NT Wright - Scripture and the Authority of God

The nature of scripture and in what way it is authoritative is one of the key debates within the church. As part of my own journey of understanding I have taken to reading on the matter. Here are the highlights i made from the work of NT Wright called 'Authority of Scripture. 

Wright's approach to narrative theology (see highlights from p. 122-126) have been transformative in my own approach to scripture and only served to confirm some of my own growing convictions in this regard. 
 
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In particular, the question of how the Bible can be ‘authoritative’ has echoed through a thousand recent debates in the life of the worldwide church. We have only to mention the question of sexual ethics to see at once how important, and yet how difficult, the question of biblical authority can be.

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Whether Lutheran or Reformed, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist or Methodist, or whether the newer Pentecostal churches, all officially accord scripture the central place in their faith, life, and theology.

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If we asked, ‘Is it true that Jesus died on a cross?’ we normally would mean, ‘Did it really happen?’ But if we asked, ‘Is the parable of the Prodigal Son true?’ we would quickly dismiss the idea that ‘it really happened’; that is simply not the sort of thing parables are. We would insist that, in quite another sense, the parable is indeed ‘true’ in that we discover within the narrative a picture of God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience.

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‘What’s true for you’ may not be the same as ‘what’s true for me’; the ‘social construction of reality’ may be very different from one society to another. This cultural move, which would have been incomprehensible to many people until quite recently, now appears so obvious to people in our world that, paradoxically, it has itself become one of the absolute and unquestionable truths of our day.

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Among many strands which came together in that cultural explosion was a new way of looking at the problem of evil, which had been highlighted particularly by the wars of religion in the seventeenth century and by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Suppose, ran the proposal, that the world is indeed divided into two, with God upstairs and a world of pure causation downstairs. If that is so, God isn’t in charge of the daily running of the material world, and he doesn’t intervene into it. If he were, and did, then Lisbon (today we might add ‘and Auschwitz’) would seem incomprehensible. But if we leave God out of the equation, and propose that he will instead provide spiritual solace in the present and a spiritual hope for the future, detached from the material world, then the world belongs to, and is in the hands of … the human race.

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The greatest of the Enlightenment-based nations, the United States of America, has been left running a de facto world empire which gets richer by the minute as much of the world remains poor…

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A good example, relevant for our current questions, is the fierce debate between ‘essentialists’ and ‘constructivists’ on the question of homosexuality. The former have insisted on a more or less modernist position about the objective ‘identity’ of the individual, as consisting in his or her sexual ‘orientation’ or preference, and in pursuit of this have continued a relentless quest for a ‘gay gene’. The latter advocate a thoroughly postmodern, free-floating account of sexuality in which the choice of types of activity is made as one goes along, without any need to explain, excuse, or vindicate one’s behaviour in terms of any external norms, objective reality, or assumption of ‘identity’. This debate plays through in a different key some, though not all, of the old discussions, as between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. But how might all this relate, if at all, to the Bible?

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In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world? These are the questions to which the rest of this little book is devoted.

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Those of a Protestant or evangelical viewpoint will emphasize the authority of scripture; those from a Catholic context will make a strong case for tradition; those who think of themselves as liberals will emphasize reason.

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We are in uncharted waters. And they are a lot deeper than some contemporary debaters seem to realize.

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This happens secretly in the case of the so-called conservative, who may well choose to ignore the ecclesial, ecumenical, sacramental, and ecological dimensions of Paul’s soteriology, in order to highlight and privilege a doctrine of justification or ‘personal salvation’ which owes its real shape to a blend of Reformation, Enlightenment, romantic, and existentialist influences.

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I merely note that I have found help – albeit sometimes by being forced to disagree! – in a wide variety of books. Rather than clutter up the text at this point, I have listed them in the Appendix.

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All of these examples, and many more besides which one might easily think of, are ways in which the Bible does in fact work, does in fact exercise authority. This strongly suggests that for the Bible to have the effect it seems to be designed to have it will be necessary for the church to hear it as it is, not to chop it up in an effort to make it into something else. To this we shall return.

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When Revelation speaks of God and the Lamb receiving all power, glory, honour, and so forth, it is because through the Lamb’s victory the whole of creation is being brought back into its intended harmony, rescued from evil and death.

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This is fine as far as it goes. But in scripture itself God’s purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world.

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A fully Christian view of the Bible includes the idea of God’s self-revelation but, by setting it in a larger context, transforms it. Precisely because the God who reveals himself is the world’s lover and judge, rather than its absentee landlord, that self-revelation is always to be understood within the category of God’s mission to the world, God’s saving sovereignty let loose through Jesus and the Spirit and aimed at the healing and renewal of all creation.

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The monastic lectio divina, the evangelical ‘quiet time’, and the increasingly popular ‘Ignatian’ meditation all provide examples.

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Those individuals and churches which have ‘heard God speaking’ through a passage of scripture, and have acted accordingly, tend to be those where division is most apparent.

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Without the problem of evil, there would be no need to speak of, pray for, or invoke God’s Kingdom or authority; it would be apparent as a present reality.

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This fresh, gracious, and forgiving purpose, aimed at new creation, is put into effect through the renewal of the covenant. Our question can then be sharpened up: what was, and is, the role of scripture within this divine purpose?

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When he spoke of the scripture needing to be fulfilled (e.g., Mark 14:49), he was not simply envisaging himself doing a few scattered and random acts which corresponded to various distant and detached prophetic sayings; he was thinking of the entire storyline at last coming to fruition, and of an entire world of hints and shadows now coming to plain statement and full light.

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In the early church, the ‘word’ offered both fulfilment of Old Testament promises and a call to accept the Spirit’s life-changing power and authority in the present.

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The earliest apostolic preaching was neither a standard Jewish message with Jesus added on at the end, nor a free-standing announcement of a new religion cut off from its Jewish roots, but rather the story of Jesus understood as the fulfilment of the Old Testament covenant narrative, and thus as the euangelion, the good news or ‘gospel’ – the creative force which called the church into being and shaped its mission and life. It was this biblical story, rather than some other (that of human empire, say, or of individual spiritual self-discovery) that provided the interpretative matrix within which the accomplishment of Jesus made the sense it did.

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Paul himself sums up the hermeneutical tension which covenant renewal has set up: God’s righteousness is revealed ‘apart from the Law’, although ‘the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it’ (Romans 3:21).

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There is now no holy land: in Paul’s reinterpretation of the Abrahamic promises in Romans 4:13, God promises Abraham not just one strip of territory but the whole world, anticipating the renewal of all creation as in Romans 8. Perhaps most important, the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been abolished (throughout Paul, and summarized in Ephesians 2:11–22). These conclusions were reached by the early Christians, not by a cavalier process of setting aside bits of the Old Testament which they found unwelcome, but through a deep-rooted sense, worked out theologically and practically, that all of that scripture had been summed up in Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:17, itself summing up the message of much of the book; Romans 3:31; 2 Corinthians 1:20) and that now God’s project of new covenant and new creation had begun, necessarily taking a new mode. John sums it up in a sentence which has often teased commentators. ‘The law’, he writes, ‘was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (1:17). Should we understand him to mean ‘but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’, or should it be ‘and’? The rest of the gospel suggests that John deliberately left it ambiguous.

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The early Christian use of the Old Testament reflects exactly this double-edged position. Precisely because of the emphasis on the unique accomplishment of Jesus Christ, the Old Testament could not continue to have exactly the same role within the Christian community that it had had before. Christianity does not repeat the earlier stages of the story, any more than it repeats the unique achievement of Jesus; it celebrates and builds upon them. From the start, in the ministry of Jesus and the work of Paul, we find constant reference to the fact that with the fulfilment comes a new moment in the story, a new act in the play (see pages 121–127).

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Nor, for that matter, do the pragmatic, rule-of-thumb conclusions of some other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who saw the ‘civil’ and ‘ceremonial’ laws being abolished while the ‘moral’ ones remained, ignoring the fact that most ancient Jews would not have recognized such a distinction.

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This has nothing to do with the declaration of an arbitrary or ‘controlling’ ethic, a standard imposed from without by constricting or bullying authority in the early church. It has everything to do with understanding human renewal as the beginning, the pointer towards, and even the means of, God’s eventual eradication of evil from the world and the bringing to birth of the new creation itself. Thus, so the early Christians believed, God’s word was at work by the Spirit within the community, to put Jesus’ achievement into effect and thus to advance the final Kingdom. We can summarize it like this: the New Testament understands itself as the new covenant charter, the book that forms the basis for the new telling of the story through which Christians are formed, reformed and transformed so as to be God’s people for God’s world. That is the challenge the early Christians bequeath to us as we reconsider what ‘the authority of scripture’ might mean in practice today.

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People sometimes suggest, indeed, that the process of canonization is the sign that the church itself was the final authority. This proposal is sometimes made by Catholic traditionalists asserting the supremacy of the church over the Bible, and sometimes by postmodern sceptics asserting that the canon itself, and hence the books included in it, were all part of a power play for control within the church and social respectability in the world.

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The church’s hold on the Jewish sense of the scriptural story was hard to maintain. Over the next few centuries, with the gradual loss of the Israel-dimension in the church’s understanding of itself and its scriptures, the notion of scriptural authority became detached from its narrative context, and thereby isolated from both the gift and the goal of the Kingdom.

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As Telford Work has demonstrated, many theologians, not least Augustine, remained passionately committed to God’s work through scripture in bringing people to faith, to holiness and to salvation. But we miss, in some of the developing tradition, the dynamic notion of scripture as the vehicle of God’s Kingdom coming to birth in the world. The notion of ‘authority’ which we have scetched in terms of ‘God at work powerfully through scripture to bring about the Kingdom, by calling and shaping a new covenant people and equipping its leaders to be teachers and preachers’, became gradually flattened out into two things in particular. First, scripture came to be regarded as a ‘court of appeal’, the source-book or rule-book from which doctrine and ethics might be deduced and against which innovations were to be judged. Second, scripture was used for lectio divina, the practice through which individual readers could hear God speaking to them personally, nourishing their own spirituality and devotion.

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At its heart, allegory (already extensively employed by the first-century Jewish philosopher and statesman Philo, who like Origen lived in Alexandria) reads the surface text as a code through which hidden meanings may be discerned. It is partially anticipated in at least some of Jesus’ parables, though the extent to which Jesus himself intended the details of his stories to be pressed into such use continues to be debated. The apocalyptic scenes in Daniel and other books of the Old Testament are explained allegorically within the texts themselves. Paul uses explicit allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament in Galatians 4:21–31; so does 1 Peter 3:20–22. Perhaps the best-known example of subsequent allegorical reading of scripture is the use of…

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This is where we see a tension developing between authority and interpretation: how far can a reinterpretation of the text go before it ceases to carry the authority which was…

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I suspect that the New Testament writers, faced with the later allegorizers, would want to ask them certain questions. Why did they find those texts problematic? Did they not realize that the Bible is more than simply a repository of moral examples and dogmatic teaching?

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cases at least, human wickedness is allowed to be seen as what it is in order that God’s dealings with Israel may be properly understood? Thus, for instance, Judah’s conviction for incest with Tamar (Genesis 38) is the missing link between his arrogant behaviour in 37:26, proposing to sell Joseph into slavery, and his humble volunteering to be Joseph’s slave in place of Benjamin (44:18–34). The horrible tale of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 was never intended as any kind of moral example; it was part of the writer’s repeated argument about how chaotic life is when there is no king. David’s adultery with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11) sets the tone in court which is followed by Amnon’s rape of the other Tamar (2 Samuel 13), which in turn precipitates Absalom’s rebellion and David’s disgrace (2 Samuel 15). These passages, though hardly ‘improving stories’ in the sense of cosy moral tales, nevertheless do not need in fact to be read allegorically in order for their powerful theological…

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Allegory was in one sense, as is sometimes claimed, a way of ‘saving the Bible for the church’, in the sense that with the other reading strategies available at the time the less savoury passages of the Old Testament might have been jettisoned altogether. And of course the allegorical readers always…

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The allegorical exegesis offered by some of the early interpreters was continued and developed in a highly refined and imaginative way through the medieval period. Theologians came to distinguish four different senses of scripture:…

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However, we should not miss the point that is often made today about the medieval world-view. We who live on the near side of the Enlightenment and all its scientific revolutions have inherited a sense of a disconnected and fragmented world, and are having to learn with great difficulty – for instance, in our ecological care of the planet – that things are more interconnected than they had seemed.

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Not without a cost, however. As even apologists for the medieval period will admit, once allegory had taken over, almost anything could be ‘proved’ from scripture, resulting in fantastic and highly speculative theories. Sometimes these are simply flights of fancy, as when the twelfth-century Hugh of St Victor suggested that Noah’s Ark, being three hundred cubits long, pointed to the cross – since the Greek letter T, in the shape of a cross, represents the number three hundred. (This was part of the medieval determination to see every aspect of the Noah story as a foreshadowing of events in the life of Jesus, in line with the hint in 1 Peter 3:20–22; famously, even Noah’s drunkenness was included, and became the subject of many great paintings.)

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The question must always be asked, whether scripture is being used to serve an existing theology or vice versa. Concerns like this contributed to the complex set of circumstances which generated the sixteenth-century Reformation.

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This meant that anything which could be regarded as well established in ecclesial tradition, even if there was nothing about it in the Bible, and even if it appeared to go against some of the things which the Bible itself said, could be taught as authoritative and backed up with clever allegorical exegesis. (The perpetual virginity of Mary would be a good example.) The status of tradition, and its relation to scripture, has remained a matter of controversy to this day, not only between Roman Catholics and Protestants but also within Roman Catholicism itself.

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The Reformers’ sola scriptura slogan was part of their protest against perceived medieval corruptions. Go back to scripture, they insisted, and you will find the once-for-all death of Jesus but not the Mass, justification by faith but not purgatory, the power of God’s word but not that of the pope. Their insistence that scripture contains all things necessary to salvation (a point which remains loud and clear in the formularies of most of the churches which take their origins from the Reformation) was part of their protest against the Roman insistence on belief in dogmas like transubstantiation as necessary articles of faith.

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It was never a way of saying that one had to believe every single thing in the scriptures in order to be saved. Rather, it provided, on the one hand, a statute of limitations: nothing beyond scripture is to be taught as needing to be believed in order for one to be saved.

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The Reformers thus set scripture over against the traditions of the church; the recovery of the literal sense over against the lush growth of the three other senses; and the right of ordinary Christians to read scripture for themselves over against the protection of the sacred text by the Latin-reading elite.

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It was with these ordinary people in mind that some of the great Reformers became translators, the best known being Luther in Germany and Tyndale in England. Both men exercised a lasting influence, not only on Christian thinking but on the languages of their people in the subsequent centuries.

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It is important to notice a key difference in meaning between one of the Reformers’ central technical terms and the way in which the same word has been used in the modern period. When the Reformers insisted on the ‘literal’ sense of scripture, they were referring to the first of the four medieval senses. Though, as we saw, this would often refer to the historical meaning and referent of scripture (when scripture says that Solomon’s men built the Temple, for example, the literal sense is that Solomon’s men built the Temple),

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This is one of those many points at which the later appeal to the rhetoric of the Reformation needs to be scrutinized rather carefully. Today, when people say ‘literalist’, they often mean ‘fundamentalist’. The Reformers’ stress on the literal sense by no means supports the kind of position thereby implied. To this we shall return.

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When the Council of Trent, called by Rome to answer the Reformers’ charges and proposals, went to work on the question of scripture and tradition, it came up with formulae which remain part of Roman Catholic doctrine and catechesis to this day. Scripture and tradition, declared Trent (Session 4.8; 8 April 1546), were to be received as of equal authority. The Second Vatican Council, four hundred years later, stated that scripture and tradition ‘flow from the same divine wellspring, merge into a unity and move toward the same goal’. It has always been the Protestant position that scripture must remain as the test of which traditions are genuine and true interpretations of scripture (this is what, for example, virtually all churches believe in the case of the Nicene Creed) and which ones represent distortions and corruptions. This debate continues.

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For our present purposes, which are to clarify and expound the way in which scripture can be authoritative, we should note that as soon as we start talking about ‘scripture and tradition’ as two sources of authority we are in fact using the word ‘authority’ itself in a subtly different way.

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But the main point to note from this glance at the sixteenth century is that the Reformers’ insistence on the authority of scripture made several important points, but left many other matters open for further discussion. Of one thing we may be absolutely sure. If the Reformers could return and address us today, they would not say, ‘We got it all right; you must follow our exegesis and theology and implement it precisely as it stands’. What they would say is, ‘You must follow our method: read and study scripture for all it’s worth, and let it do its work in the world, in and through you and your churches’.

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Tertullian famously asked, at the end of the second century, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ – in other words, what has unaided philosophical reason to do with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ?

