Preaching

How does our vision of the Scriptures as the Word of God affect our vision for preaching, and for what God does by His Spirit through the means of preaching?  In many contemporary British Churches, our vision for what goes on (or perhaps, should go on) in preaching is pretty shallow, and so such a question barely makes sense.  We might expect to meet with God through the music, but surely not in preaching??? A sermon is easily dismissed as one opinion among many equally valid opinions.  But if that preaching is shaped and informed by the Word of God, that simply will not do.  But even if we avoid such crass thinking, we may still rarely feel inspired at the prospect of a sermon.  We can feel at liberty to sit in judgement on what is being said (even when we do see the link between sermon and Scripture), and our expectations can be tragically superficial!

This is so very different from the days when the Church understood the Scriptures to be the Word of God and had unshakeable confidence in their being written and interpreted in a way that was intrinsically trustworthy.  In those days, the corporate reading and preaching of God’s Word was much more prevalent, and congregations often demanded daily sermons (occasionally scheduled at 5 am).  In those days too, preachers were described in terms that we would find alarming.  One 16th Century preacher, for example, sees a role and responsibility for preachers that sounds downright dangerous to our ears: 

‘We see how God, who could in a moment make perfect his own, nevertheless desires them to grow up solely under the education of the church.  We see the way set for it: the preaching of the heavenly doctrine has been enjoined upon the pastors.  We see that all are brought under the same regulation, that with a gentle and teachable spirit they may allow themselves to be governed by teachers appointed to this function … As He was of old not content with the Law alone, but added priests as interpreters from whose lips the people might ask its true meaning (Mal.2:7), so today He not only desires us to be attentive to the reading [of Scripture], but also appoints instructors to help us by their effort … it is a singular privilege that He deigns to consecrate to Himself the mouths and tongues of men, in order that his voice may resound in them’.[1]

Is this some kind of power-play, an attempt at manipulating a congregation so as to increase the preacher’s influence, or put them beyond the reach of criticism? In our cynicism, we might dismiss it as such.  In fact, such thinking was widely agreed on by preachers and congregations alike, and was underpinned by the powerful idea that the Holy Spirit is at work in and through the preacher such that a sermon shaped, defined and informed by the Scriptures creates a situation in which the voice of God is heard echoing in the words of that preacher.  There is a profound sense in which this can itself be called the word of God, so Heb.13:7, ‘Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you’ (see also I Thess. 2:13).

This of course raises the question of what do I expect from those who preach to me?  What do I think is happening when I listen to preaching?  Do I think that  I am merely hearing someone’s opinion about what a passage means and how it should be applied?  Or am I anticipating something more?  Am I expecting to be confronted with the Word of God? 

But we should come prepared and anticipating that God will speak to me during a sermon;  that something will happen that will take this moment above what can be explained in simply human categories.  The words are from the mouth of a preacher (and a very human preacher at that), and yet their impact suggests that Someone Else is actually speaking to me, and applying His word to my heart and mind.  This ‘incarnation’ by the Spirit of the Divine Word in human form continues as the act of preaching takes on this added dimension, through which a sermon becomes more than merely human words.  Such an expectation would certainly change the way in which we approached an act of corporate worship; how we prayed for ourselves and each other, and the preacher; and the attention we would give to sermons. 

And God’s word (for that is what true preaching has the potential to become) calls reality into being.  In the beginning God spoke, and it was as He declared it to be.  So, as Ezekiel prophecies life to the valley of dry bones, they are brought to life (see Ezek.37:1-10).  The proclamation of the Word of God achieves what it articulates.  His Word changes things, shapes things, transforms darkness and chaos into life and light.  It is the word of God that calls faith into being, that calls Christ-likeness into being, that changes and transforms situations and characters and relationships.  Preaching is not just something I might (or might not) go away and put into practise.  Preaching can become something through which God changes us in and during the very act of hearing and receiving His holy Word.  I should step out from under the preaching of the word of God a different person as a result of my encounter with His Word.  Why?  Because God has spoken, and His word is living and active... 

Imagine a Church where that was the frequent experience of preaching…

[1] Calvin, Inst 4.1.5, emphasis added;  The Institutes has a footnote pointing the reader to Calvin’s sermons on I Samuel, where such preachers are said to be ‘the very mouth of God’.  Elsewhere Calvin argues that in every sermon there are 2 ministers: the external minister who preaches the Word, and the internal preacher (the Holy Spirit) who guides the Word into the hearts of those who hear.

The heart of the matter

We have been thinking about how we can understand the Bible, and find our way through the variety of interpretations there are out there.  With all our talk of ‘understanding’ the Bible, we might have forgotten that the nature of our engagement with Scripture is not primarily about intellectual capacity.  There is a real danger (especially in a culture which celebrates education and academic achievement) that we assume only clever people who have been to college can understand the Bible…  this again puts up barriers to my confidence that as an ‘ordinary’ Christian, I can handle the Bible well.  Please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not anti-intellectual, or anti-education.  We should study and think hard – but in the right way and on the right things.

Grasping the truth of Scripture is not primarily an intellectual exercise.  It is rather a spiritual and moral one.  There are a number of passages we could go to see this:  Eph.4:18 teaches that people are ‘darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts’.  Did you catch that?  Our ignorance about what the Bible means is caused by the condition of our heart.  Paul learned this from Jesus:  ‘Whoever has my commands and obeys them is the one who loves me.  Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them’ (John 14:21).

Remember that the Bible is the revealing of the Son to us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  That fits into the scheme Jesus lays out in John 14:21.  The Bible is how Jesus shows Himself (by His Spirit) to those loved by the Father.[1] Jesus makes all this explicit in Jn.14:26, but for now we just notice that Jesus teaches us how we can ‘understand’ the Bible effectively.  Interestingly, He doesn’t talk about college, or degrees.  Instead, He lays out two conditions on the basis of which the revelation of Christ takes place:

First is obeying the commands of Jesus.  Robert Murray McCheyne, a great Scottish preacher of a bygone era once wrote in his journal: ‘My people’s greatest need is my own personal holiness’.   Such a thing sounds strange to our ears, but it was born out of McCheyne’s grasp of John 14:21.  Holiness – the obeying of Jesus’ commands – is critical if anyone is to appreciate the portrait of Jesus painted in the Scriptures.  For McCheyne personally this would be the case – how much more so for McCheyne as a preacher.  Before he could hold Jesus out to his people, he must first see Him clearly himself.  But McCheyne would only be shown Jesus if he obeyed the commands of Christ he had.  Pray for those who preach to you.  Pray for their obedience, their holiness.  Without holiness, no-one will see the Lord (Heb.12:14).  How terrible for a congregation if their preacher stood before them not having seen Christ for themselves.    

But this is not just a text for preachers.  When the Bible seems like a closed book to us, this must be a first avenue of our investigation as to why.  The hardening of our hearts, and our failure in obedience will darken our understanding.  The Bible becomes obscure and we find the experience of reading it dry and Spiritless.  The key is not to take a course in theology, but to ask the Holy Spirit to show where we need to repent.  As an old saint once told me: either the Bible keeps you from sin, or sin keeps you from the Bible.  A course in theology will help us navigate the Scriptures – but only if we are first committed to the pursuit of holiness.

Secondly (and intimately related to the above), is the question of our love for Jesus.  John 14:21 doesn’t equate love and obedience, as if they were the same thing.  Obedience is a symptom of our love, not its totality.  What is staggering here is the extent to which understanding the Bible is put firmly in the context of our living relationship with Jesus (and through Him, the Father), and the state of our heart towards Him.  Our ability to understand the Bible has much more to do with our heart than our mind.  It confronts us with a question that we may struggle to conceptualise:  Do I love the Lord Jesus Christ?  This is different from ‘Do I accept certain things about Him as true?’; ‘Do I enjoy the benefits He offers?’; ‘Do I love the idea of Him?’  It penetrates to the fundamental question of religion: Do I love Him?

