Inwardly Digesting God's Word

I've been waiting for this Sunday to roll around for a long time. The reason is the Collect of the Day that Fr. Kunz just read to us. It is one of my favorites, and it offers me an opportunity to say a few things to you about the role the Bible plays in the Anglican tradition. In case you missed the Collect the first time around, here it is again:

These words were written in 1549 by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who gave us The Book of Common Prayer. They were written to emphasize the belief of the reformers of the church that the Bible needed to be put on the same footing as the sacrament of the Lord's Supper and to make the point that the Bible is the touchstone or reference point for all wisdom. This was done to correct a situation inherited by the reformers, namely that the venerable practice of reading the whole Bible through in a year of public worship had become, "altered, broken, and neglected."

As is often the case when there is a problem to be fixed, some reformers went too far in the direction of restoring the Bible and began to emphasize the Bible above all else to the neglect of the sacramental life of the church. Indeed, the standard American version of Christianity is derived from a Calvinism that wanted to create a whole system of religion - and even civil government - based on the Bible. Thus, as this idea has become transformed over the years, we hear about people "preaching Jesus" or "preaching the Bible" as though these were ends in themselves. We hear of people placing great stock in their ability to memorize and recall instantly many passages from the Bible, usually totally out of the context that would reveal the true meaning of the passage. And, most pernicious of all, we hear of instances in which the Bible is used as a weapon by people who invoke carefully selected passages - while ignoring other passages - to stop others from doing what they want to do, or, as was the case with slavery, to justify what they themselves wanted to do.

In the Anglican tradition we are reminded that Jesus did not come to preach the Bible or the New Testament. In his very first sermon he interpreted the book of Isaiah saying that its prophecy had been fulfilled. People sat up and paid attention not because he preached the Bible, but because he preached "good news."

On this campus - as well as abroad in this country - we have many examples of people confusing the good news of Jesus Christ with the means by which this good news is communicated. This leads to new form of idolatry that we may call "bibliolotry" - the sin of worshipping the text.

The Puritans - the ancestors of many of our non-denominational Bible study groups and churches - claimed an infallible understanding of the mind of God as they saw it in the Bible. Anglicans find this just as hard to accept as the Roman Catholic claim to know the mind of God in the "magisterium", or teaching authority of the church. We Anglicans are not so certain about what is in and on the mind of God, except that we are convinced that God loves us and expects us to love one another. So, instead, we locate ourselves in the middle between an exclusive reliance on the Bible and an exclusive reliance on the teaching and traditions of a hierarchical church.

It is the genius of the English reformation, which resulted in our Episcopal tradition, that the importance of God's word - the Bible - is held in balance with the importance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Take a look at the two major headings in your service bulletin and you will see a manifestation of this balance.

In this balance we {+pray+{ the Bible. The Book of Common Prayer is, in fact, a prayer book based on the Bible. It is full of the Bible to such an extent that when we pray from The Book of Common Prayer we pray from the Bible. The point of this is that by reading the Bible and by praying it, we do no so much discover specific rules for living as we discover God's redeeming loving grace, which is another kind of guide for living, one that is lasting and immutable. We believe that a Bible that is used as the only standard for belief and behavior will eventually grow stale and lose its authority. We believe that that the big picture is far more important that the details seen close up. That's why we emphasize God's redeeming love made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ instead of emphasizing some of those mean-spirited passages that some would have us focus on almost exclusively. Whenever we are faced with a choice between an understanding of the Bible that emphasizes God's love and compassion and one that emphasizes oppression, hatred, and mean-spiritedness, we believe that such a choice is really a false choice and we opt always for love.

This begs the question of how we will hand on our Anglican tradition of using the Bible as a touchstone for our faith and life. I think the answer lies in having a clear picture in our minds of what this tradition actually looks like. And so, I offer four guiding principles of Anglican biblical interpretation based on the work of Episcopal biblical scholar William Countryman.

The first is that the Bible is our fundamental source of the proclamation of God's love. Contrary to Medieval Catholicism, we expect to hear in and through it something conclusive and constructive about our relationship with God and with one another. We believe that whenever the church tries to command assent beyond the clear word of scripture, it overreaches itself.

The second is that the Bible is complex and demands interpretation. Contrary to extreme Calvinism - as we see it manifested in some groups on this campus - we do not expect it to speak directly to us without mediation, for to do so would allow interoperations based on a plethora of individual whims and prejudices. We are thus always engaged in a {+collective+{ process of interpretation and understanding - of reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting what it has to say to us within the context of a living Christian community. We believe that the Bible was inspired by God, but we do not believe that it was dictated by God as literal truth in every instance. Consequently, we believe that anyone who claims to represent the Bible directly, without interpretation, should automatically be suspected of using scripture as a cover for his or her own agenda.

The third principle is that God's truth cannot be grasped in a single moment and that God's truth is continually revealed to us throughout history. Contrary to all comprehensive and totalizing theological traditions, we expect that we will have to discern God's will for us in our own age, occasion by occasion, without the benefit of an infallible authority. Not even scripture can spare us the necessity of this hard work. And so, we believe that humility is the only credible stance for theology.

The fourth principle - and perhaps the most important one - is that God's written word exists for the sake of bringing us new life. Our world is inundated with forces of despair, both secular and religious. Against them we assert that the Bible is a book of life and hope and that it points to love and compassion. Thus, we believe that a reading of scripture that does not offer hope and healing to the world can never be authoritative. Said another way, a reading of scripture that oppresses people and suggests that they are cut off from God's redeeming love must be rejected.

So, for Anglicans the Bible read truly is known by the hope it gives and the love it shows. Those who use the Bible as a weapon and a club to condemn and to create insiders versus outsiders only succeed in proving that they have seen the trees but not the forest, that they have missed the whole point.

As I said earlier, we Anglicans don't memorize the Bible and focus on its minutiae. Rather, we pray the Bible and we pray it in community. That's why our liturgy - our common prayer - is so important to us. The Bible is for us not instruction so much as it is a living tradition of prayer. A good example of this is Handel's Messiah, in which we have the life of Christ made up largely of Old Testament texts used allusively. Handel knew that such an approach would be very familiar to his largely Anglican audience.

So, with open minds, as well as open hearts, let us read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the holy scriptures so that we will know truly the transforming power of the good news of Jesus Christ in our lives - the good news of compassion and love, of redemption and wholeness for all, to the end that this knowledge of Jesus' good news will enable us to discern the course of our lives, and, indeed, transform them.

Amen.