeremiah dictated another scroll twice as long.

The point to note is this: Isaiah's circle of disciples, and possibly similar groups around other prophets, carried on after his death and probably recruited fresh members. As history unfolded they responded to it in the light of his original teaching, uttering oracles of their own. Now today we would say that if you are putting out prophecies of your own, honesty demands that you do so under your own name. That is our social convention. But is that honest? If I write a book of theology, there may indeed be a certain small percentage that is my own contribution but most of the book will be drawn from other writers. Isn't it a fraud to stick my own name on the cover? The prophetic circles of ancient Israel would certainly have thought so. The one who deserved any credit that was going was the original prophet master, either because what they were saying directly derived from his recorded words or, if the words were their own, because they were his spiritual sons who owed their vocation to his example. Their ministry was dedicated to his memory.

In the same way all law was said to have come from God through Moses because Moses had been the originator of Israel's law codes, probably in the Ten Commandments and so became, as it were, the patron saint of law-makers. Solomon was the patron of proverb makers and the wise, and down the years wise observations were collected under his name. David was the prince of psalmists, though other poets are mentioned alongside him. Daniel was a figure of folk memory who could unravel mysteries and so writings of this sort were attributed sometimes to him but also to other sages of the past, like the mythical Enoch or the historical Ezra. It was a way of saying, 'This too is God's word of a particular kind'.

The New Testament inherited from Judaism this convention of working uner the aegis of a great figure, of continuing his work in new circumstances. It was one also known in the Graeco-Roman world, and was to continue into the age of the Church Fathers. So it is perfectly possible that some at least of the Letters attributed to St Paul are the work of followers who were in effect claiming 'This is what Paul would be saying to the Church today.' The same literary device has been used, though transparently, even in modern times. We also have to allow for the use of scribes and, in the Gospels, for the compiling of oral traditions from the Syrian church which venerated Matthew. In the case of the Fourth Gospel we almost certainly have an edited version of reminiscences and meditations by the Apostle John.

Another considerable point we have to keep in mind when approaching the Bible is the question of languages. Unless we are lucky enough to know Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic we can read the Bible only in translation; and anyone who possesses several of the many modern versions that are around will notice endless variations of nuance or even of straight sense. In the case of the Gospels we have two stages of translation for Jesus would normally have taught in Aramaic and that had to be put into Greek by the Evangelists, or possibly before them, at the oral tradition stage.

There are also problems, common to all works from the ancient world, where we cannot be sure what was originally written. Thus in the Old Testament the ancient translations into Greek or Syriac or Latin may suggest that the Hebrew text we have is wrong; or in the New Testament, MSS can vary significantly and then you find alternatives given in your footnotes. Often these variations can be traced back to simple errors in copying, but sometimes they are the result of deliberate alterations by scribes who felt that the text before them was in some way not good enough. The most famous in the New Testament is a verse added in the 5th century to John to insert the doctrine of the Trinity! But perhaps the most fascinating feature of the Bible is the extraordinary variety of the documents that make it up.

Taking the Old Testament first, let us start with the historical material, for it is this which runs through the whole, binding it together. It comes in different forms. First, there is the speculative history in Genesis 1-11, which describes the creation of the universe and the earliest years of the human race. You may object that surely this is not history but myth or legend, but that is not what the writers intended. In some ways the most important verse in the whole Old Testament is Genesis 5.3. In case you cannot recall it at once, here it is: 'When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters.' And so it goes on, giving a genealogy of the earliest humans, starting from the very first man. In this basic way the creation is linked to the human story and then to the story of Israel.

We see the tremendous significance of this if we compare it, say, with the Babylonian Creation Epic. That text is not linked with historical characters who lived later, as Genesis links the creation eventually to Abraham. The Babylonian creation story is true myth, self-contained, explaining the perennial cycle of seasons and fertility empowered by the god-Marduk. The Jewish creation story, on the other hand, is the start of a covenant relationship of God with humankind and in particular with Israel. That is the driving force of the whole Old Testament; and as the centuries pass, so the historical writing moves from imaginative reconstruction to folk memory to more what we call history, for example, in the offical Court History of David and Solomon, an analysis of human policies and motives. After that, rather stereotyped annals take us down to the exile in Babylon. The return is presented through the personal memoirs of Ezra and Nehemiah, enlarged with offical correspondence. Finally, the wars of independence against the oppression of the Greek kings in the 2nd century BC are recorded in the histories of the Maccabees in the Apocrypha.

The prophetic writings we have already briefly considered and they will feature again in later talks. Here let us just note them as a highly distinctive literary type but one which incidentally had immense influence in encouraging the writing down of religious material.