Or better: am I loved by Him?  It is worthy of note that the Bible is not – strictly speaking – a text which I understand, as I take the initiative, and I work it out.  The reality is a far more profoundly spiritual dynamic, as the meaning of the Bible is revealed to me; Jesus shows Himself.  His act of revelation (like our act of obedience) is one driven and shaped by love:  His for me.  Am I loved by the Lord Jesus Christ?  On no other issue hangs so very much.  Woe to those who do not love Christ, who are not loved by Christ, and so who read the Bible without finding Christ.  Such a tragedy was the one time Prince of Grenada, imprisoned for 33 years with only a Bible to read.  After he died, they found among his writings his observations on the Bible he had read so many times.  They contained such insights as: the middle verse of the Bible is Psalm 118:8; Ezra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet, except the letter ‘j’; no word of more than 6 syllables can be found in the Bible.  Woe to such a ‘theologian’.

[1] See also passages like Matt.11:27 for just how deep into the purposes of the Trinity this will take us!

Sola Scriptura

We have been celebrating how confident we can be as we work to understand the Bible.   We can worry that so many (clever!) people claim the Bible says so many different things… what hope does an ordinary Christian like me have?  Do I really think I can just pick up the Bible, read it and understand it? 

We’ve collected a number of good reasons for thinking that ordinary Christians like you and me can read the Bible and understand it.  God is trustworthy and is a Communicator (He is after all, called the ‘Word’), and if He’s going to say something, He’ll say it clearly.  He has created us with the ability to reliably understand what a person (including the Person of God) is saying to us.   He has given us the same Spirit who inspired the Bible in the first place, to inspire our understanding of what He meant.  We’ve seen that the OT prophets, Jesus and the Apostles all had to expose false teaching and wrong understandings, and that they taught clearly and fearlessly what a true interpretation of the Bible looked like.  We’ve also seen that the Church – from Bible times onwards – has repeatedly explored variant ‘interpretations’, and has been able to recognise good and bad interpretations of Scripture.  This means that we have a pretty good collection of creeds and confessions from many points in history, which were often written in order to exclude a certain ‘interpretation’ because it had been shown to not reflect the Bible’s teaching – in spite of what its proponents claimed.  Those councils have stood the test of time, with generation after generation of Christians recognising that they summarise the trustworthy interpretation of the Bible’s teaching.  And there are books and commentaries from across the geography and history of the Church that show a remarkable consistency of interpretation that transcends time and culture.  That is why when I am preparing a sermon, I can read books that were written centuries ago, and find they still help me in understanding what the Bible says today. 

There is one last question for us to consider before we move on.  It has become fashionable in recent years to say that you need to understand the culture in which the Bible was written before you can really understand what the Prophets, or Jesus or the Apostles meant.  I regularly read books, or hear preachers who tell me that I have to have a particular cultural insight into first century Palestine, or Corinth, or Rome, before I’ll be able to really understand something Jesus or Paul or Peter is telling me.  I’ve even heard people suggest that the Bible is culturally bound, so that things it teaches no longer apply because ‘that was for the first century’.  I respectfully disagree.

The genius of the Bible is that it interprets itself.  One old English preacher, Thomas Watson drew the analogy with a diamond, that can only be cut by another diamond, to illustrate this truth.  You don’t need any outside information in order to know what the Bible teaches: anyone can pick it up in any culture and still understand it.  I’ll be showing this very clearly when I preach through the Book of Revelation in the autumn.  Again and again we’ll see that everything we need to interpret even a book like Revelation is found in the Bible.  There is a danger that theologians in universities are re-creating an environment in which you need their special insights before you can know what the Bible really says.  We got rid of all that nonsense in the Reformation.  Back in the Middle Ages, the educated priests didn’t trust the ordinary people to read the Bible for themselves and understand it properly.  You needed to trust them, with their special insights and additional information.   The Reformers put the Bible in the hands of the people.

But we are in danger of slipping back into that mindset, with the Academic theologians – with their specialised research into first century ancient near eastern and / or Judaistic culture – being a new priesthood, holding the key to a ‘true’ interpretation which is locked away from the ordinary Bible reader.  But that is to misunderstand the trans-cultural nature of the Scriptures remain that means they are so devastatingly relevant to every generation and in every culture.    The Bible was as radical and as counter-cultural in the first century as it is in the twenty-first century, and in every century in between.  The (human & Divine) authors of the Scriptures did not ever capitulate to prevailing cultural opinion, or allow it to shape their belief.  As the cliché goes: that which is wedded to one culture is widowed in the next.  The genius of the Bible is that it is transcultural, and so, in the hands of the Spirit, it interprets applies itself.  Whether I am a Christian in Iraq or Ipswich, if I can read it, I can make sense of it.

None of this is to say that it is always easy to understand.  There is one famous passage where even Peter complains Paul’s letters ‘contain some things that are hard to understand’!  But the key to unlocking their meaning is not to be found outside of the Bible.  We do not have to go to a scholar with a PhD in first century culture and religion in order to gain some indispensable and extra-Biblical piece of information that means we can grasp the texts’ meaning in a way we couldn’t have done before.  No, the resources to understand difficult passages in the Bible are found in the Bible.  And so we do study, and we study hard, but we study the Bible first and foremost.  It is our lack of a working knowledge of the Scriptures that means these passages remain closed to us for so many years.

Recycling heresy

Over the last few months’ articles, I have been working hard to kindle a sense of deep confidence in our reading of the Bible.  Like everything in our faith, that confidence is built on the grace of God who works harder than we do to make sure that we can understand His Word.  It was His idea to give His people the Scriptures.  He has inspired it by His Holy Spirit; He has watched over it across the generations by that same Spirit; and He pours that same Spirit out generously on His people as they engage with His Word.  All this sounds very good in theory, but doesn’t it only exacerbate our struggle to make sense of the Bible when we read it – to say nothing of the sometimes overwhelming variety of interpretations there seems to be. 

Actually, there have always been a variety of interpretations on offer - although there are not as many as you might think.  What tends to happen is that the same interpretations are re-invented and re-packaged from generation to generation.  There are a few variations on a theme, but substantively the pattern is one of recycling!  The old Teacher knew what he was talking about when he said: there is nothing new under the sun (Eccl.1:9).  Even within the time of Jesus (see Matt.22:23; Jn.5:39-40) and the Apostles there were varying and variant ‘interpretations’.  We’ve just worked our way through II Corinthians in the evening services.  That whole letter is dealing with a variant interpretation of Christianity that the Corinthian Church has bought into.  In fact, most of the letters in the New Testament are written to Churches who are flirting with different interpretations of Jesus and the Scriptures.  And stretching back into the OT, we find the Prophets dealing repeatedly with the fact of different interpretations.

Interestingly though, their approach to this phenomenon was very different.  They would never have countenanced a deafeatism (‘There are so many interpretations how can I ever know which is right?), still less an ever-broadening spectrum of validity (‘So many well-meaning Christians think this is right, so we have to accept it is a legitimate way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian).  Their assumption remains that we can in fact know God’s Word in the midst so many conflicting interpretations, and their counsel is to have as little to do with those conflicting interpretations as possible (e.g. II Jn.7 & 10).  In the Bible, those who teach contrary to what the Spirit means to say are called false prophets and godless men, rather than different, equally valid interpretations (Matt.7:15; Acts 20:30; Jude 4).  Again and again, the reality of false interpretations, and the motivations that drive them, are exposed and argued against – sometimes with a ferocity that we find disturbing (e.g. II Peter 2:10-22).  The dangers of following such teaching is spelled out in no uncertain terms (Col.2:23; II Peter 3:15-16).  The seriousness with which wrong interpretations of the Scriptures are taken can be seen in Paul’s pronouncing eternal condemnation on those who are throwing the Galatian Churches into confusion (see Gal.1:6-10).  The Apostles ‘never stopped warning [their Churches] night and day with tears’ (Acts 20:31).  Jesus has one word for those who have allowed themselves to be side-tracked by following a version of Christianity that is at variance from his own teaching and that of His apostles: Repent (e.g Rev.2:15-16).  All this of course implies that it is possible, indeed imperative, to understand clearly what the true prophets and Apostles teach.  We have a responsibility before God to know the content of our faith.

Throughout the generations of the Church, we have continued to recognise and wrestle with, differing ‘interpretations’.  For centuries they were called heresies, although our tolerant age has long since given credibility to theological views that in times past the faithful went to the stake rather than legitimise. With tiring repetition there have arisen those from among our ranks (Acts 20:28-31) who have argued with more or less sophistication that God is not Trinity; or Jesus was not Deity; or that He didn’t bear our sin on the cross as our substitute and sacrifice; or that He didn’t rise from the dead; or that humanity is not sinful, or at least not as sinful as previous generations might have thought; or that hell is not real, or if it is Jesus wouldn’t ever send anyone there; or a host of other examples I could cite…  each proponent claims radical originality, but it is the same tedious regurgitation of the earliest ‘heresies’.  When someone ‘interprets’ the Bible to show that the God of the Old Testament is different to the God of the New, they are merely parroting the teaching of a second century preacher called Marcion.  When someone ‘interprets’ the Bible to say that Jesus was merely a great teacher or prophet, they are simply giving new life to the centuries old teaching of Arius.  When they try to show from the Bible that sin isn’t as bad as it is, we discern the long shadow of Pelagius cast through the ages.

And of course the Church has explored and considered each of these ‘interpretations’, along with countless others, with staggering graciousness.  Long debates, often stretching over several decades have tested their claims to be authentic Biblical teaching to the limits … and found them wanting.  These ‘interpretations’ have been rejected by the Church with devastating finality.  Often it is because we do not listen to our spiritual forbears, that we find ourselves listening instead to the heresies that whisper down the long corridors of time.

Can we trust ourselves (ii)

In our series on the Bible we have been exploring whether or not we can trust the Bible as the Word of God, and indeed whether we can trust ourselves as we read it.  We have considered the writing of the Scriptures and see both why and how we must think of them as utterly reliable in composition.  But what about the other end of the process of communication: reading.  Often the simple fact of the variety of ‘interpretations’ is used as an argument for why you can’t trust the Bible.  I suggested last time that this was, at best, simply an illogical argument.  Just because something can be, and indeed has been mis-interpreted, doesn’t mean it cannot be truly interpreted.

What I am suggesting is that in spite of the cynicism of some, we can have a basic confidence both in the trustworthiness of the Bible, and in our ability to read and understand the Bible.  Both these aspects are born out of the ministry of the Holy Spirit graciously at work both in the producing of the text in the Bible, and in our engagement with that text.  Our encounter with Scripture is thus intensely relational.  We lose confidence only insofar as we lose sight of the Spirit’s intimate involvement throughout the process.  Though I’m not saying that every part of the Bible is as easy to understand as every other part, I am affirming our belief that God is probably quite an effective communicator.  He knows what He wants to say, and how to say it such that it can be understood.  We can also surmise that given our being created in the Image of God, effective and useful communication is something we can do well.  Partly that would be based on experience – we do in fact manage to understand people every day.  And if we don’t understand them, it quickly becomes apparent that there has been a breakdown in communication, and we can rectify the situation by going back for clarification (which, incidentally, is a good way to approach the Bible).  But much more significant than our daily experience is the realisation that it is intrinsic to God to communicate.  There is clearly deep communication between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Jesus repeatedly indicates that there is a profound and persistent conversation throughout the life of the Trinity (e.g. Jn.8:26).  The fact that Jesus is celebrated as the Word gives us tremendous confidence that God is in the business of effective communication.  It is staggering to think that God could reveal everything in One Word. 

Not only are we created to communicate, but we are also created to be communicated with.  We are created in such a way that we are able to understand what we are told.  Indeed, the reason we are created to understand words, is so that God can reveal Himself to us through His Word.  Certainly Jesus seems to think it worth His while to spend a great deal of time teaching His disciples (and us through them) using words.  He lays great emphasis on our being able to hear and hold to, to believe and trust in His words.  Throughout the Scriptures our God is portrayed as a speaking God – indeed this is one of the things that differentiates Him from false gods, who have mouths by who cannot speak or answer (Psalm 135:16; Is.46:7).  We know God is the Living and True God precisely because He does speak.

But as with all things ‘under the sun’, sin has damaged and distorted our ability to understand one another, and ultimately God.  Herein lies the problem: not in any obscurity within the Bible, but in the obscurity of our minds and hearts, a darkness that brings confusion to what we hear and read.  As I said in our last article, the struggle to ‘understand’ the Bible is not primarily an intellectual one (though aspects of our intellectual life are clearly involved), but a spiritual one.  We’ll be following this thought up in the next few articles.  But in the meantime, let us realize that the impact of sin in our thinking is a reality that we dare not underestimate.  But neither do we dare let it lead us into despair.  As in the whole arena of the consequence of sin, the work of Christ is sufficient to redeem and restore.  On the basis of that work, the Holy Spirit works deep within us, re-fashioning in us the Image of Christ.  That process includes our volitional and moral life, our relational and emotional life, and also our psychological and intellectual life.  In other words, how we think. 

We are often fearful of confronting the depth of our own sinfulness.  Fearful too of measuring the impact of that sin on ourselves and on others.  But in some ways it is quite an important spiritual discipline.  For one thing you cannot learn to trust the grace of God if you are never driven to rely on it as your only hope.  As one recent song puts it: Our shame was deeper than the sea, your grace is deeper still.  No matter how devastating our sin and its impact on any area of our life or being, the grace of God in Christ is more than equal to it.  And so, even as we reflect on the extent to which our sin has distorted our thinking, rendering us illogical, unreasonable, incongruous and at times absurd in what we think and why, yet still we can, (as victims of God’s grace) approach the Scriptures with confidence, as we humbly rely on the Holy Spirit to apply the work of Christ to our hearts and minds, and to guide us in the path of truth.  Cynicism, or even just a loss of confidence, in our dealing with the Scriptures, however sophisticated it might seem to be, is simply an expression of our faithlessness in the redeeming work of Christ …or perhaps in the Father’s ability to communicate …or perhaps in the Spirit’s involvement throughout the event of our reading Scripture.  Any of those would be something for which we would need to repent.

Can we trust ourselves?

Over the last few articles, we have begun to unpack the question of whether we can trust the Bible.  After all, it is argued, the Bible was written by people – and we all know the people get things wrong – albeit sometimes unintentionally.  People are, it is argued, all constrained by their own cultural limitations, and intellectual restrictions.  But the Bible isn’t merely a human book.  And herein lies the crucial distinction.  We’ve seen how we can – and must - think of the inspiration of the Bible in a way that gives us confidence that it is without error.  It is ‘breathed out’ by God, its human authors carried along by the Holy Spirit. 

