Pastoral Letter #2
to the Members and Friends of Saint John's Church
from
The Rector
The Rev'd Jesse L. A. Parker, Rector of Saint John's Church, Huntingdon, Waverly, Baltimore
Do not be children in your thinking, my friends; be infants in evil, but in your thinking be grown-up.
I Corinthians 14.20
This is the second of several letters to you about the essentials of the Christian Faith and practise. Their purpose is not to answer definitively the "burning questions" of our day, but rather to contribute to our answering them more clearly in this Congregation along with the rest of the Church, by putting before us, as I see them, relevant reflection and teaching.
Most of us realise that there is great debate and division in the Church today about belief, morality, and the nature of authority in the Church. But there is another still more fundamental disagreement, underlying and effecting all these serious questions. This disagreement centres on the nature and authority of the Bible. To a greater or lesser extent this disagreement has always been present in the history of the Church, albeit of considerably less magnitude in most generations past. It is really only today, in our generation, that one can say that the general consensus of belief about the nature of the Word of God, the Holy Bible, among laity, theologians, scholars, bishops and clergy, has utterly collapsed. And along with it has collapsed what underpinned the general consensus about the Faith, morality, and authority.
There are many reasons for what we might call this collapse of faith in the Bible, or for the radical disagreement about its interpretation. A central reason might well be that it is obvious from reading the Bible that the way very many humans view the world has radically changed from the vantage point of the biblical writers. As a simple example, we no longer believe that rain falls through a kind of window in the sky. We would refute the idea that beyond the sky lies one of the great "waters" that God in creation separated with the firmament (the sky), and that there are windows in the firmament that are opened and closed by God or his agents to water the earth, or as means of punishment and reward. If the Bible is "true", and this world-view thus was eternal truth, then what are we to make of the contradictory evidence we now have using our God-given brains? In order to support a "biblical" view of either physical or human history, it is necessary to go to extraordinary, and usually incredible, lengths. One such opinion, upon which some 'creationists' insist, suggests that God really did plant dinosaur bones in the earth just to see if we would believe his Word as we have it in the Bible, as a test of our faith. There is a radical difference between the biblical pre-suppositions about the nature and history of the physical world and what we today consider to be reality. The challenge to belief in the veracity of the Bible's presentation of the creation and history of the physical world begs questions about the veracity of other so-called biblical truths.
Another serious problem for many of us is that there are many internal inconsistencies within the Bible which must be taken into account in any real interpretative effort. For centuries Christian scholars tried to rationalise, or 'harmonise' these indications of varied authorship, points of view, and outright contradiction contained within the texts themselves. For example, how can we have the text of the dialogue of Jesus's prayers at the rock in Gethsamene if there was no one present to hear them, much less hear them from a distance, the disciples all being apart and fast asleep. Where did this information come from? The same can be asked of much of the judicial proceedings against Jesus in the Passion narratives, for which none of the disciples was present. Or, as another example, was the God of Love really willing to slaughter his Egyptian children by the thousands just so the Israelites could get away? Couldn't a real God do better than that to bring about a saviour centuries later? These inconsistencies and seeming contradictions call into serious question the reliability of the Bible as a guide for life for many people.
Another possible reason for dissent from traditional views about Scripture has come as communication with and exposure to other cultures and religions has taken place. More and more people have been willing to see the sacred writings of the Hebrews and early Christians as distinct examples among many of the mythic explanations of creation and the Mystery that is life. Perhaps some might believe these particular writings to bring the Mystery closer to grasp than others, but they might also understand this effect to be their own cultural bias. The study of comparative religions has produced in our day a kind of relativism about 'sacred writings' unknown in the past, when people with different beliefs were considered either blatant heretics, or simply determinedly wrong-headed, and as such needed to be stopped, one way or another. Now we see that there are genuine consistencies and similarities, as well as sharp differences, in the sacred writings of all peoples, and depending upon our values, we find them all more or less fruitful in explicating the Mystery of life. What makes our Bible unique and gives it a claim to pre-immanence?
