In a recent sermon Sir Alan Goodison raised, in his usual challenging and perhaps (?) occasionally provocative way, the question of scriptural inspiration and the way in which God can be said to reveal himself to us through the pages of the Bible. And in case this letter is read by any of our local reporters can I say now that I am not here challenging what he said but developing his case and responding to some of the questions he left unanswered.
The background to this discussion is provided by the question of whether or not women should now be consecrated to the episcopate and how that question might be settled by appeal to Scripture. The recent Rochester Report which explores these arguments (they will be considered in a future letter) provides an interesting starting point for responding to the topic of Sir Alan’s sermon.
It may be that when we consider the revelation of God we have an image of a kind of divine striptease. Scripture we might think provides us with a series of propositions about God (summed up perhaps in the Creeds). Each proposition is like a veil. As you come to believe in and accept each proposition so God is gradually uncovered or revealed till in the end you know all about God, or would do if only you could really understand and accept these propositions.
The Rochester Report provides a different approach. It begins with the idea of Scripture as a grand or overarching narrative. If we pay attention to this story it will enable us to start living as God intends us to live. Through the story we find out who God is, who we are and what God has done for us. The Bible is a drama disclosing the truth about God and humankind. The authors of the story wrote under the inspiration of the divine author working through their intelligence and experience.
Unlike a series of propositions, a narrative does not require assent. Believing in a story is different to believing a statement. A story engages with us imaginatively allowing us to go at our own pace. The Biblical story (the history of Israel and of Jesus and of the earliest Christians) is, however, a story that goes beyond the other stories we might enjoy reading (The Lord of the Rings for example a similar kind of grand narrative). The Church ‘privileges’ this biblical story above all others because it believes that in this story we can begin to discover and make sense of our own stories. We find our identity as characters who have become part of this narrative as it is retold through history. From this perspective, therefore, ‘obeying Scripture’ does not mean a repressive implementation of rules and regulations. It means a rigorous listening to this story and a faithful openness to the ways in which it might (surprisingly) affect us. The story is ‘not coercive but generative, not repressive but emancipatory’ (Bruegemann)
To understand the story we need, of course, to find a way into its language, imagery, conventions, and assumptions, just as we need help in understanding Shakespeare, even though the text can still speak to us without any further information. But such is the nature of human sinfulness that we often read into a story things that aren’t there as a way of legitimising a fantasy or prejudice of our own. So we need to learn to suspect our habitual patterns of interpretation, and our preferences for one element of the story over another. We need to be challenged by the strangeness of the text and that is where the critics and scholars can help. They show us how and when the text was written; what were the special concerns of the writer in the time he (could any of the Biblical authors have been she?) was writing; what was his cultural and historical background; how one part of the text relates to another; how words change their meaning. Biblical interpretation, conducted in this way, is not like the interpretation of a code, which becomes redundant once it has been unravelled; it is more like the interpretation of a masterpiece which we come back to again and again. And over time we begin to discern in this way ‘what is central and what is peripheral, what is relative and what is absolute, what is provisional and what is enduring.’ (Henderson). And thus we might begin to see that Biblical inspiration is not a matter of God holding the writer’s hand, or dictating his words. Divine inspiration resides in the encounter between the story and its reader. Inspiration is a present reality not a past event. As we read the strange story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses, and David and Isaiah and Jeremiah, of Peter and Paul and above all of Jesus, so, however historically remote they may seem, we become related to them in God.
And yet it may be that reading this you feel disinclined to ‘privilege’ the Bible in quite the way that is being suggested. What about the boring, repetitive, repulsive, unjust, blood thirsty, primitive, patriarchal, irrelevant parts of Scripture? Why should we pay any attention to these? And what are we to do when other readers insist on the authority of part of the text which we feel no-one should pay any attention to now? How should we respond when we feel that ‘Biblical Authority’ is being used abusively to beat us about the head? Why do we say that the Bible reveals God when it quite clearly doesn’t in many places or at least not the sort of God we could ever believe in? Such questions may arise, however, because we are still thinking propositionally. I haven’t tried to suggest that this is in any way an easy story. It is for example a frequently subversive set of texts, where what is assumed about God in one part of the narrative is contradicted in another part. The Old Testament often reads like a conversation between humankind and God where God is constantly being misrepresented by people who think they are listening to him, when they are only listening to themselves.
Perhaps the New Testament reveals God’s perfect partner in the conversation Jesus. And it was the report of that conversation which began to change people’s lives and produce a community that was radically different both to the Jewish and the Hellenistic worlds. The words and works of Jesus were ‘generative’; they gave birth to something the nature of which it took time and prayer and discussion and witness and martyrdom to discover. To be a part of this community, to be ‘in Christ’ involved a slow but far-reaching reconstruction of one’s humanity. It revealed a new meaning to who we are and therefore who God is. And such a process cannot be summed up in neat propositions or regulations. It is revealed only in transformed lives.
With my love and prayers,
Father Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker