You have to
feel sorry for Harold Campion. Perhaps
you heard his name on the news back in May when on the 21st of May
this chap predicted with absolute certainty that the end of the world was
coming and that the world would be destroyed, the dead would rise from their
graves and the faithful would be raised to heaven by way of the Rapture. When it didn’t happen he quickly revised his
calculations, said his Biblical Mathematics had been wrong and proclaimed with
the same absolute certainty that the end of the world would come on the 21st
of October. Did you notice it? Nor did I?
Though he
has done the same thing twice before this year – proclaiming without a shadow
of doubt that the end of the world would arrive on May 21st 1988 and
September 6th 1994. As the
head of Family Radio, a Christian Media Ministry broadcast all over America,
Camping has now retired from his public ministry and has since been heard to
say that no one does know the day or the hour of the return of Jesus – finally
admitting what Jesus said a long time ago a few verses later than today’s
reading in Matthew 24v34 “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the
angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
These
predictions of the end of the world have provided fodder for both
fundamentalists and comedians over many years!
There used to be rather grey looking individuals that would wander up
and down places like Oxford Street in London wearing sandwich boards or holding
up placards which told us ‘the End of the World is nigh! Or there were folk who
would stand on the streets of Cambridge on a
Saturday or who would proclaim at speaker’s Corner in Hyde
Park ‘Repent, Jesus is coming’.
Maybe they still do, though we don’t hear much of it these days.
Books have
been written with titles like ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ and ‘Arise and
Reap’ which have told those who have read them that we are living in the end
times, and Jesus is coming back soon.
Well, one day they will be right – the Bible says that Jesus will
someday return and – in the words of Mother Julian of Norwich – ‘All will be well and all manner of
things shall be well’. But those who seem
to fixate on working out exactly how the words of the book of Revelation fit
into the present age seem to be missing the point – how are we living here…
When we
pray in the words Jesus taught us, the one prayer he gave us to say, we say
‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ – that’s not
just about the time when Jesus will return and the kingdom will come in all
it’s fullness – it’s also a statement of hope that God will bring His reign to
the earth NOW, and a statement of our willingness to be involved in that. Jesus soon goes on in that prayer to ask that
we know forgiveness and share that forgiveness with others, that we have the
food we need for each day, and that in trials we will stand firm. Any understanding, hope, faith we may have
for heaven coming to earth must be grounded in lives of love and service here
on earth.
Look at
today’s lesson from Matthew Chapter 24, for instance. Jesus says that life will become very
difficult indeed for those who follow him – and hints of needing to endure to
the end, but he doesn’t obsess about what that end will be, he talks about
needing to remain faithful.
Now when
Matthew is writing – we reckon about AD 70 or later – the Church is being torn
apart by persecution, many are abandoning faith, the Jewish people are on going
to be decimated by the Romans and sometime after, or even just before, the
Gospel is written down and made available the Temple in Jerusalem will be
destroyed. Jesus’ words about the
destruction of the temple stand out in the mind of the writer as he is
compiling his writings and stories to make up the Gospel and it’s those words
that open our Bible passage, Mt 24:
1As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his
disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. 2Then
he asked them, ‘You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone
will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’
Jesus could
see that time would come when the political intrigue that the leaders of Israel were involved in would eventually bring
about chaos and destruction for Israel. And he warns his followers that a time will
come that being faithful to his message will endanger their wellbeing, indeed
even their lives.
But Jesus
has one message: “Stick with it, don’t be distracted” - don’t listen to false prophets, don’t get
caught up in worrying about the end, don’t allow the disloyalty and hatred of
others make you give up. Stand firm in
the face of persecution, live with hope, but don’t live just for the end – as
no one knows when it will come….
Common sense
tells us that to live for something that might happen is a recipe
for disaster. We worry, we fret, we get
nervous, or we constantly look forward without seeing where we are or where we
should be going. Jesus doesn’t want his
followers to be distracted – as he says earlier in Matthew’s Gospel ‘where your
treasure is, there will your hear be also’ or, in other words, what you think
is important will be what you focus on…
I honestly
believe Jesus wants us, his Church, to focus on one thing… and that is summed
up at the end of the Gospel reading we heard just now, in Chapter 24 verse 14
he says:
And this good news of the
kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world…
That’s the
focus we should have in the Church today!
We call it Mission
– and part of that mission is evangelism, sharing the good news of the
kingdom. And it IS Good News –
that amidst the turmoil of this world, even when there are wars and violence,
natural disaster, strife and hatred, even then Jesus is with us. Even in the worst that this world has to
offer Christ offers us his strength, his love, his hope, his faith – through
his Holy Spirit he has promised to be with us, and if we were to go to the very
end of the Gospel we would read Jesus’ parting words to his disciples. Words that we call the Great Commission, when
Jesus instructed his disciples, and through them instructs us, to carry on his
work of making the Good News real in everything we do and we say. In loving God and our neighbour, and learning
to love ourselves as God loves us. In
speaking the truth even in difficult situations, in standing up for what is
right even when it is not the trendy, easy or popular way. In keeping Christ as the absolute centre of
our lives and as the basis of our worship and living.
This is
what we are called to focus on, this is where our heart should be – rather than
winding ourselves and others up about when the end of the world might be coming
or not, and exactly what form it is going to take, we should focus on our
calling as Christ’s people to share this good news, in word and action, in
silence and in service and we should always keep in mind these words which we
call the Great Commission:
Matthew 28.19-20
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and
teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am
with you always, to the end of the age.’
Time to get this Deep Stuff Blog back up and running... This week is our Big Bible Week, where we are celebrating the gift of Scripture... so here's my overview talk which I presented this evening. These are my own notes so its a bit warts and all.......
The Big
Bible overview
I want to start with a
little ‘word association’ exercise – it’s quite a simple one, I’ve only got one
word that I want you to consider – Bible.
What comes to mind when I say ‘Bible’ – anyone?
Here’s a Vox Pop from some young
people…
There are so many words that
we can associate with the Bible. Some
are purely descriptive titles, some are somewhat more loaded.
Scripture, for instance is relatively simple – the Bible is
the Holy Book of Christian Faith.
Writings, again a simple one
– all of the parts of the Bible are definitely writings.
But we get a little more
contentious if we start using words like ‘The Word of God’, or ‘Truth’, or
‘Inspired’. Even within our Christian
Faith there’s a fair amount of disagreement as to what those terms might
mean. For instance what do we mean when
we say ‘Word of God’? In the first
chapter of the Gospel of St John we have a wonderfully resonant piece of Scripture
that seems to have a different perspective – “In the beginning was The Word,
and the Word was with God and the Word was God’. You see in the Greek world view which shaped
the writing of John’s Gospel a word was considered to be connected to the
person who said it – it remained in some way a part of someone. So to describe Jesus as the Word was to say
that he still remained as part of God the Father, the word goes forth and yet
remains.
And there are many who think
that way about the Bible too! I’m not
going to tell you how you should understand it and how you should interpret
this book, but there is in the historic Christian faith a belief which is
stated beautifully in the 39 Articles of the Church of England – that Scripture
contains within it all things necessary for salvation… That there is ultimately no need to have
anything more than this book to discern the working of God’s salvific word to
the world.
2 Timothy 3.16 "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work."
Inspired… an important word,
as it is one that the Bible uses to describe itself – or to be specific it is a
word that St Paul uses to describe what we might call the Old Testament. St
Paul was concerned that these new Christians who he
was pastoring were, as they believed that Christ freed them from the
constraints of the law, leaving behind also the sacred writing of the Jewish
faith – the law and the prophets – within which the wisdom of God could be
found.