It is not possible here to list all of the reasons for the contemporary collapse of consensus about the Bible and what it means to us, but it must be acknowledged that the rise of biblical criticism by scholars in the nineteenth century began what has become an avalanche of dissent from traditional models and belief about the Bible. Traditionally accepted and usually unquestioned beliefs about inspiration, authorship, internal inconsistencies, the obvious conflict between the physical world-view of the Bible and that of contemporary readers in every age since, have been skewered by earnest, devout, and pious men and women in an attempt to get at just what can be the unique claim of revelation and authority for Christians. It has been an attempt to get at the truth about the Scripture, and to get the Truth out of Scripture.
Today, it would be naïve in the extreme for us to try to recapture a time before these legitimate questions were forcefully raised by competent and faithful believers. The reality is that much of what was considered foundational, bedrock Christianity has been called into question as the consensus about the nature of the Word of God has collapsed. A call to fundamentalism is not what is needed.
From its rise in the nineteenth century the overwhelming majority of Anglicans, lay and clerical alike, has consistently rejected what we now call "Fundamentalism", the continuing response since the nineteenth century of conservative Protestantism to the challenges raised by honest and distinguished scholarship. While some Anglicans, or even associations of Anglicans, have subscribed to fundamentalist views, these have never been accepted widely in our Churches. This movement began in the late nineteenth century among various Protestant bodies and developed after the First World War (1914-1918), especially in the United States. It arose in reaction to critical theories about evolution, liberal social theology, and biblical criticism.
The stinging arguments between what came to be called the Fundamentalists and the Modernists in Protestantism did in fact over-reach into both Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. Bloody verbal combat about evolution brought to the fore the methods of modern biblical scholarship, which laid heavy support to the Modernist acceptance of evolution as being well within the realm of belief for Christians. The Fundamentalists attacked the very methods of approaching the Bible used by these scholars, insisting on the definitive veracity and inerrancy of every word or line of the biblical texts. In varying degrees and in multi-shadings with new issues and challenges, this is essentially the debate that continues today in the churches and even in our Church.
We need another response. It is time to see the Holy Bible as the Word of God, not the words of God. Now is the time to begin trying to pull out of the Scriptures the over-arching themes, the consistent teachings, the truly eternal foundational principles which are revealed in the Bible, and in many instances, other religions. We can begin here by looking at the fundamental principle of the Bible.
First among them is that of Covenant-Love. This is the great underlying bedrock of all of the Bible's teaching. God is a being trying to reach us, even as He lives in us. God is trying to awaken us to His Presence among and in us. God continually enters into a covenanted relationship with humanity. The covenant is based on the acceptance of God as the only God, on His desire to bring us to fulfilment with Him, on His unimpeachable love for His creation, on the free gift of life He bestows. From Genesis to Apocalypse this is the continual theme: God loves us, wants intercourse with us, and desires our fulfilment. Only fidelity to Him in a covenant of love will make this possible.
Many covenants are recorded in the Bible: God and Adam, God and Noah, God and Abraham, God and Moses, God and David, God and various of the prophets, and God and Jesus-for Christians the definitive and final Covenant (...notice that in the patriarchal society of the Hebrews there is none recorded with women...). All of these are based in God reaching out to humankind for salvation and the grace of fulfilling our lives as His creatures. The nature of these covenants is never singular, just for an individual. They might focus through an individual, but the purpose of the covenants is the revelation of God to all humanity, and of our own immortal nature with and in Him.
In the fullness of time, and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God, various rules and laws were promulgated by men (again, our patriarch-dominated Bible records no women giving laws) to help achieve the ends of the covenant, to help explicate it and enable people to live it. These time and human-conditioned rules and laws formed morals, which shortly formed mores for the organisation, regulation, and ostensibly for the betterment of humanity in its relation to God and other creatures.
