Matthew 16. 17: Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.
I want to consider the character of revelation this morning, and in particular the Bible. The more one studies the Bible, the less certain one becomes about its witness. Of course, we talk about the Bible as if it were a book, when it is actually a library, in which each of the books has its own history. Few of these histories correspond to what pious enthusiasm asserts. The Bible dates from times when it was normal to give books authority by ascribing their authorship to some distinguished figure of the past, like Moses, who may or may not have existed at all four or five hundred years before the books called by his name received their present form. The practice was as common in New Testament times as earlier. Not all of the epistles ascribed to Paul were actually written by him. As books were copied, they often received additions and tweaks in accordance with the copyist’s interests. Once one is aware of this, one has to look at the revelation the books contain without prior assumptions.
The composition of the Old Testament was determined about the first century AD; that of the New was not finally fixed till the fourth century. The Church decided which books should be included. The authority of the Bible, therefore, is derived from the Church, that is, the Church’s conviction that it contains messages from God. You will note that I do not myself assert that the Bible itself is a direct message from God. As you study the Old Testament you can recognize that it contains primitive material conveying an inadequate understanding of God, like the folk-tales in Genesis, which are strongly nationalistic, in contrast to the more sophisticated theology of the later chapters of Isaiah, which preach universal salvation.. It is also possible to observe development of doctrine and church organization in the New Testament between the earliest books, like Galatians, as compared with books from the end of the century like John and Ephesians. So the Bible is not all of a piece or internally self-consistent. That does not mean that it is not a vehicle for revelation. But the divine messages have been filtered through the minds and the writing of its authors. In fact, the Bible is an uncertain source, not an absolute guide, quite apart from its need of translation. We are not dealing with documents where the actual wording can be expected to have any particular validity.
It seems unfortunate that one party in the General Synod succeeded in requiring us in a Common Worship service to end our readings with the assertion “This is the Word of the Lord’. I can remember my wife flatly refusing to do so when obliged to declaim a grisly legend about God murdering someone who steadied the Ark of the Covenant with his hand when it appeared about to fall.
I speak of these things, not to undermine your faith in the good news of Jesus, but to warn you against belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible. Of course, the witness of the Church precedes the composition and compilation of the New Testament. Some assert that God protects the Church from error, which thus authenticates the actual text of the Bible. I am not myself convinced of this in view of the record of the Church, whose history is one of controversy, and the text of the Bible is full of problems. I repeat that the Bible contains messages from God, of which the message of Jesus Christ is the most important, but that does not mean that the Bible is itself the message.
It seems possible to me that, as part of our essential freedom, God protects us in general from certainty about his history and his nature, just as we are rarely certain of his will. Even this passage of praise for Peter is followed immediately by ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ to balance it. I believe a great deal of harm has been, and is being done in the world by Christians who are absolutely certain that they are right, like the Spanish Inquisition, and that they know everything about God. God is a mystery we can never hope to fathom. In the book I am reading at the moment, Befriending Death, by James Woodward, I came across a passage worth pondering on in this connexion: ‘Perhaps the gospel message offers us only a certain promise of uncertainty, of continuing love and change. It reminds us that comprehending mystery is the process of discovering and engaging with the struggle to manage these profound ambiguities and paradoxes as a condition of our living. It is about being in touch with our weaknesses and vulnerabilities as the bases of our living, loving and dying .’
If this is so, it is a mistake to seek too much from revelation. It is an ancient tradition which seeks God in a Cloud of Unknowing. We have no need for a book to worship when we are sustained by the love of God. We have no need for textual certainties when our faith is in a person rather than a set of propositions. We know that God became a human being, because the Bible tells us so, and it does not matter whether all the details of the stories of his birth are historical or not. It is God who sustains us, whatever questions may arise. We do not ask for proof of the character of our friends; we rely on our experience of them. and we should rely on God in the same way. It is he who uses the church to celebrate with us the Eucharist we are attending today and who comes to us in the bread and wine. The fact that we do not know how is of no great importance. We know he is here and that is enough. In the same way, we know that God speaks to us in the Bible, and that is revelation sufficient for our needs. Amen
Alan Goodison