It’s tricky to argue about
inspiration of Scripture by saying ‘it’s because the Bible says it’s so’
–that’s the very definition of a circular argument, one which only finds it’s
justification in self reference… Also
that as we know Paul was writing about before four hundred years before the
books which got into our Bible actually got into our Bible (but more about that
in a minute) and Judaism didn’t set what was to be included in the equivalent
of their ‘canon’ of Scripture until after the Christian Church did.
But if we do believe that
God was somehow in the writing of this book, then inspiration is a good place
to start.
Does the word Inspire make
you think of any other words that are very similar?
Respire
Expire
Conspire
All breathing words –
Respire, to breathe, Conspire ‘to
breathe together’, Expire to lose breath, and all from the same root:
Spirit. In both Hebrew and Greek the word
‘Spirit’ – Ruach in Hebrew and Pneuma in Greek can be variously translated as
Breath, wind, spirit, air.
So when St Paul talks of all
Scripture being inspired, he is talking about God breathing into the
Scriptures, that somehow God was present in the transmission of these
Scriptures – and (if we believe that Paul was somehow talking about the whole
canon of Scripture and not the undefined ‘Hebrew Bible’ of his day) then God
was in on the way that our Bibles came together as they did, and how they found
themselves looking like they do.
And that’s really what I
want to talk to you about this evening.
It’s just taken me a while to get here.
First of all I want you to
have one phrase in mind as we do all that we do here for the next few minutes
By Faith:
from Faith,
to Faith
& for Faith
Our Bibles come to us –
however we might want express Inspiration, and my point of being here this
evening is not to justify one way or another of thinking on that – By
Faith. Those who told the stories,
transmitted the stories between generations, wrote them down, compiled, edited,
did so because of their faith, sharing these things with others who were a part
of that faith or with the desire to draw people into that faith, and in order
to inspire and nurture faith.
So I would always recommend
praying before opening up a Bible, because it’s an act of faith to want to
truly discern the truth within our Scriptures – and besides if the Holy Spirit
was in on the writing of these books, surely it would be good to have the Holy
Spirit help us out with the understanding of it.
As Kate shared at Lunchtime,
the whole of this book shares one great theme – God’s Story of salvation. God’s relationship with human beings and his
will to draw all people to himself.
So what does that look
like? What does that mean? Well from the creation hymn at the start of
Genesis to the vision of the end in the Revelation to St John of Patmos all of
these seemingly disparate parts have this thread of God’s work in, through,
towards, because of and sometimes despite human beings. We have a huge variety of writing and a
number of developments, and lots of interpretations of what it means when God
interacts with people.
Of course what I should say
is that the Bible we have today is not a book, but a library of books. Biblios, the greek word from which we get
Bible is the plural of biblion meaning book.
So it’s books. That may seem an
obvious thing to say, but it’s amazing how easily we lump together the whole
book as if it’s one thing, one style, almost as if it was all written at one
time with one author. It wasn’t. (Though
we could claim God was the ultimate author, of course)
So some thought about that…
The Bible isn’t just one
kind of writing, it’s lots of different genres or styles. I’ve said before that if it had a trailer
like a movie we’d be here forever as the voice over said ‘War, passion, faith,
romance etc etc etc’ as we went through the type of thing we have in the bible.
Pop Quiz
How many books do we usually
have in our Bibles? 66 – 39 & 3x9…
Can you tell me how they’re
divided? Old Testament/New Testament (Covenant)
Does anyone know what
languages they were originally written in? Hebrew & Koine Greek
Can anyone think of a style
of writing within our Bibles that we might call a genre? Here's some I thought of....
Hymn/Worship
Poetry (including Erotic Poetry!)
Proverbs/Wisdom
Parables
History
Law
Letter
Vision/Apocalyptic
Gospel
Prophecy
Myth
Humour/Comedy
Horror!
Texts of Terror!
Romance
Genealogy
Look through these passagesof Scripture and with your neighbour or a few people around you talk about what
type of writing each one is. I am only
going to give you a couple of minutes with this one, so some of you might want
to start at the end and work forward and others at the beginning… Or just pick
a few out at random….
