In order to do this, I want you to cast your mind back to your encounters with Holy Writ. Perhaps the word Bible conjures up images of an old family bible, a dusty Authorised Version in a charity shop, or a Good News Bible with its 1970s style logo that you encountered at Sunday School. Whatever your last encounter with the Bible as an artifact entailed, it may have been, and probably was, quite a marginal event in your life; something that may have evoked a sense of the past, even nostalgia for another age, but probably did not result in a sudden wish to thumb through the pages, or read it from cover to cover. If it did I am pleased, but I think that for most British people the idea of the Bible at best indicates a heritage object, and at worst stands for sabbatarian moralistic dullness.
The apparent disengagement,
even disenchantment, with the Bible marks us off from our predecessors. At the
time of the Reformation vernacular scripture was very exciting and peasants had
to be banned from reading it in case they got ideas above their station, or at
least it was that fear which plagued Henry VIII's thought. English society after the Reformation
was built on scripture: it was painted on church walls, and referred to in
poetry, prose and legislation.
The printed word in the form of the vernacular Bible was the
thing that set the sixteenth and seventeenth century alight, even if the main
issue was the footnotes and commentary rather than the text itself. Such was
the feeling of liberation that the vernacular scriptures gave to people, that
they were willing to risk their lives to obtain them.
Even when non-conformist disenchantment with
the established church was at its height in the mid-nineteenth century, scripture remained a key factor in the
English identity: we were a people of the ‘good book’, and scripture remained
relevant to many who only had a very marginal relationship with church. It was
precisely that world that the 1944 Education Act supposed when it obliged
community schools to offer non-denominational RE and worship: the Christianity
of the bible.
From 1538 to 1944 it was
assumed that the vernacular scriptures were at the core of our nation’s life.
We were the people of the Elizabethan Settlement who felt that they were God’s
chosen people knew that scripture was central to their cultural and religious
identity.
Yet much has changed in our
present society, and this is not a matter of simply being unfamiliar with the
stories of the bible. Many primary school children still learn about Noah and
his ark, Moses and his plagues, and Mary and Joseph trooping along to Bethlehem.
In fact many of them know these stories better than us. The problem is not that
the contents are completely unfamiliar, but that they are considered to be
irrelevant.
There is a sense in which
biblical narratives have moved from being the narrative of life to being certain
narratives of childhood which feature alongside Snow White, Robin Hood and Toy
Story. Fascinating though scripture may be for a good yarn, or as a historical
artifact for A-Level students, what it is essentially lacks is any real sense
of meaning for the lives of the individuals that study it. The bible is seen as
fragmented stories without any sense of overall scheme or meaning. Earlier
generations might have been convinced that it had its meaning in morality, but
this looks increasingly unlikely when one considers stories of adultery,
polygamy, and ramming tent pegs into the skulls of others.
The problem is not just
about cultural plurality, and that there are other scriptures on offer, but
that scripture often seems irrelevant even to those who consider themselves to
be Christians. ‘This is the word of the Lord’, we confidently affirm after we
have heard about God’s wrath over Saul sparing some Philistine’s lives, or
after a very difficult reading that has attempted to excuse David from killing
his son Absolom. Is this really the word of the Lord?
So what then to do with the
Bible? Why consider it to be the ‘good book’? To claim that the Bible is
primarily about putting forward a good non-doctrinal code for living, which no
doubt was in the minds of the creators of the 1944 education act, will not do. Are
the good people of England to lay waste to lands without mercy? Are they to
tell dubious lies to thwart their political enemies, marry several times, and
seduce other people’s wives?
To regard the Bible, and
indeed Christianity, as simply providers of morality is to debase them both,
and rather ignore the point that faith in God is central to Christianity, and morality a corollary. I want to pause and
rewind, and consider the elephant in the room that so many ignore: what
is it that traditionally made scripture so important to Christians, and so why
should we care about its seeming irrelevance to this generation?
The answer lies in doctrine.
In order to establish why the Bible might be important we have to ask what it
is there for. Traditionally this is where systematic theology began. Read Aquinas and
you will find him start with the idea of Christianity as a revealed religion;
look to Calvin’s Institutes, and there you will find an explanation in the
first book of why God has chosen to reveal himself to humanity.
For a more modern example,
consider the great German theologian Karl Barth for whom theology is about the
study of God’s revelation of himself. Scripture is not that properly revelation
itself, but is the channel through which we learn of the revelation of God in
the person of Christ. The person of God is communicated through the
incarnation, which is passed on to us through scripture, and explained through
the inadequate exegesis of persons such as myself.
The missing piece of
theological data in our society is the idea that the Bible is revelation: it is
about God telling us who he is. To say this is to claim that despite its
complexities and contradictions, scripture is about an attempt to record God’s
revelation of himself to humanity in history. As such it has a structure
of creation, fall, and redemption: a gradual call back to faithfulness to God,
which culminates in the life of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit, as a
token of the world to come. This meta-narrative is the
only one that will allow Christians to understand the reason why scripture
should be significant for them. If we break it down into small chunks and
stories, we are rather in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees.
Without a sense of the
revelation, it is rather difficult to see what sense it makes to tell the story
of Noah and his ark. As entertaining as songs and lists of animals may be for
children, it is little more than a nursery story unless it is considered in
terms of a greater story in which it marks the first point of redemption: the
promise that God has chosen not to destroy what he has made, even though it is
fallen. Without a meta-narrative of redemption the only moral to draw from the
story of Noah is that it is good to have a boat if you should find yourself inundated
with water: something vital to note if you live by the sea, but not perhaps that
earth shatteringly interesting.
A critical awareness of the
Bible is not fundamentally threatening to this idea of revelation. To claim
that St Luke was primarily concerned with Jesus as a revelation of God is
fairly obvious. He was not primarily interested in recording every last detail
of Jesus’ life like some dreadful episode of Big Brother. Instead his view of
himself as a historian was theological: he had to convey what Jesus revealed
about God. A good deal of time and
energy is spent on rather fruitless debates about finding the historical Jesus
or sorting out the truth from the dross within scripture, with one side arguing
that every detail is right, and the other seeming to want to carve it up. The danger in all this is
that we forget what scripture is meant to be for: a faithful witness to the
revelation of God.
So today we come to scripture as something far greater than a good and moral book. Instead we come to this book because in its narratives we find the revelation of God.
So today we come to scripture as something far greater than a good and moral book. Instead we come to this book because in its narratives we find the revelation of God.
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