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This question, of how much one could know without special revelation, burst into flame again in the early Reformation, with Luther angrily confronting Erasmus over the question of whether human will and understanding are capable of grasping the gospel, or whether original sin has so darkened the mind as to leave it, despite some elements of insight, enslaved, unable to help itself, and always in need of grace and revelation.

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The Enlightenment (whose leading thinkers include Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and Kant) was, in fact, for the most part an explicitly anti-Christian movement.

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In particular, the Enlightenment insisted on ‘reason’ as the central capacity of human beings, enabling us to think and act correctly; it therefore regarded human beings as by nature rational and good. Reason was to be the arbiter of which religious and theological claims could be sustained (note Kant’s famous work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). This meant that many Enlightenment thinkers tended towards atheism.

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This programme continues to this day: it is only recently that it has been widely acknowledged, for instance, that the phrase ‘son of God’ in many New Testament writings does not automatically mean ‘the second person of the Trinity’, but is a title which, to a first-century Jew, would have carried messianic rather than ‘divine’ overtones (so that the high Christology which the New Testament undoubtedly asserts is to be understood within that framework).

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Second, however, from the eighteenth century onward, several historians working from within the Enlightenment project made deliberate attempts to demonstrate that such readings would in fact undermine central Christian claims. They would prove, it was asserted, that the Bible could be faulted on matters of history (it says certain things happened, but they did not), on matters of science (it said God created the world in seven days, but we now know it happened through a long period of evolution), and on matters of morality (it displays God telling the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites and Amalekites, for example). These are all part of the standard attack mounted against Christianity from within modernism as a whole.

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The Enlightenment thus offered to the world a new analysis of, and solution to, the problem of evil, standing in radical tension to those offered in classical Judaism and Christianity. The real problem of evil, it proposed, is that people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how and create the social and political conditions to make it happen. The biblical scholarship which grew up within the Enlightenment world went along for the ride, reducing the act of God in Jesus Christ to mere moral teaching and example.

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The point was this: if Enlightenment progress is solving the problem of evil, all Jesus needs to have done is to point the way, to show people what love and compassion look like. Being reasonable, people will follow his example. If they do not, they need more teaching in reason.

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Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be ‘biblical’ Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning ‘Kingdom of God’ into ‘the hope for heaven after death’ and treating Jesus’ death, at the most, as the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future – leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining, of the world.

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(This political agenda, by the way, was of course a vital part of the Enlightenment project: kick ‘God’ upstairs, make religion a matter of private piety, and then you can organize the world to your own advantage. That has been the leitmotif of the Western world ever since, the new philosophy which has so far sustained several great empires, launched huge and horribly flawed totalitarian projects, and left the contemporary world thoroughly confused. But all this must wait for another day.)

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The one thing it is no longer possible to do is to claim that ‘modern biblical studies’ have come to the kind of fixed and unalterable conclusions that used to be taught in colleges and seminaries – an important point, since many who now debate major issues in the life of the church were educated in that way, and their reading and use of scripture has been, to say the least, significantly skewed as a result.

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In fact, those who refuse the attempt to think freshly about the Bible are often shutting themselves up inside one particular kind of post-Enlightenment Western world-view – the ‘fundamentalist’ one, in which all kinds of things in the gospels and Paul have been screened out, despite the claim to be ‘biblical’.

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The extraordinary and sometimes horrible excesses of behaviour on both sides in the localized social and cultural politics of North America must of course be borne in mind during debate. So, too, must the oddity (as it seems to an outside observer) that those who are most keen on ‘conservative’ Christianity on some issues often choose to ignore what the Bible says about loving one’s enemies and about economic justice, and choose to forget that many of the earliest and finest exponents of Christian scripture – the early church fathers – were firmly opposed to the death penalty.

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But this problem ought to look very different (though this has not yet been widely noticed) in the light of the detailed and careful work of the last half-century in highlighting and exploring the historical and cultural context, Jewish and Greco-Roman alike, of early Christianity.

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Many of the old ‘consensus’ positions (e.g., that Paul could not have written Ephesians and Colossians; that forms of gospel tradition which exhibited ‘Jewish’ characteristics must be later developments than those which matched Hellenistic ones) grew straight out of the Enlightenment’s rationalistic Protestantism, which screened out, among other things, both the Jewishness of the New Testament and anything that smacked of ‘early Catholicism’.

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Which is the bottom line: ‘proving the Bible to be true’ (often with the effect of saying, ‘So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought’), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear?

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Modernism and its readings have, as I have already suggested, been simultaneously under a different kind of attack, from the postmodern movement. Postmodernism, by unmasking the power interests latent in texts and movements, not least those of the last two hundred years, has offered a sustained ideological challenge not only to many ancient and modern texts but also to modernism itself – particularly the economic and cultural hegemony of the Western world which rests on the achievements of the Enlightenment. We have seen all kinds of fresh readings of biblical texts – feminist, post-Holocaust, ethnic, post-colonial, and so forth – all of which have discovered passages which have been used, and which some have suggested were intended to be used, as ‘texts of terror’, that is, weapons of oppression or worse.

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All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) sympathy. This is where a good deal of the Western church now finds itself. The fact that this position is merely assumed, not usually spelled out, makes it all the more potent, since postmodernity is currently what ‘feels right’ in Western culture, and does not open itself to challenge by coming out into the open.

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Much criticism, both modern and postmodern, has thus left the church, after years of highly funded research in seminaries and colleges, less able to use the Bible in anything like the way in which Jesus and the earliest Christians envisaged. This is the reason for the biblical vacuum at the heart of many of the so-called mainline churches on both sides of the North Atlantic and elsewhere. And this is why we are reduced to shouting matches about biblical authority. But supposing there might be a better way?

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As I shall suggest presently, a narratival and ‘critical realist’ reading of scripture offers a way forward through the postmodern morass and out the other side – a task that appears the more urgent as the great world empire of our own day proceeds to impose its economic, political, military, and cultural will on the world, while the proponents of radical positions in today’s ‘culture wars’ remain impotent to stop it.

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Rather, scripture is the bookshelf; tradition is the memory of what people in the house have read and understood (or perhaps misunderstood) from that shelf; and reason is the set of spectacles that people wear in order to make sense of what they read

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We could put it like this. ‘Experience’ is what grows by itself in the garden. ‘Authority’ is what happens when the gardener wants to affirm the goodness of the genuine flowers and vegetables by uprooting the weeds in order to let beauty and fruitfulness triumph over chaos, thorns, and thistles.

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Misreadings of the ‘Right’ To begin with, I offer the many positions regularly thought of as ‘right wing’ which are based on, or involve, a serious misreading of scripture:    A. The openly dualistic ‘rapture’ reading of 1 Thessalonians 4 (as in the hugely popular and blatantly right-wing American Left Behind series), which ironically lives in close symbiosis with (B) below.    B. The explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of biblical promises.    C. The support of slavery. (Scripture always struggled to humanize an institution it could not expect to eradicate; by privileging the Exodus narrative, it constantly appealed to a controlling story of the God who set slaves free; at some points, e.g., Philemon, it set a time-bomb beside the whole system.)    D. The endemic racism of much of Western culture. (Neo-apartheid groups still try to base racial ideologies on scripture.)    E. Undifferentiated reading of the Old and New Testaments, which of course exists in symbiosis with (F) below.    F. Unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-the-canon. (Few Christians have offered animal sacrifice or rejected pork, shellfish, etc., but few know why; some churches are tough on sexual offences but not on anger and violence, and others are the other way around; few today even notice the regular biblical prohibitions against usury.)    G. The application of ‘new Israel’ ideas (e.g., a reading of Deuteronomy) to various Enlightenment projects. (The United States is the obvious example, but interestingly the same ideology can be found, transposed into a French Roman Catholic key, in Quebec.)    H. Support for the death penalty (opposed by many of the early church fathers).     I. Discovery of ‘religious’ meanings and exclusion of ‘political’ ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo; this happily coexists in some cultures with (A) above.     J. Readings of Paul in general and Romans in particular which screen out the entire Jewish dimension through which alone that letter makes sense; this often exists in symbiosis with (K) below.    K. Attempted ‘biblical’ support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfilment of scriptural prophecy.    L. An overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics.