Just being aware of this
should make a difference to how we read our Bibles. When our only contact with the Bible is
having it read to us in Church week by week we have a very artificial, very
stilted and (to be blunt) wholly inadequate view of what the Bible contains –
particularly as so often we hear the Bible read in a certain type of Bible
Reading voice which makes it all seem like the same kind of thing. Not in these parishes, of course, but we have
all heard people stand up and read in a unique way that I like to call a
Biblical monotone which reduces our Bibles to one kind of genre, boredom…! (Yes I know that boredom isn’t a genre, but
it could be in some Churches)
Both on those occasions when
we read the Bible out loud and when we read the Bible every day (this is a good
discipline but may be more a statement of hope than of fact for many of us)
learning to discern the different styles of writing we are reading and
consciously thinking in terms of ‘this is a letter’ or ‘this is a hymn’ or even
within a letter, such as Paul to the Philippians or to the Ephesians or the Colossians, working out that Paul is
probably quoting hymns in his letters (for Instance ‘He is the image of the
invisible God’ or ‘Who being in very nature God did not consider equality with
God as something to be grasped’) can enrich our study of the Bible and prevent
us from falling into the trap of thinking ‘well, it’s Bible innit?’ and just
leaving it at that.
Something that has helped me
understand more of the genres and the background to the Bible has been an
Academic method of Bible Study called Source Criticism. Now I’m not going to get all academic on you
– I probably couldn’t if I tried anyway – but one of the things that has helped
me get to grips with the Bible, as well as causing me to scratch my head and
sometimes find myself wrestling with it’s meaning, is the process of
considering where it’s all come from.
What is the source of the Bible we have, how did it get into our
hands…and why is it in the form it is in.
I hope that by communicating some of my enthusiasm about this I might be
able to get you to think and even study some more of this so I want to just
give you a glimpse into this world of looking at the sources of our Biblical
Text. One from the Hebrew Bible and one
from our own Christian Scriptures we call the New Testament:
Isn’t that a beautiful
thing? Don’t worry you’ll have a copy of
it on the handout I will give out at the end so you can meditate upon it
later….
The Four Source Hypothesis or
Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis is a way of considering how the First Five books of
the Bible came to be in the form we have now.
This group of books known as the Pentateuch or Torah or the Books of
Moses (though that’s not a great description)
We have these five books
which are actually, if we could read Hebrew, quite different. In some parts of the book they quite
obviously use the name Jaweh (YHWH) or Jehovah it is translated to refer to
God. This is the ‘J’ tradition or
source. In some parts the term Elohim or
‘God of Hosts’ is the preferred reference – this is the ‘E’ source. In some of the Pentateuch we have a focus on
the ritualistic and temple based life of the Jewish Faith (even though there’s
not actually a temple in these books) which is often called ‘Priestly’ or ‘P’
tradition and lastly there seems to have been a fair amount of editing and the
later addition of the book of Deuteronomy which has been done by someone or
someone’s involved in the later life of the Temple and this is the ‘D’ source.
It’s by no means an exact
science and all of these things are mixed up.
It does help us consider the complex structure of just one bit of our
Bibles, though, and to perhaps glimpse some of the motivation for recording
particular bits of tradition, story, belief or ritual we find in those first
five books. Of course all of this isn’t
quite so neat as, on the whole, what these writers did was preserve and edit an
oral tradition that had been carefully handed down over centuries. Though the content of Scripture goes back
many hundreds of years, millions if we go right back to Creation, the written
form of Scripture didn’t appear until, we think, 900 BCE and without universal
literacy – or even basic literacy in most cases – things were transmitted by oral
tradition over many centuries, word for word until recorded later.
These five books were edited
very carefully together over many hundreds of years. Though we call them the books of Moses it is
a bit of a stretch to think that Moses wrote them all – partly because the
sources of them come from all over the place, and were passed down and
compiled, partly because there is reference to the life of a temple which Moses
hadn’t dreamt of let alone seen, and partly because in those books we have the
recording of the death of Moses. What
these books offer is a broad vision of God at work in the history of Israel
over hundreds, thousands of years, and (in my understanding) the Spirit at work
bringing together and weaving all these disparate parts to make the story of
salvation clearer for us.