But what about at the other end of the process?  What about those of us who are reading it – by necessity at a distance of some 2,000 years since it was written?  We are in a very different culture, and in some ways in a very different world.  Language has changed in how it is used.  We are reading a translation of the Bible, and even English translations differ from one another.  And when it comes to interpretation – how can any of us have any confidence that we are understanding it properly when there are so many interpretations, and when the Bible has been used to say so many different things.  What is the point of being able to say it is trustworthy in its being written, if we can’t say it is trustworthy in its being read?

It is going to take a couple of articles to engage with this question, but let’s make a start with an observation.  Yes, you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to say.  My favourite example of this is to point out that you can quote the Bible as saying: ‘There is no God’ (Ps.14:1).  It’s a crass example, but it gets the point across.  People can use the Bible – and abuse the Bible – in order to make it say whatever they want it to say. We are only too aware that the Bible has been used to justify some of the most truly horrific episodes in human history.  It has been used to support, and even to give credibility to slavery, apartheid, the Inquisition and the Crusades, to name but a few.  For many the fact that the Bible can be used (or even misused) to validate or vindicate such behaviour is all the evidence we need that it cannot be the Word of God! In a way the Bible was much more prone to abuse when it was not readily available in the common language.  Claims by the ecclesiastical hierarchy simply couldn’t be challenged.  But is the situation any better now that we have so many translations, and such ready access?  Since the Bible has become widely available, there has developed an equally wide spectrum of opinion on what it says, and a bewildering array of views (often contradictory) as to ‘what the Bible teaches…’.  Even for some Christians it proves too much to bear, and we retreat: ‘There are so many interpretations, and translations’, we say to ourselves, ‘how can we ever hope to

know which is right?’ … and the temptation is to simply disengage, and pursue other paths to knowing God.

In this article, I’d just like to make the rather modest point that the simple fact of various interpretations doesn’t mean we should stop engaging with the Bible!  I’ve heard so many times the argument that because there are so many possible interpretations, we can’t know what the Bible really does say.  I have to say that in spite of its apparent humility and sophistication, I actually think it is one of the more inane arguments in the whole discussion.  If I said that when you speak you were open to misinterpretation, and that because your words could conceivably be taken to mean a variety of things, it followed that I could never know what you meant, therefore I could simply ignore your words and try to find another way of understanding you, I suspect you’d be surprised, if not offended.  We have (at least when we think of ourselves) an implicit functional trust in our act of communication.  We speak because we believe we can be understood.  And if for some reason someone misunderstands what we say we can clarify and expand on our meaning.  We instinctively recognise the power and ability of words to accurately convey meaning.  This is part of our being made in the image of a God who is designated the Word.  And we know that reliable communication can be done even by those who are as clumsy and errant with words as we are.  If there is a breakdown in communication, or understanding, we don’t retreat, rather we re-engage with a deeper commitment to make sense of what we are hearing.

It seems strange that we might think God is incapable of making himself clearly and reliably understood; that we are not prepared to extend to God the same basic abilities to communicate we assume for ourselves hundreds of times every day.  Historically, the Church as held to the idea of the clarity of Scripture, and we’ll be turning to that over the next couple of articles!  Not only has the Holy Spirit done a good job of writing the Bible, but He can do a good job of making sure we understand it.  Even in the days of Jesus there were those who mis-understood the Scriptures, and indeed who misunderstood Jesus Himself.    Truly, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’.    We shouldn’t be intimidated by the long history of misinterpretation, neither by the plethora of interpretations on the market today, nor in our own struggles at times to interpret the Bible.  We approach our task with confidence, for as in its composition, itselucidation is under the inspiration and ministry of the Holy Spirit.  We are not dealing primarily with an intellectual issue (though aspects of our intellectual life are clearly involved), but with a Spiritual one. 

Can we trust the Bible (ii)

In the last article, we began to see how we could think about the Bible as having integrity both as the Word of God and as the words of men; and that while the Bible is the words of men, it remains – as the Word of God – without error.  In this, the Bible is an utterly unique book, and we reject all sense of trying to read it as we would any other book.  To do so would involve an implicit denial of its inspiration.  It would be to approach the Bible as if in fact it hadn’t been ‘breathed-out’ by God (II Tim.3:16).  This is something we could not, and indeed should not, tolerate as the people of God.  In our apparent attempt to be ‘neutral’ we would in fact be making a profound theological statement… 

But back to the topic in hand:  we have seen how we can think of the Bible as without error, even though it has been written through men.  But why is it important that we do so.  Would it not be wiser to acknowledge that everything written by human hands is bound to contain error at some level, perhaps arguing that the Bible is only without error on the important and central stuff?  At the very least we might have to concede that it was written by 1st Century Christians, and that this inevitably affects what they wrote and why.  We could suggest they got some stuff wrong, without impugning their integrity.  Might that not be a better way of thinking about the Bible?  Many Christians do in fact think about Scripture in this way, hence the number of conversations and sermons in which we are told we need to have some understanding of 1st Century Middle (or Near) Eastern culture before we can understand what’s going on in the Bible.  Because the Bible is written by human hands, we are told that we are only intellectually credible if we concede that there are limitations.  There are also those who are quite open to the possibility (if not reality) that the Bible contains errors.  I’ve even heard people say that Jesus was so bound by His cultural humanity that He – speaking as a first-century Jew – said things that we would now dismiss as mistaken.

This will not do.  We saw in our last article that the Bible is not merely a human book.  It is also a Divine book.  And the human and Divine aspects of the producing of the Bible interact in such a way that the finished product is without error.  The Church has long since realised that what is at stake in this discussion is the trustworthiness of God.  The question: ‘Can I trust the Bible?’ is in fact a question about whether God wants to, and/or whether He is able to reveal Christ by His Spirit in a way that entirely truthful and reliable.  We see this to be the case even within the narrative of the Bible itself.  So, for example, we are exhorted to test prophets; and indeed there are monumental clashes between true and false prophets (Jer.28); weare called on again and again to identify and

ignore people who do not represent God and the Gospel faithfully (Gal.1:6-9).  Clearly it matters to God that He is heard and understood when He reveals Himself.  It is not just the fact of revelation that we are convinced of, but the accuracy and therefore the trustworthiness of the content of that revelation.   It matters hugely that the picture of Jesus we draw from the pages of Scripture correlates with who Jesus actually is, what He actually said, what He actually did.  After all, Christian faith is about putting out trust in Christ, and in Christ as He is revealed in the writings of Scripture.  Any relationship is critically if we discover that the person we are relating to is not who we thought they were.  Much more is this the case in our relationship with Christ.  The trustworthiness of the text of the Bible is tied to the trustworthiness of the God behind the text. 

Take, as another example, the giving of the Law at Sinai.  Surely there must be intrinsic reliability in Moses’ conveying the Law of God to Israel.  How could we relate to a God who allowed there to be error or ambiguity in the communication of commandments which in some cases were literally a matter of life and death?  When you consider the extent to which God held His people culpable in breaking His Law, it is fatal to suggest that the record of the Law might not be historically accurate.  Can we really worship a God who allows the communication of his Law to be corrupted and then holds people responsible for their failure to know and follow it faithfully?  There is an unbreakable connection with our doctrine of God, the words of God as presented in the Bible, and the actions of God to which those words bear witness.

To put it negatively, once we concede the possibility of error in the text of the Bible, we lose all foundation for our faith.  This could be demonstrated by taking any example from the Gospels.  If we think in principle they might not be accurate in what it teaches us about Jesus, we immediately lose any confidence in the character of God as revealed through Jesus.  Did Jesus really pronounce forgiveness of sins (Matthew 9:5-6)?  Did He really calm the storm; or walk on water; or feed the 5,000?  And what kind of God would be satisfied leaving us with such an uncertain witness to His Son?   Could such a God, a God unwilling or unable to reveal Himself with clarity and faithfulness, be worthy of our worship?  Could such a God be trusted?  Could we know He will forgive us if we thought those passages in the Bible where we are taught such things might be erroneous?  No – we need a foundation firm enough for us to stake our eternal destinies on.  An uncertain revelation is perhaps more dangerous than no revelation at all.  The Scriptures are written by human hands, but not merely by human hands.  Therein lies our confidence.

