What is the Church of England’s problem with the Bible?
There were two interesting articles in theChurch Times terminal calendar week which illustrated well some of the challenges for the church of reading the Bible. The longer one was an interview with John Barton, erstwhile professor at the University of Oxford, following the publication earlier in the twelvemonth of his bookA History of the Bible.
At the launch, he explained that his thesis in the book was that "the relation of religion to book is not directly. Bug arise when this is ignored, every bit the history of interpretation of the Bible and then often illustrates."
This 'indirectness' is crucial, and the failure to recognise this is a feature of a range of 'naive' approaches to Scripture which treat the text as though it was written in a world like ours. In fact, the world of the human authors of the different parts of Scripture was in some regards very dissimilar to the world in which we live, and factoring this in is always an essential office of reading Scripture well. This is handsomely illustrated past an article a couple of pages before, past Ted Harrison, on 'Divine Numerology'. Harrison points out that the 153 fish caught in John 21 would accept a significance in the first century that means nothing to us:
There is one passage in the Gospels which may best be understood in this context: the story of the miraculous draught of fish, when 153 were caught. The meaning of this was immediately apparent to Pythagoreans, members of a religio-philosophic movement based on the instruction of Pythagoras that was undergoing a revival in the first century Advertizing.
The fish were caught on the occasion of Christ's 3rd appearance to the disciples, known traditionally as the Twelve. If three and 12 are ii sides of a right-angled triangle, Pythagoras's theorem teaches that the hypotenuse is three squared plus twelve squared, which is 153.
Furthermore, information technology was pointed out by the late Church building of Scotland minister and theologian the Revd Dr Gordon Strachan that the square root of 153 — the length of the hypotenuse — was thus 12.37. This is the number of lunar months in a solar year, which would have been known by Pythagoreans, and would have helped to convince them that the Jesus who had performed the miracle was one and the same equally the God who created the universe.
Harrison has got his maths a bit muddled hither—the length of the hypotenuse is in fact thesquare root of 153—but the link with Pythagoras is of import for reading this equally an aboriginal text. The number 153 has all sorts of interesting mathematical properties, and a number of these were of import in the ancient globe. The most meaning, which Harrison does not mention, is that it is a 'triangular' number (think of the 15 cherry assurance in a triangle at the start of a game of snooker), that is, it is the sum of the first 17 integers (and besides the sum of the commencement five factorial numbers). Richard Bauckham links this with wider numerological features of John'south gospel in the final chapter of his bookThe Testimony of the Love Disciple, which non all have found persuasive—only it has the virtue of connecting something important in the world of the text with other features of the text itself, rather than being an isolated example.
But John Barton goes on to explicate that the 'indirect' fashion the Bible relates to Christian theology and the church building is rather more comprehensive than this.
Barton is a Church of England priest as well as a prominent academic. I ask him how he sees the relationship between the Bible and the modern Church. He explains that he sees the Bible "as a resource for the Church building, only not a 'paper Pope' to answer all our questions. When it speaks, we must listen, but need not concord."…
"How does the Bible inform your own faith?" I ask. His answer is unexpected: "I believe the Bible contains and imparts a keen bargain of wisdom, but I tend not to recollect of information technology every bit 'inspired', preferring the idea that 'the Bible tells us what we cannot tell ourselves', every bit Lutherans tend to put it — insights nosotros would take been at least very unlikely to make it at unaided."
This raises some fascinating questions. The first is whether, even in this comment, Barton is being consistent. If Scripture tells u.s.a. 'what nosotros cannot tell ourselves' (which is in line with the fundamental understanding of Christianity from a phenomenological signal of view, that it is a 'revealed' religion), and then on what footing might nosotros disagree with what it tells the states? There is also the interesting question of how this sits with what Barton has said elsewhere; in his much earlierThe People of the Book(1988) he comments along these lines:
The value of the Lord'southward ain sayings for agreement and recognizing his divine authority does non depend on the fact that they appear in the pages of Christian holy books, but derives from the fact that Jesus really said them… (p 39)…The Bible matters … because it is the primeval and most compelling evidence that Jesus rose from the dead… (p 40) [The Bible is] a trusted friend, on whose impressions and interpretations of an important effect or experience we place reliance… (p 45).
He does qualify this somewhat, in suggesting that we understand revelation 'far less as the direct communication of information by God, and far more as the fruit of an encounter into which the Biblical text leads us.' (p 72) but I don't think many thinking readers of Scripture would disagree with this. (Cheers to Peter Thomas for these quotations).
