gregoryjenks

Category: Sermons

  • Why bother with the Old Testament

    A sermon for the ‘Debate the Preacher’ series at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane on Sunday, 2 February 2014.

    It has fallen to me to begin this new series of ‘Debate the Preacher’ as we explore the significance of the ‘Old Testament’ for us today. Over the four Sundays of February we shall have an opportunity to hear different scholars from St Francis Theological College offer perspectives on the contributions that this part of the Bible makes to our lives today.

    Speaking of perspectives, what are we to make of the title for this series? How do we imagine the title to be punctuated? To put it another way, is our topic a question or an argument?

    Have you come here this evening expecting to be told why you should actually bother with the OT? Or have you come to hear someone tell you it is OK not to bother with that part of the Bible? Those are very different perspectives and we can signal the difference by the way we punctuate the sentence. 

    So whether you have come to seek release from the challenge of reading the OT, or seeking to be persuaded that this is actually something you should do, we have each come with some assumptions. We also come from particular contexts and life experiences. All of this will shape our perspectives, and meaning is largely constructed through the perspective of the interpreter. You may find what I say confronting or challenging, traditional or revisionist, helpful or a waste of time. What I will have said will be the same, but your perspective will largely determine what you make of my words.

    And then to the debate after the service ends …

    Defining our terms

    One of the first challenges we may face when thinking about the OT is which set of books is  intended, and what is the best way to name them these days. We can start with the latter issue since that opens the way for the deeper issue of which texts comprise the OT.

    It is common these days to find Christian people seeking to avoid the term, ‘Old Testament’. In its place we typically find terms such as ‘Hebrew Bible’, or ‘Jewish Scriptures’. There are good reasons for doing that, as well as even stronger reasons—in my mind—not to do so.

    The positive reasons for dropping the label ‘Old Testament’ begin with the unfortunate perception that ‘Old’ implies ‘no longer of value’. In a consumer culture obsessed by the quest for the latest new thing, clearly a ‘New’ Testament is better than an ‘Old’ Testament. Quite apart from the age profile of the average Anglican congregation, one might expect such an argument to have little appeal in Anglican circles. We value tradition and do not chase after the latest new thing.

    More insidiously, ‘Old Testament’ can suggest a supersessionist attitude towards Jews and their religion, and reinforce latent Christian anti-Semitism. The traditional name for these books within the Bible that we share with Jews does tend to imply that the religion centred around those books is an earlier and less-developed version of the latest ‘religious operating system’ that we enjoy as Christians.

    On this side of the Holocaust, Christians are rightly sensitive to anything that smacks of supersessionism or excludes Jews as the despised other. For many people, calling these books the ‘Hebrew Bible’ or the ‘Jewish Scriptures’ is an overdue recognition of our debt to Judaism and of the historical reality that two-thirds of the Christian Bible belongs first of all to the Jews.

    However, despite my sympathy with all these arguments, I do not accept the fashion of re-badging two-thirds of our Bible in this way. In my view the Christian scriptures known as the ‘Old Testament’ are related to the Jewish scriptures, perhaps better described as the Tanakh, but are not to be confused with them.

    The reason for this is very simple, and it is connected with the fact that there is no such thing as ‘the Christian Bible’, but rather a great many different variants of the Christian Bible. The collection of biblical writings that passes as ‘the Bible’ for most Westeners these days is not the ancient Bible of Christianity, but a novel form of the Bible created at the time of the European Reformation for the use of Protestant faith communities in NW Europe.

    Up until the Reformation—and therefore for more than one thousand years—the normative form of the Christian Bible was an enlarged version of the Old Testament together with the commonly-accepted books of the New Testament. The Christian OT derived from the ancient Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures, and included a dozen or so additional writings not included in the normative Hebrew version of the Jewish Bible. These were parallel and competing versions of the Jewish Bible, until the Protestants decided to adopt the Jewish set of books for their Old Testament as part of their protest against Rome. In the East, of course, there were none of these internal debates over the contents and form of the Bible, and the ancient Greek Bible with its larger OT continues to be the canonical text of the Orthodox religious communities.

    When the Protestant Reformers took upon themselves to reshape the OT within the Christian Bible they only half completed the job. They deleted the books found only in the Greek version, but kept the remaining books in the same sequence as found in the Septuagint Greek and the Latin Vulgate versions. The end result was a Protestant OT that contained only the books found in the Tanakh, but arranged them in the traditional Christian order that differs significantly from the Jewish arrangement.