Can we trust the Bible (i) - Incarnation

There is a deep interconnectedness between Jesus and the Bible.  We thought last time more specifically about the purpose of the Scriptures as the means by which we ‘see’ Jesus.  They are designed to be used by the Spirit to conform us to the image of Christ, as He presents to us a magnificent view of Christ in and through the pages of the Bible.   Revelation leads to worship, and to change.  With that in mind we aren’t at all surprised to hear Jesus speak about the Bible in ways that are focussed on Himself.  We hear Him explaining to His disciples that ‘Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms’ (Luke 24:44); or declaring to the Pharisees: ‘These are the Scriptures that testify about me’ (John 5:39).   This is the nature of the Bible: It is inspired by the Father by His Spirit for the purpose of revealing His Son. 

This changes how we pray when we read the Scriptures.  We are not primarily looking for things God is telling me to do, or even for words of comfort or guidance (though all these may in fact be experienced).  Rather our goal and heart’s desire as we open the Bible is that the Holy Spirit would lead us to see and encounter Jesus.  Out of this will come guidance for how we live life;  out of our vision of Christ will come comfort and instruction – but we are missing the heartbeat of the Bible if we seek those ‘results’ but bypass Jesus.  Our vision of the Christian life will be both powerless and hopelessly egocentric and distorted.  The Bible is a radically relational book.  It brokers the interaction between Jesus and His people.  As we’ll see later in the series, this is a key reason for defending the inerrancy of the Bible.  It is telling us about a Person, and it critical that we can trust the Bible to faithfully teach us who that Person is.  Our entire faith hangs on the question of the trustworthiness of this book.  It is, as we all know from bitter experience, devastating to any relationship when you realise that someone is not who you thought they were…

More on that later.  Back to exploring the interconnectedness of Jesus and the Bible.  There is a beautiful symmetry between Christ and the Scriptures.  In both, the Father is breathing out His Word by the Spirit.  We have begun to consider how the word (Bible) relates to the Word (Christ); but beyond that even, there are profound similarities between these two ‘breathing-outs’.   Most intriguing is the realisation that both these key moments of revelation are revealed in and through humanity.  The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us … No-one has ever seen God, but God, the only Begotten Son, who is at the Father’s side has made Him known (John 1:14 & 18).  The full humanity of Jesus is pivotal, and it is one of the deep wonders of the incarnation that in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form (Col.2:9).  And that incarnated, fully human-Word is testified to by the word that is also fully human.  For all their Divine origin, the Scriptures are penned by human authors.   But, despite what is often alleged, the humanity of the authors does not call into question the trustworthiness of the words they wrote.  In fact, as we consider Christ, we find in Him a model of how to understand the nature of Scripture, for in both, the Father breathes out the revelation of Himself by His Spirit, without compromise, but nevertheless, intrinsically through humanity.

One of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church to think this through in detail was BB Warfield.   He had this to say:

“As in the case of Our Lord’s Person, the human nature remains truly human, while yet it can never fall into sin or error because it can never act out of relation with the Divine nature … so in the case of the production of Scripture by the conjoint action of human and Divine factors.  The human factors have acted as human factors, and have left their mark on the product as such, and yet cannot have fallen into that error which we say it is human to fall into, because they have not acted apart from Divine factors, by themselves, but only under their unerring guidance’.

It is important to realise that all our speaking of Scripture as of Divine Origin does not in any way undermine the reality that it was real human beings (Moses, David, Peter, Paul et al) who penned the Bible.  But neither does our speaking about the Scriptures as written by men, undermine our recognition of the Bible as the ‘breathed-out’ Word of God.   This is why the Church has historically seen the Bible as authoritative in a way that other theological writings (such as the creeds) are not.  So Article 21 openly acknowledges that Church Councils ‘may err, indeed sometimes have erred, even in things relating to God’. 

Of course there are important differences between the Word of God and the word of God, e.g. the Word is a Person; the word is a book (albeit a personal, relational book).    But the point of the analogy still stands.  As JI Packer puts it: “it points directly to the fact that as our Lord, though truly Man, was truly free from sin, so Scripture, though truly a human product, is truly free from error … we understand that the written Scriptures as such are ‘the oracles of God’ and we study their character as a human book only as one aspect of their character as a Divine book’. 

And so, we can rejoice in the authentic human character of the written word of God, while retaining our confidence that in the inerrancy of it as the written word of God.

What does the bible do?

Last week we found ourselves thinking about the relationship of the Trinity to the Scripture.  But we may have been left wondering ‘Why?’  Why has God revealed His Son by His Spirit, through the Scriptures?  A short answer might simply be God’s desire to honour His Son and exalt Him in the hearts and minds of His people that they may worship Him.  But we may need to press this a little further and ask how that worship is to manifest itself, simply because Scripture itself gives us warrant to.  God has revealed His Son by His Spirit in the Scriptures in a very specific way, for a very specific purpose:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting

and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be

thoroughly equipped for every good work.

II Tim. 3:16-17

A couple of observations before we get to the central emphasis.  First, Paul has already shown how the Scriptures have been instrumental in bringing Timothy to faith, making him ‘wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (v.15).  The salvation of the Church is integral to the purpose for which God designed the revelation of His Son through His Spirit by the Scriptures.  Secondly, Paul describes the Scriptures as ‘God-breathed’.  The issue here is the Divine origin of Scripture: it is breathed out by God.[1]  Thirdly, while Paul undoubtedly includes what we now call the Old Testament in ‘All Scripture’, he is also keenly aware that his own writing is ‘not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words’ (I Cor.2:13).  Paul isn’t the only one who recognised that he was writing Scripture.  Peter acknowledges that ‘Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom that God gave Him.  He writes in the same way in all his letters… which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures…’ (II Peter 3:15-16).  Peter puts Paul’s letters in the same category as the rest of the Scriptures.  Paul’s experience was not unique.  The Apostles had Jesus’ own promise that the ‘Holy Spirit … will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you’ (Jn.14:26).  We are wary of restricting ‘Scriptures’ to exclude the writings of the Apostles.

But back to the main point:  Why were the Scriptures written in the way they were?  Paul gives us penetrating insight into the wisdom of God.  They are written to be used by the Holy Spirit to teach us about Christ in such a way that they would be useful in conforming us to the likeness of Christ, so we can live

authentically as disciples of Christ.   Paul explores similar territory in Eph.4:11-24.  Paul begins by saying that Christ gave the Church Apostles (among others) to ‘prepare God’s people for works of serviceso that the body of Christ may be built up in the … knowledge of the Son of God and become mature’.  The climax comes in verses 23-24, in which Paul tells us that we are ‘to be made new in the attitude of our minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness’.  This sounds very like Paul’s comments in II Tim.3:16-17.  The Scriptures are perfectly designed for the purpose of bringing Christians to maturity of life and faith i.e. intimacy with and conformity to Christ.  Their usefulness in these matters is not incidental.  They are designed to be a tool in the hands of the Holy Spirit to teach, rebuke, correct and train us in righteousness.  As we study them – individually and corporately – each of these elements should be part of our experience.  We should find ourselves feeling the sting of rebuke; we should hear the Word of God with a humility that allows the Holy Spirit to correct us; we should be willing to be taught through them and from them, and so be trained for righteousness.   Sin is exposed, motives laid bare; behaviour, speech and thoughts are seen to have fallen short of the glory of God (Heb.4:12).  Our behaviour, opinions, morals and values are all tested against the reality of Christ found in the Scriptures.  We are taught how to live differently.  No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it (Heb.12:11). 

If we do not find ourselves developing in righteousness as a result of studying the Scriptures they are not achieving the purpose for which they were designed.  Too often we can find ourselves looking to the Scriptures for a comforting thought, or a stimulating intellectual insight we can share at our next home-group meeting.  But the Bible has not done its work until it has been used by the Spirit to change who we are and the way we live.

The Scriptures hold forth to us the glorious portrait of Christ in such a way that they can be used by the Holy Spirit to conform us to the image of God in Christ.  There is a transformative power in our vision of Christ.  John teaches us that when Christ ‘appears [or: is made known] we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is’.  When our vision of Christ is absolute, it will transform us absolutely.  In the interim, we find Christ is made known to us by the Holy Spirit in the pages of the Bible.  But our vision of Christ has the same transforming effects.  To know Christ is to be changed to be like Him, and to long to be so.   This is authentic worship, and is how we fulfil God’s desire to exalt His Son.

[1] We’ll come back in another article to explore the relationship between the Holy Spirit who has ex-pired the Word of God, and the in-spired human authors.

Trinity and Bible

“All things have been committed to me by my Father.  No-one knows the Son except the Father, and no-one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him”

Jesus,

Matthew 11:27

What is the Bible?  And why, in the wisdom of God, did He give it to us?  All this talk about the Bible could easily give rise to the question: Isn’t our faith about a Person (the Word) rather than a book (words)?   If we give the Bible the sort of primacy within the Church that we have been thinking about over the last couple of weeks, then aren’t we in danger of becoming ‘Bibliolaters’, committing a kind of idolatry with the Bible? 

Let’s start with Jesus.  We celebrated Christmas not so long ago, and as a part of that we reflected on Jesus (as ‘the Word become flesh’) being the exclusive revelation of God.  One of the famous Christmas passages is rooted in John 1:18, “No-one has ever seen God, but God, the only Begotten Son, who is at the Father’s side has made Him known’.  This is a glorious truth, which we find echoed again and again in the pages of Scripture (see Jn.14:6-9; Col.2:8-9; Heb.1:3; I Tim.2:5).  Indeed, it is something that Jesus Himself teaches: “…no-one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him…” (Matt.11:27).  What fantastic good news – that Christ, who is the exact representation of His Father has condescended to reveal Him to us!  We can have tremendous confidence in this.  After all, ‘God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in [Christ]’ (Col.1:19). 

But there is a problem, isn’t there?  It’s great that the Son reveals the Father, but: How do we know who the Son is?  What is Jesus like?  What does He say and why does He say it?  How does He treat people?  What did He do when He was Incarnate?  How do we make sense of Him?  At one level the problem is simply that we weren’t around when Jesus walked the earth in His incarnation.  But the problem is more profound that simply one of time and geography – after all, a lot of people who did see Him didn’t seem to understand Him.  In the first part of Matthew 11:27, Jesus teaches that ‘No-one knows the Son except the Father…’.  That seems to be a conundrum.  No-one knows the Father except the Son, but no-one knows the Son except the Father.  The Son reveals the Father, but how can we know the Son?  To know the Son we would need to know the mind of God the Father…

Which is exactly what the Apostle Paul says we do know in I Corinthians 2:10-14.  Paul painstakingly spells out for us that the mind of the Father has been revealed to us by His Spirit (2:10).  Paul rejoices in the fact that the Holy Spirit “All things have been committed to me by my Father.  No-one knows the Son except the Father, and no-one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him”

Jesus,

Matthew 11:27

What is the Bible?  And why, in the wisdom of God, did He give it to us?  All this talk about the Bible could easily give rise to the question: Isn’t our faith about a Person (the Word) rather than a book (words)?   If we give the Bible the sort of primacy within the Church that we have been thinking about over the last couple of weeks, then aren’t we in danger of becoming ‘Bibliolaters’, committing a kind of idolatry with the Bible? 

Let’s start with Jesus.  We celebrated Christmas not so long ago, and as a part of that we reflected on Jesus (as ‘the Word become flesh’) being the exclusive revelation of God.  One of the famous Christmas passages is rooted in John 1:18, “No-one has ever seen God, but God, the only Begotten Son, who is at the Father’s side has made Him known’.  This is a glorious truth, which we find echoed again and again in the pages of Scripture (see Jn.14:6-9; Col.2:8-9; Heb.1:3; I Tim.2:5).  Indeed, it is something that Jesus Himself teaches: “…no-one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him…” (Matt.11:27).  What fantastic good news – that Christ, who is the exact representation of His Father has condescended to reveal Him to us!  We can have tremendous confidence in this.  After all, ‘God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in [Christ]’ (Col.1:19). 

But there is a problem, isn’t there?  It’s great that the Son reveals the Father, but: How do we know who the Son is?  What is Jesus like?  What does He say and why does He say it?  How does He treat people?  What did He do when He was Incarnate?  How do we make sense of Him?  At one level the problem is simply that we weren’t around when Jesus walked the earth in His incarnation.  But the problem is more profound that simply one of time and geography – after all, a lot of people who did see Him didn’t seem to understand Him.  In the first part of Matthew 11:27, Jesus teaches that ‘No-one knows the Son except the Father…’.  That seems to be a conundrum.  No-one knows the Father except the Son, but no-one knows the Son except the Father.  The Son reveals the Father, but how can we know the Son?  To know the Son we would need to know the mind of God the Father…

Which is exactly what the Apostle Paul says we do know in I Corinthians 2:10-14.  Paul painstakingly spells out for us that the mind of the Father has been revealed to us by His Spirit (2:10).  Paul rejoices in the fact that the Holy Spirit searches ‘…even the deep things of God’.  Only the Holy Spirit of God could know the ‘thoughts of God’.  And Paul can barely contain his excitement as he declares that ‘We have [received]…the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us’ (2:12).  The Apostles and Prophets lay a foundation for authentic Christianity because they are the ones through whom the Holy Spirit of God reveals the reality of the Son of God (see Ephesians 2:20; 3:5; & 4:11-13).  So, it works something like this:

(i)                  our faith is built on the reality that the Father knows the Son,

(ii)                …and that the Father has revealed the Son by His Holy Spirit

(iii)               …so that the Son can reveal the Father to those ‘whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’. 

Paul goes on to link this directly to the Scriptures as the means through which the Father reveals the Son by the Holy Spirit: ‘This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words’ (2:13).  This is an extraordinary statement.  Not only is the content of the Apostle’s teaching the revelation of God, but the words used to convey that content have been specifically chosen by the Holy Spirit in order to teach us ‘the deep things of God’.   Paul is deeply aware that he is speaking something that does not have its origin in his own will and ingenuity, but that he is speaking from God, and is being carried along by the Holy Spirit (see II Peter 1:21). 

We close the loop with a final question: What are ‘the deep things of God’?  We should all be able to answer this now: Christ Jesus our Lord.  The Apostles are the last in a long line of those whom the Father has used by His Holy Spirit to reveal and point to His Son through His words.  The Father alone knows the Son, and He reveals His Son to us by His Spirit through the Scriptures.  That is why Jesus can make the claims He does about His own relationship to the Bible (John 5:39; Luke 24:44 etc.).  The Father has revealed His Son in the Scriptures (Jn.5:37-40); and now that the Father has revealed His Son by His Spirit, the Son is able to reveal the Father by that same Spirit (I Cor.2:14) to those whom He has chosen.  Hence Paul finishes with the almost unbelievable claim: ‘We have the mind of Christ’ (I Cor.2:16).  The Scriptures are a beautiful and essential act in our Trinitarian God’s gracious self-revelation of Himself to the Church.  To speak of knowing Christ apart from – or even contrary to - the Bible is nonsensical.  And to speak of knowing God apart from Christ would be utterly incomprehensible.  IN fact it would be a whole different religion!