Let’s look at a simple
example. Have a quick look at Genesis 1& 2
Can you spot the join?
Did you notice anything
about the difference between Chapter 1v1-2v3 and 2v4 and what follows?
They are two different
stories of creation in different orders.
In the first one Humanity comes last in the order of creation, in the
second humankind arrives quite early on in the process. They come from two different sources and
whilst one is very much a hymn to the creator with a repeated refrain ‘and
there was evening and there was morning’…. The other is much more concerned
with human involvement in the created order and the reason behind the creation
of man and woman.
We can do something similar
with the New Testament too. Again as an
example I want to show you something which I hope will start a process rather
than give you definitive answers…
We have four books we call
Gospels. Bible Scholars used to think
they were a unique form of literature, but study in the last 20 years has come
to a conclusion that the Gospels share a form with a genre called ‘Heroic
bibliography’ but that’s a distraction… We can talk about that another time if
you wish….
Three of our Gospels,
Matthew Mark and Luke, have much in common – they share stories, approaches,
some passages seem almost identical, some are very different. The fourth Gospel, John, is quite noticeably
different, the Greek is very precise and beautifully crafted, with a more
‘cosmic’ feel about it. It is thought
that John’s Gospel has, at least in part, the aim of contradicting some of the
Greek based ‘heresies’ that were springing up in the early Church and uses
similar language and imagery to what was called ‘Gnosticism’ whilst refuting
the elitist and dualistic beliefs of the Gnostics.
The other three have so much
in Common they are known as synoptic Gospels ‘syn’ meaning same or similar and
‘optic’ meaning seeing. They see the
same way. But why such similarities and
why the differences.
Simple viewpoint – Mark
comes first, Matthew next, borrowing from Mark and Luke next borrowing from
both. Plus both add their own
stories. I should say that by using the
names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John I am not actually definitively saying who
wrote them, but their different attributions given by the early Church. The authorship of these would be an evening,
or a number of evenings, in their own right…
Anyway, with the documents
we have it seems likely that Mark came first, the shortest Gospel and one from
which both Matthew and Luke seem to draw heavily. Yet there are also things that Matthew and
Luke seem to share that aren’t in Mark, so another source – from the German
‘Quelle’ meaning (imaginatively) source comes in. Quelle gives both Matthew and Luke material which they use in their own
way, sometimes almost identically sometimes very differently.
And there are even more
variations on this theory – with other sources unique to each Gospel
writer. Or set of writers, as it is
thought that some of the Gospels were compiled by communities rather than
written by individuals.
Anyway we can get more
complicated, and more complicated as you want – and though it might seem like
getting a bit fiddly for the sake of it, actually considering the content of
the Gospels and the way in which the writers wrote can add depth to our
understanding of these wonderful books…
For instance Mark is
shorter, the language full of urgency, the Greek not so carefully
constructed. The book is still very
carefully put together but he motivation seems to get the message out there
quickly before Jesus comes back and to give more and more people the chance to
know Jesus….
Matthew has a lot to do with
Israel, and Jesus is very
much the Jewish Messiah or king, the roaring lion of Judah come to reclaim the Jewish
people and to renew God’s chosen race in order that they may bring all people
back to God.
Luke is a gentile-friendly
text, seeking to bring out the truth to those who aren’t Jewish. He often explains Jewish traditions so that
outsiders will understand.
And I did a bit about John
earlier….
The purpose of all of this
is not to try and impress upon you how very clever I am for remembering my
undergraduate Biblical studies but because knowing more of our Bibles means we
can see the wonder of the way all these strands weave together. We have Gospels that meet different needs,
for the intellect, for the Spirit, for the Jews, for the non Jews, we have a
sense of urgency (Mark) and a sense of reflective meditation (John) and a if we
were to spread this approach to all of our Scriptures then we would see hidden
depths and be able to answer critics who talk about the Bible contradicting
itself or being out of date or made up or whatever. The Bible stands up to criticism and we
shouldn’t be afraid to take it to bits in order to see something more of how it
works… and so we can use it to put ourselves and our faith together….
I want to say a little bit
more about how the Bible got to us before I tie all of this up….
First of all I
mentioned a little way back we have a
Canon of Scripture… these are the books authorised to be included in the Bible
and we believe, again through the work of the Holy Spirit, are the books which
contain what we need to know God’s plan of salvation. This Canon of Scripture was fixed pretty much
by the end of the Fourth Century, but there has been some development and (as
seems to be the way in the Church) some difference in the way different
denominations treat different books.
The Church of England
recognises what is known pretty much universally as the ‘Protestant Canon’ of
the Bible – the sixty six books. We give
these books, since the 39 articles in 1563 a certain authority in life and
doctrine and the ordering of our faith.
There are other books which are given various levels of authority in
different traditions which we call the apocrypha or Deutero-Canonical
books. These books are considered to
have value in teaching us, and contain many passages and ideas that will be
familiar to us, but are not considered to have the full authority of the other
books of the Bible.
I could spend a long time
talking about the way in which books were included and excluded by the councils
and Bishops of the Church and how later people like Martin Luther didn’t like
the letter of James so never used it…. But that’s the kind of thing that I
recommend you go and study yourself, cos it is surprisingly fascinating….
My last thought is to do
with the way in which the Bible has made its way from it’s original languages
to the English translation we have. I
could again run a whole course on this – but it might be as well to give you a
handout…
Of course it doesn’t give
the story of just how much went into this story – suffering, division and pain
–for those such as Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale and others who were willing to
give their lives in order that the Bible might be available to people in a
language that they could understand.
Even going way back into the depths of Church history we can see
division and disagreement over the what went into the canon of Scripture and
what should stay out.
But in the end we have all
this history that gives us this wonderful book, this library of faith. For those of us who know God and long to know
God more we have a great gift which allows us to seek God in the pages of this
word. Knowing where it came from and why
it was put down as it has been can add to our own discernment and awareness of
the ways in which God works with and alongside human beings.
And in case you want a quick
summary of the Bible, just to take away with you – here’s the Bible in a minute
Archbishop Rowan Williams
said this, which I am going to finish my thoughts with…
I
believe that the Bible tells us what we could not otherwise know: it tells us
that God, the maker of the world, is committed to that world, and desires with
all his being to save it from disaster and the imprisonment of sin; that he
does this by calling a people to witness to him by their prayers and their
actions, in obedience to what he shows them of his will through the Law; that
he brings this work to completion when God the eternal Son, the eternal Word,
becomes human as Jesus of Nazareth, and offers his life to destroy or to “soak
up”, as you might say, the terrible consequences of our sin; and that Jesus is
raised from the tomb to call a new people together in the power of the Spirit,
who will show what kind of God God is in the quality of their life together and
their relation with him. This is revealed in the acts of God in history, and it
is once and for all set out in the Bible. There is no going round this or
behind it.
THIS IS the world of the Bible into which the Church has to be brought again
and again.
Christians have to be in the habit of looking into Scripture to find where they
are failing to understand and trust the God of the Bible and living in such a
way that no one outside the Church would guess what kind of God they served.
Nowhere else do we find the questions of God put to us so authoritatively and
directly.
To say that the Bible is inspired is to say at least that God’s Spirit comes to
us through the text to call us to repent and be converted. Some would want to
say further that we must also say certain things about the absolute accuracy of
every detail in Scripture if we believe in inspiration. … But I can say with
complete conviction that a Church that does not listen for God in the Bible,
and treat the Bible as the unique touchstone of truth about God and about us is
losing its identity, its raison d’être.
