The Bible
“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.” (Matt 24.35)
A man is walking through Regents Park with a penguin. He meets a policeman and says: “I’ve found this penguin and I’m not sure what to do with it.” The policeman says: “Well take it to the zoo. It’s just over there.”
The next day, the policeman bumps into the same man in Tottenham Court Road, still with the penguin. He says: “So what happened at the zoo yesterday?” The man says: “We had a lovely time thanks. We’re going to the cinema this afternoon.”
Well it’s a nice story – but of course you don’t believe it. It’s a made up story.
Today is Bible Sunday when we give thanks to God for his Word, the Bible. Some of my friends think that the Bible is full of ‘made up’ stories that Christians somehow convince themselves to believe.
So what do we mean when we say we ‘believe in’ the Bible, or ‘trust God’s Word’?
And how do we do what the collect today prayed for, that we would ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ the Holy Scriptures?
Does it mean that we have to screw ourselves up to believe things that we know aren’t true?
And how do we avoid the sort of fundamentalism which is so dangerous and yet so pervasive within the three great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three religions claim to be people of The Book.
The real debate is between Revelation and Reason: between God’s revealed truth in the Book, and the human mind’s capacity to deduce things from the outer world - to reason. Can we harmonise the Book of God’s words - the Bible; and the book of God’s works - the external world and the inner mind?
The debate goes back thousands of years as the early Jews struggled with the spoken, and later written words of priests and prophets such as those we have just read from Isaiah. What did they mean?
A whole school of Midrash grew up to give the Rabbinic (and therefore correct) view of what we would now call the OT. There were halachic (= of the law) Midrashim and haggadic (= of the narratives/non legal) Midrashim, and these commentaries on Scripture were written to harmonise and expound the Word of God. These writings flourished from 800BC to 800AD and you can still read many of them.
(Jesus often referred to these when he said ‘you have heard it said that… but I say unto you...’)
The process of arguing about the meaning of Scripture has continued through the great councils of the church.
The Nicene creed, which we always say after the sermon, was an attempt in the 4thC to clear up any ambiguity about the person of Christ - to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, not explicit in Scripture, but deduced by our reason from the Scriptures.
(Which books actually got into the Bible was also determined in this period of the Church’s history.)
Then later, through the celebrated disputes between the Curch and Galileo Galilei in the 17thC;
the Church debated the motions of the solar system and how they related to the teaching of Scripture – did the earth go round the sun, or the sun go round the earth as Scripture appeared to teach?
The 19thC saw the great evolution debates and the rise of a new form of Biblical analysis which came out of Germany and the so-called ‘higher criticism’.
In the last twenty years we have seen the Bible brought in to defend or attack, women priests, remarriage of the divorced, gay relationships, New Labour, stem cell research, euthanasia - the list is endless.
Like most polarisations, the simple ‘Reason versus Revelation’ is a false dichotomy – much loved by Richard Dawkins of course.
For the Christian, Revelation certainly informs our reason ; yet we cannot understand Revelation, or indeed discuss it, without the use of reason.
Over recent years, there have been a number of unhealthy approaches to the Bible. And by ‘unhealthy’ I mean they are not my approach to the Bible!
There is ‘The Bible as Scientific Document’ - that atomistic dissection of Scripture to which both Liberals and Fundamentalists are prone. CS Lewis mocked the approach in his essay ‘Fernseed and Elephants’ [In the collection of essays of the same title] where he supposes that a similar critical approach to the much more recent documents - say the plays of Shakespeare - would be ridiculed by the literary world.
[Post-liberals have realised the foolishness of trying to discern whether, for instance, Genesis 12.4 was written by J, E, P or D - the supposed 4 sources of the Pentateuch - the first 5 books of the OT.
And Post-evangelicals have moved away from building theologies based on the 29 tent-pegs of the Tabernacle or on a single verse of St Paul.]
Then there is that approach known as ‘The Bible as Literature’ – it’s just like all other great literature and equally valid for helping us in our understanding of life, the universe and everything. We might as well study Charles Dickens or Iris Murdoch. This has never been the position of the Church which sees the Bible as unique and fundamental to its very existence.
Or there’s ‘The Bible as Instruction Manual’ - rather like those computer manuals, only without an index, no logical structure, and written by foreigners - come to think of it that’s just like my computer manual! How to create a universe. How to discipline children.
There are other approaches we could explore – ‘The Bible as horoscope’ – ‘The Bible as systematic theology’ – ‘The Bible as Beautiful Prose’ (we’ll get a lot of that in 2011!) – ‘The Bible as Doorstop.’
So what is it? Well, it is unique and defies any clear and simple definition - which is what we might expect from a mysterious God, who wants to communicate with us.
‘The Bible as Word of God’ is as good a description as any. [Some prefer a finer Barthian distinction, that the Bible ‘contains the Word of God’.]
The important thing is made clear by Jesus in today’s Gospel: through God’s Word and the people of God we meet the Word made Flesh - Jesus - the divine communication which transcends and complements the knowledge and wisdom of reading the Book.
It is an encounter with the Source of human communication, the author of the Book, if you like, which puts the book in context and helps us to understand it and act upon it.
It’s a bit like watching Jamie Oliver on TV following one of his own recipes – the instructions come alive and you can see what he means by things.
But of course Jesus doesn’t appear on TV and so this approach is very subjective and is why we need to encounter Christ in his Word, but also in the context of the Church. One man and his Bible usually lead to the foundation of a new sect!
How then do we approach the Bible in order to know Christ, and in order to live lives pleasing to God?
Well of course we must approach it theologically and rationally. We must try to understand what it meant when it was written and what it might mean to us today: ‘The Two Horizons’ as Georg Gadamer calls them.
And then personally, as we read it and hear it read, we ‘ingest’ it, and begin quite naturally to act upon it. We shouldn’t worry too much about the detail, for the devil is truly in the detail.
It was Mark Twain who remarked, “I am not worried about the bits of the Bible I do not understand. I am worried about the bits I do understand!”
And in either case, reading the Bible theologically or personally, we must approach the Word of God with a right attitude, with humility - ‘faith seeking understanding’ as Augustine put it; and not pride seeking confirmation of prejudice.
The Bible has shaped our world and our British culture like no other book.
We honour it in our church - in the Gospel procession and the way we handle it; and in our liturgy that is based upon it.
“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.” (Matt 24.35)