    That was not simply a sloppy job. It actually created a third form of the OT, even if it is one that most Western people mistake for the original Bible. We now have a Jewish set of Scriptures with 22 books arranged in three sections, a Catholic/Orthodox Old Testament with around 52 books arranged in five sections, and a Protestant Old Testament with 39 books also arranged in the same five sections. These are not the only variations, but they are the major ones and suffice for our purposes this evening.

    Except when I am intending to refer to the Jewish Scriptures (in which case I use the term, Tanakh), I therefore insist on using ‘Old Testament’ for the first two-thirds of my Christian Bible. There is an ancient and obvious link between the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh, but they are not the same document. What I am speaking about this evening is not the role of the Tanakh in the life of the Christian community, but the role of Old Testament.

    In doing that I am conscious that my OT may not be the same as yours. That is most likely because I am using the ancient Christian Old Testament while you may be using a Protestant edition of the OT that deliberately choose to exclude a dozen or writings that had been part of the biblical inheritance of Christians since the first century. Those so-called ‘apocryphal’ books continue to form part of the Bible for Anglicans, Orthodox and Roman Catholics.

    As an aside, let me just add that this diversity in the forms of the Bible does not faze me. In fact, I appreciate that diversity and I claim it as part of my biblical authority to hold opinions that someone else may not approve. If the Great Church cannot even agree on what books constitute the Bible, then I think I can cut myself a bit of slack on a number of other disputed beliefs and practices as well.

    Why is the place of the OT in Christianity up for debate?

    Given the historical aspects of the Old Testament as ancient part of the biblical legacy of Christianity, why are we beginning this conversation over a month of Sundays? The reason is, of course, that all of us feel some degree of discomfort when engaging with these ancient Jewish texts that now form two-thirds of our Bible.

    Let me absolutely plain here: these are Jewish texts. They constitute the largest part of the Christian Bible, but they are not Christian texts. They are canonical texts for Christians, but in accepting them in that way we are adopting into our context documents that come from another very different context.

    Out of our desire to acknowledge and respect the Jewishness of these texts we may feel that there is something awkward about even using them these days as Christians. Just as we would no longer consider it appropriate (I hope) for a group of Christians to celebrate a Passover Seder during Holy Week, should we stop using their Scriptures and just make do with our own? For reasons that will be covered later, this is not my view; but it is one with which I have some sympathy.

    We sometimes hear it said that we are a ‘NT church’ and therefore should not pay as much attention to the Old Testament. Indeed a colleague said exactly that at Clergy Summer School last month. It is almost as if a biblical passage from the OT only has relevance for us if we can find a NT text to affirm it or modify it in some way. This is a view with which I have almost no sympathy, and it drives me to affirm that we are a ‘biblical church’, rather than a NT church. Not a ‘Bible Church’, mind you; but a biblical church! There is a difference even if we cannot parse it out this evening.

    Part of the reason for this series that we are beginning tonight is that we do sense some profound differences between OT and NT. This is right to do, and far better than reading the OT so thoroughly through our Christian perspectives that these ancient Jewish texts only speak with a Christian accent. But a growing awareness of those differences, and the need to redress almost 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism, can cause us to lose our nerve when it comes to reading these texts.

    The ‘problem’ of the Old Testament

    There are a great many complexities and challenges about reading the OT as Christians, just as there are when Jewish people seek to read the same texts as Jews. I have rehearsed some of these in other places, so I will not recite them again here.

    Suffice to say that the length and complexity of the OT, and its cultural distance from our time and place—as well as its uncritical acceptance of violence, patriarchy, gender discrimination—all combine to make these texts problematic for Christians in the twenty-first century. This is compounded by issues around literal readings of these ancient pre-modern texts, and perceived conflicts with history and science.

    The power of the Old Testament

    Rather than focus on the things that make it tricky for us to use the OT, I want to sketch some of the positive reasons why we should make the best use we can of these ancient Jewish texts that constitute such a large proportion of our Christian Bibles.

    First of all, the OT provides historical depth to our tradition. Even when the events themselves are not historical, these are ancient stories and ancient songs that derive from the historical experience of our ancestors in the faith. Their contexts were different from ours, and their beliefs about God are not the same as ours, but they represent the mountain spring from which the river of faith flows. The faith that matters to us did not begin with Jesus and was certainly not created in the last few hundred years. It has ancient roots deep behind historical memory. Some of us are privileged to visit the biblical lands and dig up the past with our own hands, but for most of us the OT is our birth certificate as people of faith.

    Secondly, the OT simply covers a larger sample of life and holiness than NT offers. Most likely we can account for the creation of all of the NT writings within about 100 years of Easter. Some would argue that much less time is needed, but I prefer this is more modest claim. During that one hundred years and across the limited range of texts gathered into the NT, there is a much smaller sample of life and faith than we find in the OT. Many issues are just not addressed directly in the NT, but we find texts within the OT that do so—and they invite us into an engagement with Scripture (and with the Spirit of Christ).

    A third reason for bothering with these ancient Jewish texts in the Christian Bible is that these are the formative texts of the Western religious tradition. In saying that I am conscious that these are actually ‘Eastern’  texts, even though they have shaped the Western tradition so deeply. If we want to understand our own cultural tradition we simply have to engage with the writings of the Old Testament.

    Far more than a cultural legacy is involved at this point. These are challenging spiritual texts: the Law, the Prophets, the Poems. The Law invites us to imagine ourselves in a covenant with God, and it is a communal covenant rather than simply a private quest for salvation. The Prophets challenge us to be authentic about living out the implications of that covenant, and to focus on the things that really matter: mercy, justice, humility. And the Poems of Israel provide us with a songsheet for the human soul as we pass through times of success and times of tragedy.

    The danger of a Christianity without the Old Testament

    The idea of ceasing to bother with the Old Testament is not a new one. It was a very real option for Christians in the middle of the second century. By that time a majority of Christians were not of Jewish descent, and some Christians considered too close an association with Judaism to be a negative element following successive Jewish revolts against Roman rule. Indeed, some Jews were also eager to dissociate themselves from Christianity and sharpen the divide between the two religions.

    Marcion (ca. 85–160 CE) was a Christian leader from what today we could call northern Turkey. He was something of a lightning rod for those Christians seeking to discard the Jewish aspects of Christianity, and get rid of the Old Testament. While often represented as a heretic and trouble-maker, Marcion may actually have been a traditionalist who argued for a view that was contested in his own time. However that may have been, the debate that Marcion brought to focus with his publication of the very first edition of the New Testament, led ultimately to the NT as we know it today—and to the affirmation that the OT is an essential part of the Christian Bible.

    We owe Marcion a deep debt, and especially for his unintended consequence of making us claim our Jewish heritage as an essential element of Christianity.

    To discard the OT from our Bibles—or even just from our lectionaries—would be to suffer a loss of access to these profoundly spiritual texts. Can we really contemplate a Bible without the Law? A Bible without the Prophets of Israel? A Bible without Job or the Psalms?

    Such a truncated Bible would mean we could never understand either Jesus or Paul. They were both Jews, of course. Their Bible was the Tanakh, or—in Paul’s case—the Septuagint.

    Worse still, if we are not willing to ‘bother’ with the OT we shall end up with an excessively spiritualised and individualised Christianity. ‘Me and Jesus’ too often substitutes for the biblical faith that calls us to participate in intentional covenantal communities of faithfulness. The OT is absolutely essential for a Christianity that offers more than fire insurance or get-out-of-jail cards for isolated individuals.

    Finally, and most importantly, a Christianity without the OT will lead us back to Auschwitz. Christian anti-Semitism is fed by self-serving Christian rejection of the Jews and their Bible. A Christianity without the OT is not Christianity at all, but a Jesus cult that promotes a toxic religious message that is bad for everyone, and fatal for the Jews.

    So, yes, I think we should bother with the Old Testament!

  • The myth of final security

    Jesus may have seemed not much more than an irritation to the Roman rulers.

    How wrong they were.

    Just yesterday I was walking through the impressive ruins of a 13C fortress high on a mountain near the Israel/Lebanon border.

    OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
    More pictures at my Flickr album.

    At the time the people who invested energy and funds into creating this military-industrial complex, must have felt they were now secure. No one could touch them now. How wrong they were. Today it is a tourist park.

    House built on sand, anyone?

    Towers built without counting the cost?

    Armies sent to war before assessing the chances of victory?

    Is the Pentagon listening?

    Is North Korea listening?

    Are we listening?

  • All Saints and All Souls

    Following a request as to whether I have any lectionary materials for All Saints and All Souls, which many parishes will observe next Sunday, I have gone back to check my files.

    There were no lectionary notes, as such, but I did find my sermon from Sunday, November 2, 2003. While it seems not to be on the FAITHFUTURES web site any more, it no doubt still exists somewhere in the Internet Archive with the delightful name, The Way Back Machine.