Next there are the law codes, both civil and religious, the latter regulating worship and ritual purity and public health. After that we have the so-called 'Wisdom' literature in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and (in the Apocrypha) Ecclesiasticus or Sirach. These are educational, instilling social, business and family morality and shrewdness. Associated with them are what we might call 'theological' writings, the Wisdom of Solomon and that mighty but anonymous poetic drama of Job. Mention of poetry reminds us of the Psalms and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, hymns of Israel's piety and prayer. In the book of Ruth we have the affectionate portrait of a religious and human ideal; and lastly, right out of the heart of ordinary life, the love poetry of the Song of Songs.

When we turn to the New Testament the picture is different and the range more limited. We have a conscious piece of history writing, inspired by both the OT and contemporary Greek models, the Acts of the Apostles. We have the apostolic letters from various leading figures in the Christian community, written to be read out in Christian congregations. And we have that strange work, the Apocalypse or Revelation, painting an horrific picture of the end of the world and the judgement to be visited on the persecutors of Christianity, before the new and perfect order of 'the kingdom of God and of his Christ' comes down from heaven.

But the New Testament falls into two distinct parts. The apostolic writings are one part. The other consists of the Gospels and they are unique.

The apostolic writings are concerned with the Church and its life. The statistics speak for themselves: in that second part of the New Testament the word for 'church' occurs 150 times. But the Gospels only marginally touch on the Church; in them the word occurs three times, and that only in one of the Gospels, Matthew. Jesus was not concerned with the Church but with Israel. They were his own and it was to them he came. His life was the climactic episode of the Old Testament story: God's attempt to make Israel see that the purpose of his covenant with them was to make them a light to the whole human race by living life as God meant it to be lived.

But Jesus' mission did not end with his crucifixion. In his risen life he handed it on to those friends who had kept him company, knew his mind and, after Easter, were committed to his cause. To start with, as Acts shows us, they were a group within Judaism, a particular way or sect. When opinion in Judaism hardened against them, and they were rejected by the synagogue, they took Jesus to the nations as the light of the world and became a separate community to which, 2000 years later, you and I belong.

The turning point in this history was the three days from Good Friday to Easter; and the Gospels derive their unique character from the fact that they relate the memories of Jesus' life and work in the light of those three days. Just as a crucifix is not a portrait of Jesus as he was on earth but a symbol of the Saviour as he is to us now, so the Gospels are not a simple biopic but writings that present the story of Jesus in such a way as to make plain what, crucified and risen, he means to the Christian community and for the whole world.

Let me then try to sum up the significance of what we have noted so far for our understanding and use of the Bible.

The Bible is the story not of a religious society but of a nation. And it is not a story written as such by one author or even series of authors. It is not a unified work of history or theology or literature at all. It is, in fact, an archive, a collection of all kinds of documents thrown up in the course of the nation's life, some of them not religious at all. Some are responses to events as they happened or in retrospect, some visions for the future. There is no overall editorial matrix, no ideology, no hidden agenda or subtext. What gives it its unity and its relevance for us is that it is the largely accidental legacy of a people striving to live ordinary life in partnership with God.

As such it is not the production of a small spiritual elite. Untold numbers of individuals have contributed to it: scribes who added their marginal notes, unknown prophets who stuck in their own oracles, counsellors who could not bear the world should lose their own bons mots. But even that goodly band is only a tiny fraction of those who make it what is is, not by what they said but by what they did: the bit players like the daughters of Zelophehad, Saul's uncle's donkeys, the officers of David's bodyguard, Hosea's harlot wife, Jairus the ruler of the synagogue, Dorcas and her sewing circle, Onesimus the runaway slave - a huge army, not forgetting those who never made it to the credit titles at all but who played their part in the nation's journey.

And what a journey! When we think what Israel was like when it invaded Canaan under Joshua - a murderous, superstitious, fanatical horde from the wilderness - and what it became by the time of Our Lord - a people in whom God could be himself - we can only keep silent in awe at such a miracle of divine grace.

But this means that we must always remember that in the Bible God's 'Word' comes to us not just through words on paper but through the record of a people, a nation, a culture, a society and its development, just as its fullness comes to us not simply in teaching but in a human life. To engage with God's Word, even to recognise it, we must take that history with the utmost seriousness, empathising with the characters in the drama, their circumstances, fears, sufferings and joys and all that went to make them what ultimately they became. Abraham, as the Old Prayer Book taught us, is our forefather; and if we are to be People of the Book we must first understand the Bible as the Book of the People.


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