This is the Word of the Lord.  Indeed we declare: ‘Thanks be to God’.

searches ‘…even the deep things of God’.  Only the Holy Spirit of God could know the ‘thoughts of God’.  And Paul can barely contain his excitement as he declares that ‘We have [received]…the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us’ (2:12).  The Apostles and Prophets lay a foundation for authentic Christianity because they are the ones through whom the Holy Spirit of God reveals the reality of the Son of God (see Ephesians 2:20; 3:5; & 4:11-13).  So, it works something like this:

(i)                  our faith is built on the reality that the Father knows the Son,

(ii)                …and that the Father has revealed the Son by His Holy Spirit

(iii)               …so that the Son can reveal the Father to those ‘whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’. 

Paul goes on to link this directly to the Scriptures as the means through which the Father reveals the Son by the Holy Spirit: ‘This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words’ (2:13).  This is an extraordinary statement.  Not only is the content of the Apostle’s teaching the revelation of God, but the words used to convey that content have been specifically chosen by the Holy Spirit in order to teach us ‘the deep things of God’.   Paul is deeply aware that he is speaking something that does not have its origin in his own will and ingenuity, but that he is speaking from God, and is being carried along by the Holy Spirit (see II Peter 1:21). 

We close the loop with a final question: What are ‘the deep things of God’?  We should all be able to answer this now: Christ Jesus our Lord.  The Apostles are the last in a long line of those whom the Father has used by His Holy Spirit to reveal and point to His Son through His words.  The Father alone knows the Son, and He reveals His Son to us by His Spirit through the Scriptures.  That is why Jesus can make the claims He does about His own relationship to the Bible (John 5:39; Luke 24:44 etc.).  The Father has revealed His Son in the Scriptures (Jn.5:37-40); and now that the Father has revealed His Son by His Spirit, the Son is able to reveal the Father by that same Spirit (I Cor.2:14) to those whom He has chosen.  Hence Paul finishes with the almost unbelievable claim: ‘We have the mind of Christ’ (I Cor.2:16).  The Scriptures are a beautiful and essential act in our Trinitarian God’s gracious self-revelation of Himself to the Church.  To speak of knowing Christ apart from – or even contrary to - the Bible is nonsensical.  And to speak of knowing God apart from Christ would be utterly incomprehensible.  IN fact it would be a whole different religion!

This is the Word of the Lord.  Indeed we declare: ‘Thanks be to God’.

Do we need the Bible (ii) - Tradition

In the last article I wrote I mentioned an old Anglican theologian called Richard Hooker.  He is often credited (especially in Anglican circles) with the idea that there are three ways we can access God’s self-revelation: Reason, Tradition and Scripture.  In recent years, there has been a move to include a fourth way of knowing who God is, through our experience of Him.  We need to tread carefully, for while there is an element of truth in all this, there is also a dangerous mistake we could easily make…

The first thing we need to be aware of is that what Hooker actually taught was that when we are reading the Bible we will find it useful and safe to do so in the light of (sanctified) reason and tradition, and I suspect he would have had no problem including ‘experience’.  Hooker stood firmly in line with the teaching of the Church of England, that I outlined a couple of weeks ago:

Article 18: ‘…It is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it expound one place of Scripture so that is discordant to another.  The Church is the witness and keeper of the Word of God, and must not decree anything contrary to it, nor enforce anything to be believed besides what is taught in the Scriptures…’

Hooker was too good an Anglican to think that either ‘tradition’ or ‘reason’ (or for that matter ‘experience’) should have the same level of authority when it comes to us finding out who God is, and how He wants us to relate to Him and live for Him.  Still less that he would have sanctioned the idea that if ‘reason’ or ‘tradition’ (or ‘experience’) contradicted the Bible, they might trump it (read Article 18 again!). 

Last week I tried to show why we couldn’t trust ‘reason’ alone to lead us safely to the knowledge of God.  We must rather read the Scriptures reasonably (i.e. using our redeemed heads!). This week we’ll think about the role of ‘tradition’.  So, what do we mean by ‘Tradition’? 

People often think the Reformation was a clash between the Roman Catholic Church who taught that ‘Tradition’ was most important, and the Protestants who were getting back to pure ‘Biblical’ Christianity.  But when you read them, you see that the Reformers in fact claimed to stand on Tradition, properly understood.  The fact that John Calvin quoted the Early Church Fathers over a thousand times in the Institutes is just one example that gives some credibility to the idea that the Reformers had a better claim to the tradition of the Church than did their opponents!  The Reformer’s point was not that all tradition is de facto bad, but that there are good and bad traditions; and also that there are good and bad ways to use tradition.

Good traditions reflect what the Bible has to teach.  Listening to a great Bible teacher explain a passage is a fantastic experience.  Now, what if that great Bible teacher has been dead for 1700 years, or 500 years, but has been looked to in every generation since then as providing the best interpretation of what the Bible teaches on a certain topic or passage?  We are drawing on that tradition of teaching when we read their work cited, or developed, in a contemporary book, or hear their views referred to in a sermon.  Tradition can be helpful.  But it can also be very unhelpful, e.g. when traditions of teaching or practise have grown up in the Church which have no Biblical warrant – such as the veneration of the saints, or the existence of purgatory. 

Which brings us to our second antithesis:  there are good and bad ways to use tradition.  A particularly bad way to relate to tradition is to see it as binding on us, even when it has no Biblical foundation, or has long since proved useful to the Church’s ministry or mission.  By contrast, good ways of using tradition allow us to draw on the rich reserves of thought and worship of faithful saints who have walked the path of Christian discipleship before us.  We can be guided by those to whom God has granted much deeper insight than we could ourselves attain.  Like I said before, it is like sitting in a really good Bible study with people who have been dead for a while, and benefiting from what they have to say.

When it comes to reading the Bible, we take tradition seriously because at its best, it is the work of the best minds of the Church throughout the ages. Creeds; Confessions; Catechisms; theologians and preachers of past generations, can still serve as reliable guides – sometimes more so than those who are blinded by the same cultural prejudices that hamper us.  The grace of God has seen fit to ensure that their legacy remains intact to enrich the Church in later generations.  But we only believe tradition when it can be shown to reflect faithfully the teaching of the Bible.  Tradition may be a good servant at times, but it is a terrible master.  

When it helps us understand the Bible we rejoice in it, but at no point can we imply that ‘tradition’ could replace Scripture, or compensate for it. But enough of the historical Anglican stuff.  Next time we’ll start looking at the nature of the Bible itself, and how it relates to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Do we need the Bible (i) - Reason

Do we really need the Bible?  We often sort of assume that when we read the Bible it will just confirm what I already think and believe anyway.  But is that in fact the case?  We are used to thinking about the effects of sin on the human heart.  We know that, left to ourselves, our desires would not be what they should be.  We know that we would spend our life wanting the wrong things; looking for satisfaction in the wrong places; simply not wanting to be the people God wants us to be.  There would be little in this observation that would be a surprise to us.  But I am increasingly stunned by the impact of sin on the human mind.  The more I study the Bible, the more I realise how I think the wrong things, and even when I think about the right things, I think about them in the wrong way.  Perhaps that is why we are told not to lean on our own understanding (Prov.3:5).