The difficulty with Barton'southward position in rejecting the thought of 'inspiration' is that it goes against non just what Scripture seems to merits for itself, merely what mainstream Christian thinking has consistently understood. The classic biblical text on this is of grade 2 Tim 3.sixteen: 'All scripture is God-breathed [theopneustos] and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness…' The metaphor underlying this is the voice communication of God carried on the breath or Spirit of God; try speaking and breathing in at the aforementioned time and you will see the force of the image! Sceptics will indicate out that internal claims made by a book about itself tell us cypher—but of grade that ignores the fact that the catechism of scripture has developed layer upon layer over fourth dimension. The 'Scripture' that Paul is referring to here is what we now call the Old Testament; those who received and circulated this letter of Paul then recognised that God was speaking in the same manner through this writing of Paul as God had spoken in the former scriptures, so added this to their collection of authoritative texts.
Barton clearly wants to avoid seeing this every bit implying some sort of rigid 'verbal inspiration' theory of the Bible, and so he includes criticism in his comments of 'hardline biblicists':
In this respect I wish more than hardline biblicists in the Church building of England would accept Luther's principle that what is authoritative in the Bible is 'what promotes Christ' (was Christum treibet; quod Christum urget), which allows us to criticise, as he did, even books that are in the canon.
I am not sufficiently well versed in Luther to offering a comment here, but the idea that Luther would have synthetic a picture of Jesus from the gospels and then used that to split up the wheat from the chaff in Paul and other NT writings seems scarcely credible, quite autonomously from the major questions this raises about the formation of the canon. Surely Augustine's approach to the centrality of Christ in reading Scripture offers a amend understanding:
Christ, our Moderator, having spoken what He judged sufficient, first by the Prophets, then by his ain lips, and afterwards by the Apostles, has besides produced the scripture, which is chosen canonical, which has paramount authority and to which nosotros yield assent in all matters. (City of God, XI, 3)
As is often the case, Barton reaches for Richard Hooker, 'the nearest the Church of England has to a 'founding' Reformer, which he wasn't' (which raises the question, why not wait to Cranmer…?) to protect ourselves against 'claiming too much for Scripture'. Hooker is often brought into such debates, and the interpretation of his understanding is much disputed. Simply in this key quotation, he hardly appears to be qualifying the claims that Scripture makes on us:
Be information technology in thing of the 1 kind or of the other, what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next where-unto is any any human being can necessarily conclude past force of reason; later on these the voice of the Church succeedeth. (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 5 8.2)
There is no sense here that we are free to disagree with scripture and set bated what nosotros practise not like; rather, Scripture has primary place, and simply where at that place is lack of clarity or dubiety do we demand to attain in turn for 'reason' so 'the vocalism of the Church building'. I think well-nigh thinkers nigh interpretation would now want to reconfigure the relationship between these three, so that 'reason' (how we utilise all the data at hand to make sense of the text) and 'tradition' (how previous generations have made sense of the text) role as the two 'lenses' past which nosotros read (hence the moving picture above of a pair of binoculars with a Bible).
Merely the language Barton uses offers quite a dissimilar moving picture. As a biblical scholar, he seems to describe himself as an autonomous and authoritative amanuensis, continuing above the text and to one side of the Christian tradition in making assessment as to whether this Bible is correct in the things that it claims. In this sense, he standing squarely in the tradition of Liberal Protestant thinking, based on Enlightenment assumptions about the primacy of reason, and including an agreement of the self going back to Descartes. This was the dominant mode of thinking when I get-go studied theology in the 1980s, and the thing I constitute nigh frustrating about this tradition was how uncritical it was nearly its own assumptions in taking a 'disquisitional' approach to the Bible. This is illustrated in the earlier review of Barton's book in theChurch building Times by Anthony Phillips, likewise someone standing four-foursquare in the Liberal Protestant tradition (who happened to be the chaplain of my college in Oxford when I was an undergraduate). He welcomes all of Barton's conclusions—that no OT writings get dorsum across the 9th century BC, that the NT idea-world is 'thoroughly Hellenistic', that Paul's theology 'differs considerably from what later became Christian orthodoxy', that we cannot actually be certain about anything claimed for the gospels, 'let alone in attributing material to Jesus', that the formation of the canon fundamentally changed the nature of the NT documents, and that the existence of textual variants 'rules out any appeal to the exact wording of biblical sayings'. In fact, on every ane of those bug, there is much argue; the positions of Barton that Phillips mentions are highly contested, and in fact scholarship has generally moved against these ideas in the last twoscore years; and I think I would disagree with every one of them.
I call back it was F F Bruce who said, at the beginning of his 1983 bookThe Difficult Sayings of Jesus, that there are sayings which are difficult because they are difficult to understand or make sense of. Merely there are other sayings which are hard because, beingness easy to understand, they are difficult to accept and live out. It does seem that the major problem that the Church of England has with the Bible is of the second kind, rather than the outset.
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