    That sermon—and the related open letter to a critic within the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane—reflects the tensions then threatening to pull the Anglican communion apart. Those tensions remain with us, as does the possibility of fragmentation and schism—as well as the Spirit’s call to embrace “a more excellent way.”

    Given the way that my 2003 sermon sought to engage with the festival of All Saints in that context, and the continued tensions within the Anglican communion, I am posting a slightly edited version of the sermon here. It has been edited to remove those elements that were so topical to the occasion almost 10 years ago as to be unhelpful for readers now.

    It is also important to note that some years after this sermon, I received a gracious letter of reconciliation from the priest who had called on me to resign in the heat of the conflict in 2003.

    Called to Holiness in Community:
    A sermon for All Saints & All Souls

    We are called by Christ into a communal relationship with the Sacred Mystery known to us as the Holy Community of the Trinity.

    Introduction

    If you have had an opportunity to scan the latest issue of FOCUS, the monthly newspaper from the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane, you will see that it reflects the current struggles going on within the Anglican Communion around the world and right here in this Diocese.

    I often find FOCUS almost impossible to read. The content, and more especially the tone of sections such as Letters to the Editor, are just so foreign to my understanding of faith and discipleship. Of course, were those things more to my liking, others would find the paper just as unpalatable to them!

    As it happens, this month there are a number of items that express anger and shock following the visit of Bishop John Shelby Spong to Brisbane at the beginning of October. Not only is the bishop accused of heresy, but those clergy in the Diocese who share his views or supported his visit are told to get out of the Anglican Church as we do not belong.

    I say “we” advisedly since I was one of the principal organisers of Bishop Spong’s visit to Brisbane, and have worked closely with him over the past 5 or 6 years. I was delighted to host his visit to Toowoomba in 1997, to chair the public lecture that he gave in Brisbane in 2001 and to host him here in this very Chapel just 4 weeks ago.

    It is not my intention to resign as invited to do in this Letter to the Editor, and I have published an Open Letter in which I respond to his letter.

    Instead, what I am hoping we can do is use the opportunity provided by today’s celebration of All Saints and All Souls to reflect on the faith issues posed by theological diversity within our Church. Then, at the SOJOURNERS gathering on Tuesday evening, I hope we can discuss the Letters to the Editor along with my response in the Open Letter and this sermon.

    So this is a time for heavy lifting as we put our minds and our hearts around the question of how best to be faithful to the God who calls us into holiness within community: the community of All Saints, the community of All Souls, and the community of this congregation gathered around the Table of Jesus here today.

    REALITY CHECK: A CHURCH DIVIDED

    It was once said that Anglicans did not believe anything. We were sometimes characterised as a Church of convenience, a place to worship and live as a Christian without getting embroiled in arguments about religion.

    Now it almost seems that we hear too much of what Anglicans believe. Or at least, we have heard of what some Anglicans believe, while also hearing of what other Anglicans believe, and still more about the views of Anglicans in Canada, or New Hampshire, or wherever.

    Suddenly it is all too clear that Anglicans believe lots of things and that not all the things claimed as Anglican are accepted by other Anglicans.

    Of course it has always been so, but we have been less aware of it during some periods of our history. In the past we have hounded and persecuted people for views that differed from those holding sway in the Church at the particular time, sometimes with the one person going through successive periods of favour, disapproval and rehabilitation.

    The reality is that the historical roots of the Anglican Church make it impossible for us to be a Church with a single ideology; that is, unless we have the theological equivalent of genocide and suppress those tribes that are different from our own (which ever ours happens to be).

    At the time when Europe was ravaged by the upheavals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, England chose to hold competing theological viewpoints in the one national church. Papists and reformers were required by force of royal decree to find ways to work together, and those unable to do so were excluded and suppressed. Good people of conscience from both Catholic and Protestant traditions were exiled, jailed and killed by the Anglican Church and the English Parliament.

    That is part of our history, and we do not honour the true Saints and brave Souls of all persuasions if we pretend it to have been otherwise.

    Today we again find ourselves staring down the abyss of seemingly intractable divisions within the Church that we all love, and sometimes love to hate:

    • traditional conservatives and revisionist progressives struggle for soul of the Church
    • ordination of women, as especially their ministry as Bishops
    • lay presidency at the Eucharist
    • affirmation of gay and lesbian persons
    • today the consecration of the first (openly) gay bishop
    • threats to sever communion between dioceses and provinces

    We are a church divided. Some of us at least think that there are matters of substance here that are worth passionate debate and struggle. At least we shall not die of boredom!

    For good or ill, you have yourself a priest who stands unashamedly on the progressive or liberal side of each of those issues. That will please some of you, and disappoint others. The challenge is to find ways to build and nurture a faith community where we can all go deeper into that holiness in community to which God has called us in Christ.

    THE HEART OF THE CONFLICT: WHERE IS TRUTH TO BE FOUND?

    It seems to me that most of the issues over which we see Anglicans (and other Christians) taking sides are not the real cause for the conflict. The heart of the conflict lies much deeper and I believe it concerns the profoundly human question; Where is truth to be found?

    Next weekend, for example, our friends from the Uniting Church will meet in a special session of their Queensland Synod to consider whether to cut all ties with their own national Assembly over its recent decision to allow local Presbyteries to ordain homosexual persons if they wished to do so. Their pain gives no joy to us, whatever our personal view of the issues. We pray for them and we hurt with them.

    Within the present “God Wars” raging across the Christian denominations, I think I can discern some constant themes.

    One of the themes is associated with the more traditional or conservative side of the debates.

    Conservative Anglicans—like conservative Catholics or conservative Evangelicals—tend towards a literal interpretation of the Christian tradition. This does not mean they are biblical literalists, and people such as me must be careful not to categorise them as “fundamentalist.”

    While such people can accept a certain amount of symbolic truth in the Bible and in the Church’s Tradition, they still tend to take religious language as having some objective referent and a single meaning.

    On the more progressive or liberal side of many current debates it is possible to identify another trend.

    People such as me embrace the same Scriptures and appreciate the same ancient Tradition, as I think you will appreciate after listening to my sermons and participating in my services for the best part of a year. As Paul once said to the Corinthians, “you are my credentials.” It is the quality of your lives as disciples of Jesus that attests to my own character as a priest and pastor.

    Like the conservatives we also love the Bible, the Creeds and the Prayer Book—but we tend to treat them as metaphor. This does not mean that we do not recognise literal and historical elements in the ancient writings and traditional practices, but it does mean that we are less inclined to think of them as timeless statements of divine principles. And we are less likely to spend time defending the historical or literal truth of the Bible’s stories.

    We are more likely to see them as human constructs through which the Spirit of God continues to speak as we now go about the task of being faithful to God in our own time and place. We tend to experience religious language as an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of God. We find Scripture and Liturgy to have many different meanings.

    The real point of the struggle, then, is the almost unspoken issue of where truth is to be found and what it might look like when we find it.

    • Will truth be found in the written words of an ancient book?
    • Will truth be found in the beliefs and practices of people who imagined the earth as the centre of the universe, and God to live just above the clouds?
    • Will truth be limited to the pre-modern understanding of reproductive biology and human psychology?

    Or we will allow:

    • That time makes ancient truth uncouth?
    • That God who spoke in certain ways in times past now speaks in new ways?
    • That as our knowledge of the universe and human nature explodes so must our theology?
    • That the same God who we know through Jesus is known to others, and that they have no need to become like us in order to be acceptable to God?

    Those are indeed big questions.

    They frighten the horses!

    But Anglicans have a legacy of active engagement with the best of human learning, rather than a reputation as people who put tradition ahead of truth.

    A WAY FORWARD—TOGETHER

    If I am correct, then the theological fault lines running underneath our Church are such that we must learn to live with, to embrace and to exploit our diversity—and even our disagreements—for the sake of the Gospel.

    It would be brave person—or foolish, or both—who suggested a resolution to the deep and angry divisions opening up within our Church. Let me at least suggest a way forward.

    My suggestion is shaped in conscious response to this weekend’s holy days of All Saints and All Souls.

    We are not alone.

    We increasingly realise that are we intricately linked to one another and to all other living life through a staggeringly high proportion of common DNA. But we are also deeply linked to all who have gone before us, as we affirm in the line about the communion of saints in the Creed.

    As I suggested a couple of weeks back when we reflected on the Gospel account of the man with money who comes to Jesus seeking something more, the future of our holiness lies in solidarity with one another. There is no solitary path to eternal life.

    • The rich man was well set up financially. Presumably this was not an achievement entirely of his own doing. Whether he inherited the wealth or acquired it by trade, in warfare or simple good fortune of stumbling upon buried treasure, others were involved in his success.
    • He had no qualms in claiming a VHA in personal and social morality. He had kept all the Commandments since childhood! Jesus did not deny that claim. Jesus simply said, “OK, one thing more is needed.”
    • The “one thing more” was to go beyond the obligations of morality and social responsibility and give away all he owned so that could be freed to follow Jesus as a beggar. Even when reduced to nothing more than a focus on himself and Jesus, the call to holiness involved community with others called into the company of Jesus by God.

    This weekend we are reminded of our debt to those who stand with us in the community of faith. The great saints and the ordinary souls. We are one with them. Our call to holiness involves us in a relationship with them; dead or alive!

    The challenge is to build and sustain faith communities where people can be drawn more deeply into the dream that God has for each of us, and for all of us together.

    It is not our role to distinguish between tares and wheat, and to rip out the weeds we think lie before us. It is our role to be faithful in responding to God’s call upon us, whether we hear it through a literalistic view of the Bible or a metaphorical understanding of the Gospel.

    Conclusion

    On Tuesday night I hope as many of us as possible will gather to talk and pray together about these things. In the meantime, let me conclude with the words that I used in ending my Open Letter:

    So John, I am staying in this church that has ordained and licensed both you and me. The church is big enough for both of us. The questions that remains is whether our affection for one another is sufficiently generous to see beyond our different emphases.

    On this All Saints & All Souls weekend, that is one (metaphorical) interpretation of the faith we share that commends itself to me. Amen.

  • Taking the Bible seriously, but not literally

    [A sermon preached at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane at Evensong, on Sunday, 26 August 2012.]

    Anglicans have a long history of taking the Bible very seriously while avoiding the folly of taking it literally.

    In the Articles of Religion, commonly known as the Thirty-Nine Articles, we find the Church of England carefully setting down some important principles about the place of Scripture in the life of the church, the obligations—both moral and theological—flowing from Scripture, and some significant limitations on the capacity of the church to use the Bible.

    As we have slowly and reluctantly come to terms with the European cultural revolution known as the ‘Enlightenment,’ we have found—not surprisingly—that even these carefully-crafted articles seem rather out of date, if not irrelevant. It is not so much that they are wrong. It is more that they are addressing questions that no one really cares about any longer, and doing so in ways we find less than compelling. They are top-down theological statements, and we just don’t buy that way of determining truth any more.

    The Articles of Religion capture the mind of the church up to the time they were written. They reflect the best of faithful scholarship prior to 1562. Naturally, they do not engage with or reflect the changes that have happened in the 450 years since then.

    In the spirit of the Articles of Religion, how might a faithful and informed Anglican from the twenty-first century take the Bible seriously, while avoiding the error of taking the Bible literally?

    BIBLE360

    Over the past few months I have been privileged to work on the development of the BIBLE360 program. This program was commissioned by the Archbishop and then announced at Synod in June, as part of his call for members of this Diocese to engage more directly with Scripture. Since returning from Israel last month I have begun to present these seminars in parishes and deaneries around the Diocese; 3 so far, and 12 to go before Christmas!

    As you may know, the Archbishop has challenged all members of our church to do three things in the twelve months between Synod this year and Synod next year:

    1. Participate in a BIBLE360 seminar;
    2. Engage in daily Bible reading;
    3. Join a small group with a focus on the study of the Bible and its application to life.

    We estimate that at least 800 people will have attended a BIBLE360 seminar before the end of this year, and we are planning for several thousand to have done so by June next year.

    As was clear from the Archbishop’s charge to Synod, central to this whole program is the belief that we need to take the Bible seriously, but should not make the mistake of taking it literally.

    In the next few minutes I hope to give you a sense of what we do at a BIBLE360 seminar, and why it matters for the long term health of the church as well as the wider community.

    The plastic Bible

    Taking the Bible seriously involves developing a realistic—“eyes-wide-open”—sense of what the Bible is really like. At times I discern a romantic and mistaken sense of what kind of text we actually have, and what we might realistically expect the Bible to do for us in the life of the church.

    Some of these issues are addressed in more detail in a new book, The Once and Future Scriptures, that will be published later this year, with essays by several senior priests from our diocese. More about those issues at the book launch soon!

    Last year we celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. It was an important anniversary and provided an opportunity to reflect on a book that really changed—and in many ways, shaped—the world as we know it.

    During the 400 years that have passed since the KJV was published we have gained access to a treasure trove of ancient biblical manuscripts. We now have a vast set of information simply not available to the faithful scholars who laboured to create the KJV.

    For the record, we have around 5,500 Greek MSS for the NT and a further 5,000 or so in other ancient languages: Latin, Syriac, etc.

    Among these 10,000 or so MSS are the great fourth-century and fifth-century Bibles, which are our oldest substantial copies of the Bible.