The fact of the matter is that if I was left to myself, and were to think about ‘God’, every thought I would have of Him would be wrong.  If I were asked a series of questions about God (e.g. Who do I think God is?  How do I think God relates to the world?  What do I think God wants from me?), every answer I would give would be wrong – emphatically wrong.  Does this sound too extreme?  Well, let’s think about the most basic statement of belief about God: that He is Trinity, one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  I wonder if we would ever have come to that conclusion if it were not for the Bible teaching us that it is so?  And if this most foundational of beliefs proves so elusive, what hope could there be for anything else we might want to say about Him?  

And it is my own experience that I am still – after studying the Bible for over two decades – finding frighteningly large areas where my thinking is radically out of step with what the Bible teaches.  And in many of those areas it feels like I have to keep my mind under constant pressure to think according to the Scriptures, or it would revert to some wrong, and therefore ‘sinful’, way of thinking about God.  This is simply the testimony of the history of academia.  Philosophers have for generations tried to reason their way to God.  And without fail, they have failed to arrive at a doctrine of God that resonates with what the Bible teaches us. 

But couldn’t we figure out who God is by studying creation?  That would make sense – if God made it, and especially if He made it to reveal His glory, we would expect it to carry His fingerprints.  But we encounter two obstacles in our interpreting the ‘Book of Creation’.  The first is that Creation is no longer what it was when God made it.  Paul teaches us that ‘creation is subjected to frustration’ and that it is ‘groaning as in the pains of childbirth’ (Rom.8:20 & 22).  The impact of our sinfulness on creation has thrown it off kilter, and while it is still able to

declare the glory of God (Psalm 8:1), it does so in muted and uncertain voice (see Hosea 4:2-3).  But there is still something creation can teach us then?  Yes, even in its fallen state creation has something to say about Christ (Rom.1:19-20) – but here we run into our second problem:  the impact of our sinfulness on us, and the way that sin blinds us to what should be ‘clearly seen’.  Indeed, most tragically, when left to our own devices we have a propensity to use creation, not to teach us about God, but to replace God (Rom.1:22-23) as the object of our worship.  This avenue too remains closed to us because of the reality of sin.  Only as we put on the ‘spectacles of Scripture’ can we begin to read the book of creation faithfully.

It requires a direct and very powerful intervention to break the deadlock of our sinful ignorance.  It requires an act of God that has been specifically designed to shatter the darkness of our thinking, and to reconfigure our minds in a way that allows us to see and understand the reality of God.  It is our conviction that the Scriptures, when wielded by the Holy Spirit, are precisely that act of God.  Here, and here alone, can we arrive safely at a sure and certain knowledge of our great God and Saviour.

Richard Hooker, one of the older Anglican theologians, talked of allowing (redeemed) reason and (Biblical) tradition to aid us in our interpretation of Scripture as the self-revelation of God – but that is very different from talking (as some do today) of Scripture, Reason and Tradition as three different ways of building our understanding of God.  We’ll look at Tradition next week, but we have already seen that to trust to our own Reason to think either abstractly, or to interpret the evidence of creation so as to arrive at a doctrine of God is intellectual suicide, driven in part by a dangerous naiveté about the effect of sin on our thinking.  Certainly when Scripture and Reason clash, there is no doubt as to which we must follow.

Over the next weeks we will be considering how the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to re-shape the landscape of our minds, and to reveal to us the reality of who God is.  We must first reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is no other way to access God’s revelation of Himself in Christ, than by the Spirit working through the Scriptures.  We’ll look at this directly in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, perhaps it is enough to say that we must renounce all thoughts of God or ourselves that are not based on Scripture.  To go against what is written is neither right nor true, and it will plunge us into an inexplicable labyrinth from which there is no return.

The Bible and the C of E

You might have noticed that I put a huge emphasis on teaching and preaching from the Bible throughout the life of the Church.  That isn’t to say that I devalue other aspects of our life and worship.  Hopefully you know me well enough by now to know that isn’t the case!  But when all is said and done, I guess I see a big part of Christian ministry to focus on the responsibility to ‘preach the word’ (II Tim.4:2).  I thought it might be helpful if I took a bit of time to explain why I think the Bible is so critical to the life of any Church, or for that matter, any Christian.

It’ll take me a few articles to outline my own thinking and experience of this, so bear with me over the next few weeks as I lay it out as succinctly as I can.  A word of warning though – people have spent their whole lives on this sort of question, and they’ve written some very big books as a result.  I’ll try not to let it get out of hand, (but I might give us a sketch of what is in some of those books on the way through)!

But before we really get going, and sort of as an introduction to the series… a historical perspective.  We are after all, Anglican Churches, and so here are some thoughts from the daddy of all Anglicans, the first Archbishop of the newly reformed Church of England.  In 1547, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote the first sermon that was to be preached throughout the Church of England, it was entitled: ‘A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of the Holy Scripture’.  The opening paragraph (slightly modernised!) reads:

For a Christian, nothing is more necessary or profitable than knowing the Holy Scripture – for it contains God’s true word, sets forth His glory, and instructs us as to our duty.  Every truth or doctrine that is necessary for our justification and everlasting salvation is contained within the Bible, and may be as easily drawn out of it as water is drawn from a well.  If you want to know God, you must give yourself to knowing this Book, for without it you cannot know God or His will...  And as drink is pleasant to those that thirst, so the reading, hearing, searching and studying of the Scripture is pleasant to those who desire to know God ...  Therefore we reject the misguided and corrupt thoughts of mere men, and reverently hear and read the Word of God.  Let us diligently search for the well of life, and flee from the stinking puddles of our own thoughts and imaginations.  For in the Holy Scripture is fully contained what we ought to do (and not do), what we must believe, love, and look for from God’s hand.  In these books we shall find the Father from whom, the Son by whom, and the Holy Spirit in whom, all things have their being.  In these books (of the Old and New Testament) we learn to know ourselves, and how sinful we are, and also to know God, and how good He is - and how He shall make us partakers of His goodness; to know God’s will and pleasure, and all that is required of us.  Here we shall find the medicine which can restore us to health, the truth to refute all false doctrine, the counsel to rebuke any vice, and anything else we may require for our salvation.

The Church of England has always officially stood by this view of the Bible.  In 1563, the Church compiled a foundational document called The 39 Articles of Religion, which provide a summary of the things the Church is committed to believe and teach.  When licensed and installed at St John’s, and again when I was licensed and installed at St. Andrew’s, I took a legal oath (the Declaration of Assent), in which I affirmed and accordingly declared ‘my belief in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the Catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness’.  Those ‘historic formularies include the 39 Articles, which in turn maintain the Church’s commitment to the Bible as the Word of God. 

Article 6: ‘Holy Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation, so that whatever is not read in the Scriptures, nor can be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or thought requisite or necessary for salvation…’

Article 17: ‘We must receive God’s promises as they are set forth to us in Holy Scripture, and in all that we do we should follow the will of God, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God’.

Article 18: ‘…It is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it expound one place of Scripture so that is discordant to another.  The Church is the witness and keeper of the Word of God, and must not decree anything contrary to it, nor enforce anything to be believed besides what is taught in the Scriptures…’

Over the next few weeks, we shall be exploring different aspects of the Church’s historic and unchanging testimony to the Scriptures, seeking to understand the nature of the Bible, and indeed the Bible’s own view of itself.  We’ll think about where the Bible came from, how it came to be compiled – why are some books included and others not.  How can we be sure about what it says when there are so many different and competing interpretations?  What have been the big issues about the Bible that the Church has struggled with over the generations? What do we believe about Bible, and why, and how we can better understand what it teaches us…

Whilst I hope it will be an interesting journey, my prayer is that it will prove more than just interesting, and that as we work through these articles we’ll find a renewed conviction in our repeated declaration:  This is the Word of the Lord, and a deeper appreciation in our response:  Thanks be to God.