The great underlying, and often over-looked, foundational principle for these morals and regulations was Love, that which is of God. Throughout the Bible, this is the primary ethical principle upon which morality and authority were to be based: the love of God for us, and the requirement that we love God and our neighbour in Him. The greatest exposition of this ethical principle in the Hebrew tradition is The Decalogue (The Ten Commandments). In the Christian tradition, these are fulfilled in The Beatitudes ("Blessed are they who...") of Jesus. Both of these are simple statements about the nature of Covenant-Love, upon which all future covenants would expound and upon which much "morality" would come to be based. These statements, these "commandments" seem not to be time-conditioned, but suited to the very nature of humans for eternity. What we have derived from them, in our efforts to live out their great themes, are indeed very much time-conditioned. These are the morals which we see shifting and changing in the course of the Bible's composition, and later in the history of the Church. Equally time-conditioned, we see every generation struggle with adapting their experience, knowledge, and inspiration by the Spirit, to the time-bound morals of their forefathers as they seek to live the eternal ethical principles of their God of Love.
We might well say that ethics are the eternal "verities" of God, as for example in The Decalogue and The Beatitudes, and morals are the time-conditioned applications of those principles in human experience, as, for example, we find them in the Bible: the morality of polygamy, slavery, and double-standard expectations and rules for men compared to women, all existing even through the New Testament period, all very 'moral' indeed. What then is the truly fundamental principle revealed in the Bible about God? God is Love. The truly fundamental morality? Apply love. (Compare that with the mandatory stoning for adulterers in the legalised 'morality' found even in New Testament days, and if the Bible is taken literally, still "on the books". There aren't enough rocks in Palestine to do the job!)
The shape and context of moral questions in our own time about abortion, human sexual relations, genetics, cloning, warfare, macro-economics, and the ecology of our planet would be unimaginable to our forebears. They simply had not the information. What this means is that just as the morality of David's day was different from Saint Joseph's day, so the morality of our parents day was different from their grandparents day (remember hearing about going for a buggy-ride unchaperoned and then having to marry the girl? Was that Morality? You call it. The end was, you were married and she was ruined). And so our ideas of morality, too, will be different from those of other days. What we come to when we accept the time-conditioned nature of the moralities found in the Bible is not some contemporary oh-well-do-as-you-please-if-it-feels-good-to-you notion of morality, but rather the hard-nosed realities and difficulties of accepting personal responsibility for our actions in trying to live the biblical ethic of love.
What determines Christian morality today should be the contemporary implications of the great ethical principles of The Decalogue and The Beatitudes, not merely the interpretations of people who lived hundreds and thousands of years ago without the accumulated wisdom, experience, and knowledge that we have been granted by the Holy Spirit. They did their best in their day with what they had. It was recorded for our benefit by inspiration. Having their witness and example, it is up to us, not our forebears, to apply the biblical principles at our best, following the Holy Spirit in the Church, in this era, with all that we have. This requires courage, searching, testing the spirits, and personal integrity, as well as grounding in our tradition and the knowledge gained in our day. A genuine biblical morality does not ape the conventions of a thousand years ago, but rather continues the progression of the People of God, as recorded in the Scriptures for our benefit, in following the promptings of the Spirit within our own circumstances, knowledge, and under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit. This is what we must do for a modern Christian morality of integrity. A lot of apple-carts of opinion and conventional belief are going to be upset, again: just as they always have, just as Jesus did.
Covenant-Love is the nature of our relationship to God and to each other, since we aren't in this world alone with God. Authority in this relationship comes to those who serve Love, who serve to exemplify Love, serve to magnify Love, serve to make Love known (Christian lay-folk, Bishops, Priests and Deacons, all take note!) This is the truly biblical nature and source of authority. The sacrificial system of the Jews and the hierarchy of their Aaronic and Levitical priesthood was based on these principles, even if they often obfuscated them, as they served to bring their people into communion with the God of Love. We Christians say that they culminated in the sacrificial priesthood of Jesus, Love revealing Love on a Cross, and thus in his life, a clearer authority of the Spirit of Love.