    Of these, the most significant is the Codex Sinaiticus from St Catherine’s Monastery at Mt Sinai. This is the oldest Bible anywhere in the world. It dates from some time in the fourth century. In other words, there is a gap of around 300 years between the time of Jesus and the oldest surviving copy of a substantial portion of the Bible; and even this marvelous MS is missing about half of the Old Testament (Genesis to 1 Chronicles).

    Sinaiticus includes the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, the New Testament, and two other early Christian documents not found in our version of the NT: the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas.

    Similar variations from the contents of later Bibles occur in other ancient MSS and in other lists of books accepted for reading in the church.

    In addition to the inclusion of books not found in many modern English Bibles, Sinaiticus also has some other surprises for us:

    1. Some words are not written out in full, but simply represented by abbreviations. This may seem a minor point, but it raises the issue of how obsessive we wish to be about the individual words that constitute the sacred text. And the words are not insignificant terms, but the sacra nomina: God, Jesus, Christ, Lord, and similar words.
    2. All of the texts is written in capitals, without any spaces between words, and with no punctuation. Without spaces and punctuation the meaning is often uncertain and needs to be decided by the reader.
    3. Further scribes over 800 years or so have made some changes to correct what they saw as omissions and other errors. This was an ancient MS that kept evolving for almost 1,000 years. Similar developments have been studied in other major codices.
    4. Some of the books in Sinaiticus (and also in other ancient MSS) are longer or shorter than the forms we know for the same biblical books from the KJV.
    5. Finally, for now, we can note that Sinaiticus has some important textual variations so that a number of passages long accepted as part of the Bible and therefore included in the KJV are now left out of modern Bibles. This is good news for those of us not so keen on handling poisonous snakes in worship, as those verses from the end of Mark 16 have now been removed from our Bibles!

    The Bible seems to be less fixed, and rather more ‘plastic’, than we might have anticipated. It has changed its contents in minor and major ways from time to time and from one place to another.

    Very few of these changes involve major theological issues. However, it is time for the ecclesiastical ostrich to pull her head from the sand and take seriously the kind of book we actually have in the Bible.

    There is no ancient copy of the Bible that matches exactly with a modern Bible.

    We do not have the original for any of the books in the Bible, but only copies of copies of copies.

    Indeed, with hand-written documents the very idea of an ‘original’ document is questionable. As such a book is hand-copied, another original document is formed. There was very little capacity for ‘version control’ of documents in the ancient world, and readers back then were less naive about that than many modern Christians seem to be.

    As early as Jeremiah, we find warnings about the lying pens of the scribes (Jer 8:8); and Ignatius of Antioch (Phila 8:2) prefers the “unalterable archives” of Jesus’ death and resurrection over the written documents of the church.

    In which ever way we imagine the Bible to function in the life of the church, we must have a view of Scripture that is realistic about the contingent nature of its contents and the vagaries of its transmission through time.

    We do not have a perfect Bible, nor do we have a perfect church or a perfect reader. We can kid ourselves otherwise, but in the end we must adopt a mature outlook.

    This is the real Bible that we actually possess. It did not drop out of heaven fully formed, and its journey through time has been marked by controversy and sanctity.

    A diverse text

    At this point in time we have an agreed reconstruction of the ancient biblical texts based on the best judgements of scholars from a wide range of faith traditions. No ancient MS matches the latest edition of the Biblica Hebraica the Septuagint, or the Greek New Testament.

    However, the diversity within Scripture is more extensive than textual variations, or differences over which books to include and the order in which they should be arranged.

    The more important diversity that needs to be accommodated as we read Scripture relates to the variations in genre within the Bible.

    Richard Burridge was referring to this very point in his sermon here just two weeks ago.

    In the second session of the BIBLE360 seminar we explore some of the different genre to be found within the Bible, including:

    • narratives: stories, history, legends, gospels, acts
    • lists: genealogies, places, tribes, heroes
    • laws: rules and regulations for religion as well as everyday life
    • prophetic texts: oracles, promises, sermons, threats
    • liturgical texts: especially the Psalms
    • wisdom literature: Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes
    • letters: especially in NT, but also in OT
    • apocalyptic writings: especially Daniel & Revelation

    If we mistake the genre, and read hyperbole as regulation (for example), we end up with gross mistakes in our interpretation of Scripture. We would also have churches full of blind people, who had torn out their eyes, and amputees who had removed their hands.

    When this happens—as it often has done in the history of the church—well-meaning but mistaken people turn religion into a toxic recipe rather than the elixir of life. All too often the Scriptures have become ‘texts of terror’ endorsing ethnic cleansing, homophobia, patriarchy, racism, slavery, violence, and xenophobia.