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Much of this, alas, characterizes so-called ‘conservative’ Christianity. Much ‘liberal’ Christianity, seeing this, and rightly associating it with a subculture with which it has other quarrels as well, defines itself explicitly in opposition (‘freeing the Bible from fundamentalism’, and so forth). Misreadings of the ‘Left’ The preceding list is balanced by the equally routine misreadings by what is thought of as the ‘left wing’:    A. The claim to ‘objectivity’ or to a ‘neutral’ reading of the text (the classic modernist position).    B. The claim that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable.    C. The ‘cultural relativity’ argument: ‘The Bible is an old book from a different culture, so we can’t take it seriously in the modern world’.    D. Rationalist rewritings of history, which assume as a fixed starting-point what the Enlightenment wanted to prove (that, say, some aspects of the story of Jesus ‘couldn’t have happened’) but has not been able to.    E. The attempt to relativize specific and often-repeated biblical teachings by appealing to a generalized ‘principle’ which looks suspiciously Enlightenment-generated (e.g., ‘tolerance’ or ‘inclusivity’); note that, when Jesus went to lunch with Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10), people were shocked but Zacchaeus was changed; and that, having ‘included’ the woman taken in adultery and shown up her self-righteous accusers (John 8:1–11), Jesus told her not to sin again.    F. Caricaturing biblical teaching on some topics in order to be able to set aside its teaching on other topics: despite repeated assertions, the New Testament does allow divorce in certain circumstances; it does envisage women as apostles and deacons, and as leading in worship; it does (see above) do its best to humanize, and then to challenge, slavery.    G. Discovery of ‘political’ meanings to the exclusion of ‘religious’ ones, often without noticing that, unless there is some power unleashed by these readings, this results merely in sloganeering which provides false comfort to the faithful through a sense of their own moral insight and superiority (‘I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like those non-political pietists’), but without effecting actual change in the world.    H. The proposal that the New Testament used the Old Testament in a fairly arbitrary or unwarranted fashion; sometimes, as we saw, the conclusion is drawn that we can and should use the New Testament in the same way. Standard examples include Matthew’s use of Hosea (2:15) and Paul’s use of the ‘seed’ motif (Galatians 3:16). Both, in fact, depend on a nexus between Jesus and Israel which remained opaque to many Protestant scholars in the modernist period, but which is now fairly common coin within the scholarship that has paid attention to the New Testament’s use of Old Testament themes and narratives.     I. The claim that the New Testament writers did not think they were writing ‘scripture’, so that our appeal to them as such already does them violence (see pages 51–52).     J. Pointing out that the church took a while to settle on the precise canon (… K. A skin-deep-only appeal to ‘contextual readings’, as though by murmuring the magic word ‘context’ one is allowed to hold the meaning and relevance of the text at arm’s length.    L. The attempt to reduce ‘truth’ to ‘scientific’ statements…

Page: 115
The whole of my argument so far leads to the following major conclusion: that the shorthand phrase ‘the authority of scripture’, when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community.

Page: 116
But the emphasis I want to insist on is that we discover what the shape and the inner life of the church ought to be only when we look first at the church’s mission, and that we discover what the church’s mission is only when we look first at God’s purpose for the entire world, as indicated in, for instance, Genesis 1—2, Genesis 12, Isaiah 40—55, Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians 1 and Revelation 21—22.

Page: 116
This means that ‘the authority of scripture’ is most truly put into operation as the church goes to work in the world on behalf of the gospel, the good news that in Jesus Christ the living God has defeated the powers of evil and begun the work of new creation.

Page: 118
The study of church history is not, ultimately, a different ‘subject’ from the careful Christian reading of scripture. Every period, every key figure in the history of the church has left his, her, or its mark on subsequent readings of scripture, and if we are unaware of this we are to that extent less able to understand why we ‘naturally’ read the text in this or that way.

Page: 120
‘Reason’ will mean giving attention to, and celebrating, the many and massive discoveries in biology, archaeology, physics, astronomy, and so on, which shed great light on God’s world and the human condition. This does not, of course, mean giving in to the pressure which comes from atheistic or rationalistic science. We must never forget that science, by definition, studies the repeatable, whereas history, by definition, studies the unrepeatable.

Page: 122
This is where my proposal about a ‘five-act’ hermeneutic comes in (The New Testament and the People of God, chapter 5). As I have argued there in detail, the Bible itself offers a model for its own reading, which involves knowing where we are within the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. The acts are: creation, ‘fall’, Israel, Jesus, and the church; they constitute the differentiated stages in the divine drama which scripture itself offers.

Page: 122
I also freely acknowledge that this model highlights the ‘fall’ more than many biblical writers do themselves, but without taking time to argue the point here I would stress that the story of Genesis 3 lies implicitly behind a good deal of the New Testament, by no means only Paul. Though Jews of the first century held several quite different views about the origins of evil, the overall picture, of a good creation spoiled, is widespread and was arguably assumed more or less across the board in early Christianity.

Page: 124
Perhaps we might put it like this. When we read Genesis 1—2, we read it as the first act in a play of which we live in the fifth. When we read Genesis 3—11, we read it as the second act in a play of which we live in the fifth. When we read the entire story of Israel from Abraham to the Messiah (as Paul scetches it in Galatians 3 or Romans 4), we read it as the third act. When we read the story of Jesus, we are confronted with the decisive and climactic fourth act, which is not where we ourselves live – we are not following Jesus around Palestine, watching him heal, preach, and feast with the outcasts, and puzzling over his plans for a final trip to Jerusalem – but which, of course, remains the foundation upon which our present (fifth) act is based. Indeed, telling the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel and the focal point of the story of the creator’s redemptive drama with his world is itself a major task of the fifth act, which is why both the oral tradition of storytelling about Jesus and the eventual writing of the canonical gospels in precisely that narrative mode was, and remains, one of the great founding moments of this act.

Page: 126
The New Testament offers us glimpses of where the story is to end: not with us ‘going to heaven’, as in many hymns and prayers, but with new creation. Our task is to discover, through the Spirit and prayer, the appropriate ways of improvising the script between the foundation events and charter, on the one hand, and the complete coming of the Kingdom, on the other. Once we grasp this framework, other things begin to fall into place.

Page: 127
All Christians, all churches, are free to improvise their own variations designed to take the music forward. No Christian, no church, is free to play out of tune.

Page: 128
We must be committed to a totally contextual reading of scripture. Each word must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its own chapter, each chapter within its own book, and each book within its own historical, cultural, and indeed canonical setting.

Page: 129
But it is not simply the Bible’s context that we must understand. As many have pointed out, it is equally important that we understand and appreciate our own, and the way it predisposes us to highlight some things in the Bible and quietly ignore others.

Page: 130
Far too often the ancient conflicts over Jesus’ incarnation have been mirrored in debates over the nature of scripture, with ‘conservatives’ stressing divinity and ‘liberals’ or ‘radicals’ stressing humanity.

Page: 130
This means, for instance, that we must work at making sure we read scripture properly in public, with appropriate systems for choosing what to read and appropriate training to make sure those who read do so to best effect.

Page: 131
It also means that in our public worship, in whatever tradition, we need to make sure the reading of scripture takes a central place. In my own tradition, that of the Anglican Communion, the regular offices of Morning and Evening Prayer are, in all kinds of ways, ‘showcases for scripture’. That is, they do with scripture (by means of prayer, music, and response) what a well-organized exhibition does with a great work of art: they prepare us for it, they enable us to appreciate it fully, and they give us an opportunity to meditate further on it.

Page: 132
There is simply no excuse for leaving out verses, paragraphs or chapters, from the New Testament in particular. We dare not try to tame the Bible. It is our foundation charter; we are not at liberty to play fast and loose with it.

Page: 133
Finally, of course, the reading of scripture during the Eucharist, at the very centre of the church’s life, witness and worship, is the crucial thing that forms God’s people as God’s people as they come together solemnly to ‘proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’. Within that, it becomes a vital part of the personal formation of each individual communicant. Scripture forms God’s people, warming their hearts as with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, so that their eyes may then be opened to know him in the breaking of the bread.

Page: 135
Many churches, including my own, have retained the Reformers’ emphasis on the ‘literal sense’ of scripture, not in the sense of ‘taking everything literally’ but in the sense of ‘discovering what the writers meant’ as opposed to engaging in free-floating speculation. As I pointed out earlier, the ‘literal sense’ means the sense originally intended; thus, ascertaining the ‘literal sense’ of a parable involves recognizing it as a parable, not an anecdote about something which actually happened. Getting at the original sense of scripture is an on-going task for scholar, preacher, and ordinary reader alike.

Page: 138
But how much more should a Christian minister be a serious professional when it comes to grappling with scripture and discovering how it enables him or her, in preaching, teaching, prayer, and pastoral work, to engage with the huge issues that confront us as a society and as individuals.

​Page: 141
Teaching must go on at every level. But if bishops and other church leaders are not teachers of scripture, able to lead the church thereby in its mission to the world and order its internal life to reflect God’s unity and holiness, then ‘the authority of scripture’, in the senses explored above, is simply not functioning.

Page: 10
Among many strands which came together in that cultural explosion was a new way of looking at the problem of evil, which had been highlighted particularly by the wars of religion in the seventeenth century and by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Suppose, ran the proposal, that the world is indeed divided into two, with God upstairs and a world of pure causation downstairs. If that is so, God isn’t in charge of the daily running of the material world, and he doesn’t intervene into it. If he were, and did, then Lisbon (today we might add ‘and Auschwitz’) would seem incomprehensible. But if we leave God out of the equation, and propose that he will instead provide spiritual solace in the present and a spiritual hope for the future, detached from the material world, then the world belongs to, and is in the hands of … the human race.

Page: 11
The greatest of the Enlightenment-based nations, the United States of America, has been left running a de facto world empire which gets richer by the minute as much of the world remains poor…

Page: 15
A good example, relevant for our current questions, is the fierce debate between ‘essentialists’ and ‘constructivists’ on the question of homosexuality. The former have insisted on a more or less modernist position about the objective ‘identity’ of the individual, as consisting in his or her sexual ‘orientation’ or preference, and in pursuit of this have continued a relentless quest for a ‘gay gene’. The latter advocate a thoroughly postmodern, free-floating account of sexuality in which the choice of types of activity is made as one goes along, without any need to explain, excuse, or vindicate one’s behaviour in terms of any external norms, objective reality, or assumption of ‘identity’. This debate plays through in a different key some, though not all, of the old discussions, as between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. But how might all this relate, if at all, to the Bible?

Page: 16
In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world? These are the questions to which the rest of this little book is devoted.

​Page: 17
Those of a Protestant or evangelical viewpoint will emphasize the authority of scripture; those from a Catholic context will make a strong case for tradition; those who think of themselves as liberals will emphasize reason.

Page: 18
We are in uncharted waters. And they are a lot deeper than some contemporary debaters seem to realize.

Page: 19
This happens secretly in the case of the so-called conservative, who may well choose to ignore the ecclesial, ecumenical, sacramental, and ecological dimensions of Paul’s soteriology, in order to highlight and privilege a doctrine of justification or ‘personal salvation’ which owes its real shape to a blend of Reformation, Enlightenment, romantic, and existentialist influences.

Page: 19
I merely note that I have found help – albeit sometimes by being forced to disagree! – in a wide variety of books. Rather than clutter up the text at this point, I have listed them in the Appendix.

Page: 25
All of these examples, and many more besides which one might easily think of, are ways in which the Bible does in fact work, does in fact exercise authority. This strongly suggests that for the Bible to have the effect it seems to be designed to have it will be necessary for the church to hear it as it is, not to chop it up in an effort to make it into something else. To this we shall return.

Page: 27
When Revelation speaks of God and the Lamb receiving all power, glory, honour, and so forth, it is because through the Lamb’s victory the whole of creation is being brought back into its intended harmony, rescued from evil and death.

Page: 27
This is fine as far as it goes. But in scripture itself God’s purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world.

Page: 29
A fully Christian view of the Bible includes the idea of God’s self-revelation but, by setting it in a larger context, transforms it. Precisely because the God who reveals himself is the world’s lover and judge, rather than its absentee landlord, that self-revelation is always to be understood within the category of God’s mission to the world, God’s saving sovereignty let loose through Jesus and the Spirit and aimed at the healing and renewal of all creation.

Page: 30
The monastic lectio divina, the evangelical ‘quiet time’, and the increasingly popular ‘Ignatian’ meditation all provide examples.

Page: 31
Those individuals and churches which have ‘heard God speaking’ through a passage of scripture, and have acted accordingly, tend to be those where division is most apparent.

Page: 34
Without the problem of evil, there would be no need to speak of, pray for, or invoke God’s Kingdom or authority; it would be apparent as a present reality.

Page: 34
This fresh, gracious, and forgiving purpose, aimed at new creation, is put into effect through the renewal of the covenant. Our question can then be sharpened up: what was, and is, the role of scripture within this divine purpose?

Page: 42
When he spoke of the scripture needing to be fulfilled (e.g., Mark 14:49), he was not simply envisaging himself doing a few scattered and random acts which corresponded to various distant and detached prophetic sayings; he was thinking of the entire storyline at last coming to fruition, and of an entire world of hints and shadows now coming to plain statement and full light.

Page: 47
In the early church, the ‘word’ offered both fulfilment of Old Testament promises and a call to accept the Spirit’s life-changing power and authority in the present.

Page: 47
The earliest apostolic preaching was neither a standard Jewish message with Jesus added on at the end, nor a free-standing announcement of a new religion cut off from its Jewish roots, but rather the story of Jesus understood as the fulfilment of the Old Testament covenant narrative, and thus as the euangelion, the good news or ‘gospel’ – the creative force which called the church into being and shaped its mission and life. It was this biblical story, rather than some other (that of human empire, say, or of individual spiritual self-discovery) that provided the interpretative matrix within which the accomplishment of Jesus made the sense it did.

Page: 55
Paul himself sums up the hermeneutical tension which covenant renewal has set up: God’s righteousness is revealed ‘apart from the Law’, although ‘the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it’ (Romans 3:21).

Page: 55
There is now no holy land: in Paul’s reinterpretation of the Abrahamic promises in Romans 4:13, God promises Abraham not just one strip of territory but the whole world, anticipating the renewal of all creation as in Romans 8. Perhaps most important, the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been abolished (throughout Paul, and summarized in Ephesians 2:11–22). These conclusions were reached by the early Christians, not by a cavalier process of setting aside bits of the Old Testament which they found unwelcome, but through a deep-rooted sense, worked out theologically and practically, that all of that scripture had been summed up in Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:17, itself summing up the message of much of the book; Romans 3:31; 2 Corinthians 1:20) and that now God’s project of new covenant and new creation had begun, necessarily taking a new mode. John sums it up in a sentence which has often teased commentators. ‘The law’, he writes, ‘was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (1:17). Should we understand him to mean ‘but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’, or should it be ‘and’? The rest of the gospel suggests that John deliberately left it ambiguous.

Page: 56
The early Christian use of the Old Testament reflects exactly this double-edged position. Precisely because of the emphasis on the unique accomplishment of Jesus Christ, the Old Testament could not continue to have exactly the same role within the Christian community that it had had before. Christianity does not repeat the earlier stages of the story, any more than it repeats the unique achievement of Jesus; it celebrates and builds upon them. From the start, in the ministry of Jesus and the work of Paul, we find constant reference to the fact that with the fulfilment comes a new moment in the story, a new act in the play (see pages 121–127).

Page: 57
Nor, for that matter, do the pragmatic, rule-of-thumb conclusions of some other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who saw the ‘civil’ and ‘ceremonial’ laws being abolished while the ‘moral’ ones remained, ignoring the fact that most ancient Jews would not have recognized such a distinction.

Page: 60
This has nothing to do with the declaration of an arbitrary or ‘controlling’ ethic, a standard imposed from without by constricting or bullying authority in the early church. It has everything to do with understanding human renewal as the beginning, the pointer towards, and even the means of, God’s eventual eradication of evil from the world and the bringing to birth of the new creation itself. Thus, so the early Christians believed, God’s word was at work by the Spirit within the community, to put Jesus’ achievement into effect and thus to advance the final Kingdom. We can summarize it like this: the New Testament understands itself as the new covenant charter, the book that forms the basis for the new telling of the story through which Christians are formed, reformed and transformed so as to be God’s people for God’s world. That is the challenge the early Christians bequeath to us as we reconsider what ‘the authority of scripture’ might mean in practice today.

Page: 64
People sometimes suggest, indeed, that the process of canonization is the sign that the church itself was the final authority. This proposal is sometimes made by Catholic traditionalists asserting the supremacy of the church over the Bible, and sometimes by postmodern sceptics asserting that the canon itself, and hence the books included in it, were all part of a power play for control within the church and social respectability in the world.

Page: 65
The church’s hold on the Jewish sense of the scriptural story was hard to maintain. Over the next few centuries, with the gradual loss of the Israel-dimension in the church’s understanding of itself and its scriptures, the notion of scriptural authority became detached from its narrative context, and thereby isolated from both the gift and the goal of the Kingdom.

Page: 65
As Telford Work has demonstrated, many theologians, not least Augustine, remained passionately committed to God’s work through scripture in bringing people to faith, to holiness and to salvation. But we miss, in some of the developing tradition, the dynamic notion of scripture as the vehicle of God’s Kingdom coming to birth in the world. The notion of ‘authority’ which we have scetched in terms of ‘God at work powerfully through scripture to bring about the Kingdom, by calling and shaping a new covenant people and equipping its leaders to be teachers and preachers’, became gradually flattened out into two things in particular. First, scripture came to be regarded as a ‘court of appeal’, the source-book or rule-book from which doctrine and ethics might be deduced and against which innovations were to be judged. Second, scripture was used for lectio divina, the practice through which individual readers could hear God speaking to them personally, nourishing their own spirituality and devotion.

Page: 66
At its heart, allegory (already extensively employed by the first-century Jewish philosopher and statesman Philo, who like Origen lived in Alexandria) reads the surface text as a code through which hidden meanings may be discerned. It is partially anticipated in at least some of Jesus’ parables, though the extent to which Jesus himself intended the details of his stories to be pressed into such use continues to be debated. The apocalyptic scenes in Daniel and other books of the Old Testament are explained allegorically within the texts themselves. Paul uses explicit allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament in Galatians 4:21–31; so does 1 Peter 3:20–22. Perhaps the best-known example of subsequent allegorical reading of scripture is the use of…

Page: 67
This is where we see a tension developing between authority and interpretation: how far can a reinterpretation of the text go before it ceases to carry the authority which was…

Page: 67
I suspect that the New Testament writers, faced with the later allegorizers, would want to ask them certain questions. Why did they find those texts problematic? Did they not realize that the Bible is more than simply a repository of moral examples and dogmatic teaching?

Page: 67
cases at least, human wickedness is allowed to be seen as what it is in order that God’s dealings with Israel may be properly understood? Thus, for instance, Judah’s conviction for incest with Tamar (Genesis 38) is the missing link between his arrogant behaviour in 37:26, proposing to sell Joseph into slavery, and his humble volunteering to be Joseph’s slave in place of Benjamin (44:18–34). The horrible tale of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 was never intended as any kind of moral example; it was part of the writer’s repeated argument about how chaotic life is when there is no king. David’s adultery with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11) sets the tone in court which is followed by Amnon’s rape of the other Tamar (2 Samuel 13), which in turn precipitates Absalom’s rebellion and David’s disgrace (2 Samuel 15). These passages, though hardly ‘improving stories’ in the sense of cosy moral tales, nevertheless do not need in fact to be read allegorically in order for their powerful theological…

Page: 68
Allegory was in one sense, as is sometimes claimed, a way of ‘saving the Bible for the church’, in the sense that with the other reading strategies available at the time the less savoury passages of the Old Testament might have been jettisoned altogether. And of course the allegorical readers always…

Page: 69
The allegorical exegesis offered by some of the early interpreters was continued and developed in a highly refined and imaginative way through the medieval period. Theologians came to distinguish four different senses of scripture:…

Page: 70
However, we should not miss the point that is often made today about the medieval world-view. We who live on the near side of the Enlightenment and all its scientific revolutions have inherited a sense of a disconnected and fragmented world, and are having to learn with great difficulty – for instance, in our ecological care of the planet – that things are more interconnected than they had seemed.

​Page: 70
Not without a cost, however. As even apologists for the medieval period will admit, once allegory had taken over, almost anything could be ‘proved’ from scripture, resulting in fantastic and highly speculative theories. Sometimes these are simply flights of fancy, as when the twelfth-century Hugh of St Victor suggested that Noah’s Ark, being three hundred cubits long, pointed to the cross – since the Greek letter T, in the shape of a cross, represents the number three hundred. (This was part of the medieval determination to see every aspect of the Noah story as a foreshadowing of events in the life of Jesus, in line with the hint in 1 Peter 3:20–22; famously, even Noah’s drunkenness was included, and became the subject of many great paintings.)

Page: 71
The question must always be asked, whether scripture is being used to serve an existing theology or vice versa. Concerns like this contributed to the complex set of circumstances which generated the sixteenth-century Reformation.

Page: 72
This meant that anything which could be regarded as well established in ecclesial tradition, even if there was nothing about it in the Bible, and even if it appeared to go against some of the things which the Bible itself said, could be taught as authoritative and backed up with clever allegorical exegesis. (The perpetual virginity of Mary would be a good example.) The status of tradition, and its relation to scripture, has remained a matter of controversy to this day, not only between Roman Catholics and Protestants but also within Roman Catholicism itself.

Page: 72
The Reformers’ sola scriptura slogan was part of their protest against perceived medieval corruptions. Go back to scripture, they insisted, and you will find the once-for-all death of Jesus but not the Mass, justification by faith but not purgatory, the power of God’s word but not that of the pope. Their insistence that scripture contains all things necessary to salvation (a point which remains loud and clear in the formularies of most of the churches which take their origins from the Reformation) was part of their protest against the Roman insistence on belief in dogmas like transubstantiation as necessary articles of faith.

Page: 72
It was never a way of saying that one had to believe every single thing in the scriptures in order to be saved. Rather, it provided, on the one hand, a statute of limitations: nothing beyond scripture is to be taught as needing to be believed in order for one to be saved.

Page: 73
The Reformers thus set scripture over against the traditions of the church; the recovery of the literal sense over against the lush growth of the three other senses; and the right of ordinary Christians to read scripture for themselves over against the protection of the sacred text by the Latin-reading elite.

Page: 73
It was with these ordinary people in mind that some of the great Reformers became translators, the best known being Luther in Germany and Tyndale in England. Both men exercised a lasting influence, not only on Christian thinking but on the languages of their people in the subsequent centuries.

Page: 73
It is important to notice a key difference in meaning between one of the Reformers’ central technical terms and the way in which the same word has been used in the modern period. When the Reformers insisted on the ‘literal’ sense of scripture, they were referring to the first of the four medieval senses. Though, as we saw, this would often refer to the historical meaning and referent of scripture (when scripture says that Solomon’s men built the Temple, for example, the literal sense is that Solomon’s men built the Temple),

Page: 74
This is one of those many points at which the later appeal to the rhetoric of the Reformation needs to be scrutinized rather carefully. Today, when people say ‘literalist’, they often mean ‘fundamentalist’. The Reformers’ stress on the literal sense by no means supports the kind of position thereby implied. To this we shall return.

Page: 75
When the Council of Trent, called by Rome to answer the Reformers’ charges and proposals, went to work on the question of scripture and tradition, it came up with formulae which remain part of Roman Catholic doctrine and catechesis to this day. Scripture and tradition, declared Trent (Session 4.8; 8 April 1546), were to be received as of equal authority. The Second Vatican Council, four hundred years later, stated that scripture and tradition ‘flow from the same divine wellspring, merge into a unity and move toward the same goal’. It has always been the Protestant position that scripture must remain as the test of which traditions are genuine and true interpretations of scripture (this is what, for example, virtually all churches believe in the case of the Nicene Creed) and which ones represent distortions and corruptions. This debate continues.

Page: 76
For our present purposes, which are to clarify and expound the way in which scripture can be authoritative, we should note that as soon as we start talking about ‘scripture and tradition’ as two sources of authority we are in fact using the word ‘authority’ itself in a subtly different way.

Page: 77
But the main point to note from this glance at the sixteenth century is that the Reformers’ insistence on the authority of scripture made several important points, but left many other matters open for further discussion. Of one thing we may be absolutely sure. If the Reformers could return and address us today, they would not say, ‘We got it all right; you must follow our exegesis and theology and implement it precisely as it stands’. What they would say is, ‘You must follow our method: read and study scripture for all it’s worth, and let it do its work in the world, in and through you and your churches’.

Page: 78
Tertullian famously asked, at the end of the second century, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ – in other words, what has unaided philosophical reason to do with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ?

Page: 79
This question, of how much one could know without special revelation, burst into flame again in the early Reformation, with Luther angrily confronting Erasmus over the question of whether human will and understanding are capable of grasping the gospel, or whether original sin has so darkened the mind as to leave it, despite some elements of insight, enslaved, unable to help itself, and always in need of grace and revelation.

Page: 84
The Enlightenment (whose leading thinkers include Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and Kant) was, in fact, for the most part an explicitly anti-Christian movement.

Page: 84
In particular, the Enlightenment insisted on ‘reason’ as the central capacity of human beings, enabling us to think and act correctly; it therefore regarded human beings as by nature rational and good. Reason was to be the arbiter of which religious and theological claims could be sustained (note Kant’s famous work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). This meant that many Enlightenment thinkers tended towards atheism.

Page: 85
This programme continues to this day: it is only recently that it has been widely acknowledged, for instance, that the phrase ‘son of God’ in many New Testament writings does not automatically mean ‘the second person of the Trinity’, but is a title which, to a first-century Jew, would have carried messianic rather than ‘divine’ overtones (so that the high Christology which the New Testament undoubtedly asserts is to be understood within that framework).

Page: 85
Second, however, from the eighteenth century onward, several historians working from within the Enlightenment project made deliberate attempts to demonstrate that such readings would in fact undermine central Christian claims. They would prove, it was asserted, that the Bible could be faulted on matters of history (it says certain things happened, but they did not), on matters of science (it said God created the world in seven days, but we now know it happened through a long period of evolution), and on matters of morality (it displays God telling the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites and Amalekites, for example). These are all part of the standard attack mounted against Christianity from within modernism as a whole.

Page: 89
The Enlightenment thus offered to the world a new analysis of, and solution to, the problem of evil, standing in radical tension to those offered in classical Judaism and Christianity. The real problem of evil, it proposed, is that people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how and create the social and political conditions to make it happen. The biblical scholarship which grew up within the Enlightenment world went along for the ride, reducing the act of God in Jesus Christ to mere moral teaching and example.

Page: 89
The point was this: if Enlightenment progress is solving the problem of evil, all Jesus needs to have done is to point the way, to show people what love and compassion look like. Being reasonable, people will follow his example. If they do not, they need more teaching in reason.

Page: 89
Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be ‘biblical’ Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning ‘Kingdom of God’ into ‘the hope for heaven after death’ and treating Jesus’ death, at the most, as the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future – leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining, of the world.

Page: 89
(This political agenda, by the way, was of course a vital part of the Enlightenment project: kick ‘God’ upstairs, make religion a matter of private piety, and then you can organize the world to your own advantage. That has been the leitmotif of the Western world ever since, the new philosophy which has so far sustained several great empires, launched huge and horribly flawed totalitarian projects, and left the contemporary world thoroughly confused. But all this must wait for another day.)

Page: 90
The one thing it is no longer possible to do is to claim that ‘modern biblical studies’ have come to the kind of fixed and unalterable conclusions that used to be taught in colleges and seminaries – an important point, since many who now debate major issues in the life of the church were educated in that way, and their reading and use of scripture has been, to say the least, significantly skewed as a result.

Page: 92
In fact, those who refuse the attempt to think freshly about the Bible are often shutting themselves up inside one particular kind of post-Enlightenment Western world-view – the ‘fundamentalist’ one, in which all kinds of things in the gospels and Paul have been screened out, despite the claim to be ‘biblical’.

Page: 94
The extraordinary and sometimes horrible excesses of behaviour on both sides in the localized social and cultural politics of North America must of course be borne in mind during debate. So, too, must the oddity (as it seems to an outside observer) that those who are most keen on ‘conservative’ Christianity on some issues often choose to ignore what the Bible says about loving one’s enemies and about economic justice, and choose to forget that many of the earliest and finest exponents of Christian scripture – the early church fathers – were firmly opposed to the death penalty.

Page: 95
But this problem ought to look very different (though this has not yet been widely noticed) in the light of the detailed and careful work of the last half-century in highlighting and exploring the historical and cultural context, Jewish and Greco-Roman alike, of early Christianity.

Page: 95
Many of the old ‘consensus’ positions (e.g., that Paul could not have written Ephesians and Colossians; that forms of gospel tradition which exhibited ‘Jewish’ characteristics must be later developments than those which matched Hellenistic ones) grew straight out of the Enlightenment’s rationalistic Protestantism, which screened out, among other things, both the Jewishness of the New Testament and anything that smacked of ‘early Catholicism’.

Page: 95
Which is the bottom line: ‘proving the Bible to be true’ (often with the effect of saying, ‘So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought’), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear?

Page: 97
Modernism and its readings have, as I have already suggested, been simultaneously under a different kind of attack, from the postmodern movement. Postmodernism, by unmasking the power interests latent in texts and movements, not least those of the last two hundred years, has offered a sustained ideological challenge not only to many ancient and modern texts but also to modernism itself – particularly the economic and cultural hegemony of the Western world which rests on the achievements of the Enlightenment. We have seen all kinds of fresh readings of biblical texts – feminist, post-Holocaust, ethnic, post-colonial, and so forth – all of which have discovered passages which have been used, and which some have suggested were intended to be used, as ‘texts of terror’, that is, weapons of oppression or worse.

Page: 98
All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) sympathy. This is where a good deal of the Western church now finds itself. The fact that this position is merely assumed, not usually spelled out, makes it all the more potent, since postmodernity is currently what ‘feels right’ in Western culture, and does not open itself to challenge by coming out into the open.

Page: 99
Much criticism, both modern and postmodern, has thus left the church, after years of highly funded research in seminaries and colleges, less able to use the Bible in anything like the way in which Jesus and the earliest Christians envisaged. This is the reason for the biblical vacuum at the heart of many of the so-called mainline churches on both sides of the North Atlantic and elsewhere. And this is why we are reduced to shouting matches about biblical authority. But supposing there might be a better way?

Page: 100
As I shall suggest presently, a narratival and ‘critical realist’ reading of scripture offers a way forward through the postmodern morass and out the other side – a task that appears the more urgent as the great world empire of our own day proceeds to impose its economic, political, military, and cultural will on the world, while the proponents of radical positions in today’s ‘culture wars’ remain impotent to stop it.

Page: 102
Rather, scripture is the bookshelf; tradition is the memory of what people in the house have read and understood (or perhaps misunderstood) from that shelf; and reason is the set of spectacles that people wear in order to make sense of what they read

Page: 104
We could put it like this. ‘Experience’ is what grows by itself in the garden. ‘Authority’ is what happens when the gardener wants to affirm the goodness of the genuine flowers and vegetables by uprooting the weeds in order to let beauty and fruitfulness triumph over chaos, thorns, and thistles.

Page: 107
Misreadings of the ‘Right’ To begin with, I offer the many positions regularly thought of as ‘right wing’ which are based on, or involve, a serious misreading of scripture:    A. The openly dualistic ‘rapture’ reading of 1 Thessalonians 4 (as in the hugely popular and blatantly right-wing American Left Behind series), which ironically lives in close symbiosis with (B) below.    B. The explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of biblical promises.    C. The support of slavery. (Scripture always struggled to humanize an institution it could not expect to eradicate; by privileging the Exodus narrative, it constantly appealed to a controlling story of the God who set slaves free; at some points, e.g., Philemon, it set a time-bomb beside the whole system.)    D. The endemic racism of much of Western culture. (Neo-apartheid groups still try to base racial ideologies on scripture.)    E. Undifferentiated reading of the Old and New Testaments, which of course exists in symbiosis with (F) below.    F. Unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-the-canon. (Few Christians have offered animal sacrifice or rejected pork, shellfish, etc., but few know why; some churches are tough on sexual offences but not on anger and violence, and others are the other way around; few today even notice the regular biblical prohibitions against usury.)    G. The application of ‘new Israel’ ideas (e.g., a reading of Deuteronomy) to various Enlightenment projects. (The United States is the obvious example, but interestingly the same ideology can be found, transposed into a French Roman Catholic key, in Quebec.)    H. Support for the death penalty (opposed by many of the early church fathers).     I. Discovery of ‘religious’ meanings and exclusion of ‘political’ ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo; this happily coexists in some cultures with (A) above.     J. Readings of Paul in general and Romans in particular which screen out the entire Jewish dimension through which alone that letter makes sense; this often exists in symbiosis with (K) below.    K. Attempted ‘biblical’ support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfilment of scriptural prophecy.    L. An overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics.