Neat, clean lines of authority and the rule of Law and morality dissolve under the Spirit of Love which blows where it will and leads us where we would not follow (how hard it was for us to relinquish our slaves! How hard it still is; think about current economic practises...) "Love will conquer in the end", we proclaim, and yet we fight it as we try to keep our women imprisoned in financial and emotional dependence, our races separate and controlled, and those who dissent or differ silenced or marginalised.
The authority of Scripture is based not on its words, but on the Word which is revealed and proved in the human lives which make up the history and story of the Bible, and in the history and lives of those in the Church who struggled to allow Christ to live in them. That revealed Word is Love lived. Out of the generations of moralities clearly present in the Bible (so much for one "biblical" morality) what is revealed is the authority of Love, or God Himself, and the authority of a morality which serves Love and it alone.
The great moral questions of our day do not find precise, prescriptive answers in the record of a world long passed from the human scene as presented in the Bible. What they do find there is the revelation of a consistent belief in a God of Love whose Spirit can and will lead us into truth, and whose law is Love, whose Word became Incarnate and is authoritative, not in words, but in applying Love. This is not sentimental, mushy, nor romantic love, but the strong, powerful love which can lead us to a Cross and Paradise.
A few words about the inspiration of the Bible are very much in order. We all know that in 1611 the Holy Bible did not drop from heaven into the be-satinned lap of that "high and mighty Prince", King James the First of England, in beautifully cadenced language already archaic at that time. We know that the Bible is a compilation of documents, of varying kinds, most based upon generations of prior oral tradition. We know that what we call the Bible was not universally recognised as such, more or less, until the time of Saint Athanasius (ca. 296-373). We also know that the Jews, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans all use different versions of the Bible, and call 'canonical' differing lists of Biblical books. What then is inspired?
The men (and women?) who wrote down the oral traditions, those who edited them, those who re-edited them, those who joined them with other versions of the same thing, and the members of the Councils of the Church who argued about the whole matter, were all participating in the on-going inspiration by the Holy Spirit to reveal the biblical ethic of God's Covenant-Love for us. The Holy Spirit, we believe, led people to put before us the sacred record of our dawning realisation of His Love, the story of the way God uses our personal histories and beliefs to reveal in us His purposes, and the struggle and failures of our forbears in faith to live the biblical ethic of Covenant-Love with their God and neighbours. Saint Paul, or perhaps one of his followers, wrote that "all Holy Scripture (meaning in their time, the Old Testament) was written for our learning". We can and should learn from the examples, good and bad, of those who have preceded us in believing in this singular God of Love. The Bible does contain "all things necessary for salvation", that is why the Church hasn't found the need to add to it since the time of Saint Athanasius. But the Holy Spirit has not stopped inspiring us, nor guiding us, nor leading us into the Truth, in and through the Bible's record, and beyond the limits of its recorded experience.
The image of an angel whispering in the ear of the evangelists might convey to simple minds the idea of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the composition of the Bible, but it is hardly sufficient to cover the complex process of interaction between the Holy Spirit, individuals, their society and culture, and the worldview of their time which so colours what they can think and express.
What then do we mean when we say that the Bible is the Word of God? We mean that we find God and His Love for us revealed in it, and in the written record of the struggle of the Jews and the early Church to reckon with Covenant-Love. How, or, is the Bible different from the Sacred Writings of other world religions? It is different for us in that it has specific historical meaning for us, and, we believe in faith, by extension for everyone. We believe that the story of the Jews and the early Church is our story, the human story, that it has universal application, not 'jurisdiction'. We believe that it contains all things necessary for God to save us when we join Him in Covenant-Love. What authority does the Bible have for Christians? It reveals in written words the nature of Love, and the compelling requirements of living a life based on Love. The authority of the Bible is absolute in that it is a reliable record of the struggle of human beings to come to terms with a God of Love. Does it literally mean what it says? Sometimes; often, but not always. Christians mature in the faith and in Love must seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church for its interpretation for our day.
All of this renewal in thought about the Bible has many implications for the Faith, morality, and authority. For one thing, it takes us out of an Old Testament mentality about God, and then also right out of a New Testament mentality. Those mentalities are precisely what we do not want! We do want a mentality informed by them, inspired by them, and nurtured by them, but we also want, and for maturity require, in the Holy Spirit an honest, contemporary mentality informed with the wisdom of the past and the wisdom peculiar to us that our own inspired generation has been granted, and can add to the progress of the People of God. We want the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as we read, learn and inwardly digest the biblical texts.
When we stop looking at the Bible as the words of God Himself, and see it rather as containing in its record the Word of God for us, many supposed certitudes and verities will fall away. What happens as the time-conditioned presuppositions of various centuries are removed, as in the belief that illness is a punishment by God for sin, is that we can then see God revealing His will, in the actions of Christ, in and for our own day as He promised He would. We can begin to see and separate the eternal truths from the vagaries of historical contexts. This is not in any way to denigrate the past-- our progress in the Christian life is dependent upon knowing the past, but rather to see it for what it is, learn from it, and follow the Spirit into the hard choices we must make in our time.
Questions about the nature of God, the meaning of terms like "Son of Man", "Son of God", the divinity of Christ, and the divinisation of humanity all take on new excitement and reality as we come to them today. The hardest part for all of us seems to be in living with the ambiguities which real faith requires. We apparently want or need certitude, to know completely, not faith. (Which really is another way of saying we want to be God. Isn't that Pride? Wasn't someone thrown out of heaven for that, according to the Bible?)
It is not an easy thing to release the comforts of a "settled" world-view, a well-worn set of moral and faith conventions. But the Bible is a record of people doing just that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Noah, Abraham, and Moses leading people out of their physical and moral settings, the prophets recalling Israel to the great ethical principles and away from conventional (convenient?) morality, Jesus ushering in the dawn of the Kingdom of God in his actions and insisting on making Love the measure of morals, the Church living the rites of a New Covenant, and men and women throughout the Bible and the history of the Church slowly evolving the morality and faith of their time.
It is time for us to put away childish and naïve attitudes about the Bible which serve only to prop up positions from the past, or even emotional security and prejudices in the present, and instead to see the Bible for what it is: the inspired record of our dealings with the God of Love in history, the primary source for our knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, the messiah of Israel, the Saviour of the world, and our distinct and peculiar meeting-place with the God of our fathers and mothers in faith. It is time to see the Bible as containing the 'Word of God', with all of its loving authority, but emphatically not as the literal words of God. It is time to be led by the Spirit through the Bible into deeper and broader truth for our selves and others. It is time for us to make our own contributions to allowing the Bible to speak in all its power in our own time, as many Fathers of the Church did, as the great biblical scholars did, as the abolitionists did, as the suffragettes did, and as the great civil rights leaders did, all contradicting the "received" use of the Bible which supported ignorance, servitude, exclusion and oppression. It is time to recognise and even proclaim that there is no one "biblical morality", but a record of moralities evolving in an attempt to live out the biblical ethical principles proven by the experience of centuries of lives to be of the God who is Love.
Scripture, tradition, and reason are our Anglican guides for morality and authority in the Church. Tradition and reason being congruent with the Scriptures, we rest on sure footing. But congruent with what interpretation of the Bible??? Surely that interpretation which, with our limited reason and frail traditions, we see serving Love Himself best. Inspired ideas today about God, morality and authority will have congruence with the past, but will not haul past contexts into the present as authoritative. Fundamentalism and Modernism both be damned. Let us serve the God of Love in Spirit and in Truth, following the example established in the Covenant of Jesus, the Saviour of the world. We can face the faith, moral, and authority questions of our relativistic era with confidence in the Spirit of Truth alive in the Church, alive in Jesus the Christ, alive in our Covenant-Love for our God, and in Him for one another. Lived with fidelity to that Covenant, our Faith, our morality, our authority, and our credibility will be established on the firm foundation of Scripture.
JLAP 