    Sometimes the Bible is indeed guilty of celebrating and promoting such atrocities. In such cases we need to have the integrity to reject such teaching, and turn away from such evil practices.

    Some of the time when the Bible is invoked in support of power and privilege the problem lies with the reader rather than the text.

    The creationism debate arises from a total misunderstanding of both the contents and the genre of the Bible. Rather than embrace the wonderful new insights into the universe being gifted to us by the sciences, some people of faith persist in reading the creation myth of Genesis 1 as if it were a description of how God created the world.

    Category error. Genre mistake. Garbage in, garbage out.

    When we tune our reading of the Scripture to the appropriate settings for the genre being read, we are open to new wisdom for our lives.

    In the BIBLE360 seminars participants explore different biblical texts, noting their genre, and exploring some of the ways in which their favourite Bible passages can be read (or cannot be read).

    We also discover the power of imagination to assist us in entering into the world of the texts, and being surprised by joy at the fresh insights this can open up for us.

    The Bible in the Life of the Church

    One of the most challenging aspects of a BIBLE360 seminar is not the discovery of the vagaries of the Bible’s own history, or the immense diversity of its literary forms, but rather the questions that arise around the use of the Bible in our own lives and in the life of the church.

    At one extreme, we may know people who still use the Bible like a promise box. Some here may know I mean, but for others (thankfully) the allusion will break down. Error 404.

    The ‘promise box’ was a small cardboard container inside which were placed dozens of small pieces of paper, each carefully rolled to form a tiny tube. On each piece of paper was printed a verse from the Bible with a ‘promise’ thought to be relevant to Christian life. These were selected at random, using a very small pair of metal tongs.

    Such a verse-a-day approach to reading the Bible places the reader at the centre of the process, and totally ignores the context of the biblical verse being picked. These words are timeless, unrelated to historical context, and directly relevant to me personally. While many people found this a helpful devotional practice, I consider it barely better than checking the stars in the newspaper.

    At the other end of the spectrum, we have high-level commissions of the national and international church comprising a careful balance of well-qualified people from different theological perspectives, seeking to determine the meaning of Scripture for the church today on controversial questions such as conception and fertility, sexuality and gender, stem-cell research, refugees, climate change, or end of life issues. No random picking of Bible verses here. But no clear and simple answers either.

    In our seminar we review our church’s received traditions about the importance of the Scriptures, and explore some of the ways in which we encounter the Bible in the life of the church. We appreciate how Scripture permeates our worship, but we also note how some parts of the Bible are rarely heard in the liturgy, or carefully side-stepped in our personal and collective lives.

    As part of this segment in the BIBLE360 seminars we take up the challenge of Richard Burridge for our reading of Scripture to begin with Jesus. As followers of Jesus it is his words and his actions that create the lens through which we read the Bible.

    This does not mean we find Jesus hiding under every rock in the Old Testament, but it does mean we read those ancient Jewish texts with Christian eyes. We respect their Jewishness, and affirm the Jewish readings of their own sacred texts which are also the larger portion of our own Bible—but we read the Bible as Christians; indeed as Anglicans!

    We neither seek nor offer a package that explains the Bible, imposes a unity across its many different documents, or requires us to read the Scriptures in one particular way. But we do affirm the belief that nothing matters more in the Christian life than engaging with the Bible.

    As I have found myself saying at these seminars, “I can imagine being a Christian without a church, but not without a Bible” With the Bible—and the support of other disciples of Jesus—I can rebuild the church. Without the Bible, I could never be sure my church was faithful to the legacy of Jesus. And as a Christian, that matters to me.

    Conclusion

    The final stage in a BIBLE360 seminar is for people to determine their own response to all this. We share some practical ideas about reading the Bible, accessing the resources we need, finding a small group of people with whom to share our study of Scripture.

    By the end of the seminar, however, it comes down to the individual response each participant makes.

    These seminars include information, but they are not just about acquiring more knowledge.

    These seminars encourage us to see the Bible afresh, but they are not just an enjoyable day spent working with Scripture.

    These seminars invite participants to make explicit personal plans for their own engagement with Scripture, and to decide what they will do about getting started on those plans … in the next week.

    I offer the same invitation to you here this evening.

    We can sit in this cathedral and hear others talk about the Bible. We can stay behind for a few minutes to argue with the preacher about our favourite theological hobby horse. Or we can quietly determine right now that this week the Bible will get more attention from us than it did last week.

    Whether that happens or not is entirely your call.