Page: 109
Much of this, alas, characterizes so-called ‘conservative’ Christianity. Much ‘liberal’ Christianity, seeing this, and rightly associating it with a subculture with which it has other quarrels as well, defines itself explicitly in opposition (‘freeing the Bible from fundamentalism’, and so forth). Misreadings of the ‘Left’ The preceding list is balanced by the equally routine misreadings by what is thought of as the ‘left wing’:    A. The claim to ‘objectivity’ or to a ‘neutral’ reading of the text (the classic modernist position).    B. The claim that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable.    C. The ‘cultural relativity’ argument: ‘The Bible is an old book from a different culture, so we can’t take it seriously in the modern world’.    D. Rationalist rewritings of history, which assume as a fixed starting-point what the Enlightenment wanted to prove (that, say, some aspects of the story of Jesus ‘couldn’t have happened’) but has not been able to.    E. The attempt to relativize specific and often-repeated biblical teachings by appealing to a generalized ‘principle’ which looks suspiciously Enlightenment-generated (e.g., ‘tolerance’ or ‘inclusivity’); note that, when Jesus went to lunch with Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10), people were shocked but Zacchaeus was changed; and that, having ‘included’ the woman taken in adultery and shown up her self-righteous accusers (John 8:1–11), Jesus told her not to sin again.    F. Caricaturing biblical teaching on some topics in order to be able to set aside its teaching on other topics: despite repeated assertions, the New Testament does allow divorce in certain circumstances; it does envisage women as apostles and deacons, and as leading in worship; it does (see above) do its best to humanize, and then to challenge, slavery.    G. Discovery of ‘political’ meanings to the exclusion of ‘religious’ ones, often without noticing that, unless there is some power unleashed by these readings, this results merely in sloganeering which provides false comfort to the faithful through a sense of their own moral insight and superiority (‘I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like those non-political pietists’), but without effecting actual change in the world.    H. The proposal that the New Testament used the Old Testament in a fairly arbitrary or unwarranted fashion; sometimes, as we saw, the conclusion is drawn that we can and should use the New Testament in the same way. Standard examples include Matthew’s use of Hosea (2:15) and Paul’s use of the ‘seed’ motif (Galatians 3:16). Both, in fact, depend on a nexus between Jesus and Israel which remained opaque to many Protestant scholars in the modernist period, but which is now fairly common coin within the scholarship that has paid attention to the New Testament’s use of Old Testament themes and narratives.     I. The claim that the New Testament writers did not think they were writing ‘scripture’, so that our appeal to them as such already does them violence (see pages 51–52).     J. Pointing out that the church took a while to settle on the precise canon (… K. A skin-deep-only appeal to ‘contextual readings’, as though by murmuring the magic word ‘context’ one is allowed to hold the meaning and relevance of the text at arm’s length.    L. The attempt to reduce ‘truth’ to ‘scientific’ statements…

Page: 115
The whole of my argument so far leads to the following major conclusion: that the shorthand phrase ‘the authority of scripture’, when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community.

Page: 116
But the emphasis I want to insist on is that we discover what the shape and the inner life of the church ought to be only when we look first at the church’s mission, and that we discover what the church’s mission is only when we look first at God’s purpose for the entire world, as indicated in, for instance, Genesis 1—2, Genesis 12, Isaiah 40—55, Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians 1 and Revelation 21—22.

Page: 116
This means that ‘the authority of scripture’ is most truly put into operation as the church goes to work in the world on behalf of the gospel, the good news that in Jesus Christ the living God has defeated the powers of evil and begun the work of new creation.

Page: 118
The study of church history is not, ultimately, a different ‘subject’ from the careful Christian reading of scripture. Every period, every key figure in the history of the church has left his, her, or its mark on subsequent readings of scripture, and if we are unaware of this we are to that extent less able to understand why we ‘naturally’ read the text in this or that way.

Page: 120
‘Reason’ will mean giving attention to, and celebrating, the many and massive discoveries in biology, archaeology, physics, astronomy, and so on, which shed great light on God’s world and the human condition. This does not, of course, mean giving in to the pressure which comes from atheistic or rationalistic science. We must never forget that science, by definition, studies the repeatable, whereas history, by definition, studies the unrepeatable.

Page: 122
This is where my proposal about a ‘five-act’ hermeneutic comes in (The New Testament and the People of God, chapter 5). As I have argued there in detail, the Bible itself offers a model for its own reading, which involves knowing where we are within the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. The acts are: creation, ‘fall’, Israel, Jesus, and the church; they constitute the differentiated stages in the divine drama which scripture itself offers.

Page: 122
I also freely acknowledge that this model highlights the ‘fall’ more than many biblical writers do themselves, but without taking time to argue the point here I would stress that the story of Genesis 3 lies implicitly behind a good deal of the New Testament, by no means only Paul. Though Jews of the first century held several quite different views about the origins of evil, the overall picture, of a good creation spoiled, is widespread and was arguably assumed more or less across the board in early Christianity.

Page: 124
Perhaps we might put it like this. When we read Genesis 1—2, we read it as the first act in a play of which we live in the fifth. When we read Genesis 3—11, we read it as the second act in a play of which we live in the fifth. When we read the entire story of Israel from Abraham to the Messiah (as Paul scetches it in Galatians 3 or Romans 4), we read it as the third act. When we read the story of Jesus, we are confronted with the decisive and climactic fourth act, which is not where we ourselves live – we are not following Jesus around Palestine, watching him heal, preach, and feast with the outcasts, and puzzling over his plans for a final trip to Jerusalem – but which, of course, remains the foundation upon which our present (fifth) act is based. Indeed, telling the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel and the focal point of the story of the creator’s redemptive drama with his world is itself a major task of the fifth act, which is why both the oral tradition of storytelling about Jesus and the eventual writing of the canonical gospels in precisely that narrative mode was, and remains, one of the great founding moments of this act.

Page: 126
The New Testament offers us glimpses of where the story is to end: not with us ‘going to heaven’, as in many hymns and prayers, but with new creation. Our task is to discover, through the Spirit and prayer, the appropriate ways of improvising the script between the foundation events and charter, on the one hand, and the complete coming of the Kingdom, on the other. Once we grasp this framework, other things begin to fall into place.

Page: 127
All Christians, all churches, are free to improvise their own variations designed to take the music forward. No Christian, no church, is free to play out of tune.

Page: 128
We must be committed to a totally contextual reading of scripture. Each word must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its own chapter, each chapter within its own book, and each book within its own historical, cultural, and indeed canonical setting.

Page: 129
But it is not simply the Bible’s context that we must understand. As many have pointed out, it is equally important that we understand and appreciate our own, and the way it predisposes us to highlight some things in the Bible and quietly ignore others.

Page: 130
Far too often the ancient conflicts over Jesus’ incarnation have been mirrored in debates over the nature of scripture, with ‘conservatives’ stressing divinity and ‘liberals’ or ‘radicals’ stressing humanity.

Page: 130
This means, for instance, that we must work at making sure we read scripture properly in public, with appropriate systems for choosing what to read and appropriate training to make sure those who read do so to best effect.

Page: 131
It also means that in our public worship, in whatever tradition, we need to make sure the reading of scripture takes a central place. In my own tradition, that of the Anglican Communion, the regular offices of Morning and Evening Prayer are, in all kinds of ways, ‘showcases for scripture’. That is, they do with scripture (by means of prayer, music, and response) what a well-organized exhibition does with a great work of art: they prepare us for it, they enable us to appreciate it fully, and they give us an opportunity to meditate further on it.

Page: 132
There is simply no excuse for leaving out verses, paragraphs or chapters, from the New Testament in particular. We dare not try to tame the Bible. It is our foundation charter; we are not at liberty to play fast and loose with it.

Page: 133
Finally, of course, the reading of scripture during the Eucharist, at the very centre of the church’s life, witness and worship, is the crucial thing that forms God’s people as God’s people as they come together solemnly to ‘proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’. Within that, it becomes a vital part of the personal formation of each individual communicant. Scripture forms God’s people, warming their hearts as with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, so that their eyes may then be opened to know him in the breaking of the bread.

Page: 135
Many churches, including my own, have retained the Reformers’ emphasis on the ‘literal sense’ of scripture, not in the sense of ‘taking everything literally’ but in the sense of ‘discovering what the writers meant’ as opposed to engaging in free-floating speculation. As I pointed out earlier, the ‘literal sense’ means the sense originally intended; thus, ascertaining the ‘literal sense’ of a parable involves recognizing it as a parable, not an anecdote about something which actually happened. Getting at the original sense of scripture is an on-going task for scholar, preacher, and ordinary reader alike.

Page: 138
But how much more should a Christian minister be a serious professional when it comes to grappling with scripture and discovering how it enables him or her, in preaching, teaching, prayer, and pastoral work, to engage with the huge issues that confront us as a society and as individuals.

​Page: 141
Teaching must go on at every level. But if bishops and other church leaders are not teachers of scripture, able to lead the church thereby in its mission to the world and order its internal life to reflect God’s unity and holiness, then ‘the authority of scripture’, in the senses explored above, is simply not functioning.