The Bible in the Life of the Church: Canterbury Studies in Anglicanism

CANTERBURY STUDIES

IN ANGLICANISM

The Bible in the Life of the Church

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CANTERBURY STUDIES

IN ANGLICANISM

Series Editors: Martyn Percy and Ian Markham

The Bible in the Life of the Church

Edited by

Clare Amos

© The editor and contributors

First published in 2013 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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Contents

About the Contributors

Introduction (Clare Amos)

Part 1. Regional Reflections

1. Australian Anglicans and the Bible – A Reflection

Charles Sherlock

2. The Bible and the Fifth Mark of Mission – Reflections from the ‘British’ Group

Dave Allen

3. Pamoja Reading – In Community and in Context: Reflections from East Africa

Kabiro wa Gatumu

4. ‘Scripture in the Toolshed’: A Report from North America

Robert MacSwain

5. Bible as a Meeting Place

Jonathan G. May

6. The Bible in the Life of the Sudanese Church

Ellen F. Davis

Part 2. Wider Reflections

7. Mind the Gaps – Slipping between the Cracks in Bible Study

Stephen P. Lyon

8. The Hermeneutical Process in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia

David Moxon

9. Relentless Intimacy: The Peculiar Labour of an Anglican Biblical Scholar

Ellen Bradshaw Aitken

10. Reading the Scriptures Decently – and In Order

Charles Sherlock

11. Biblical Interpretative Horizons and Anglican Readers: An Empirical Enquiry

Andrew Village

12. Jesus, Mary, the Bible and the Orichas: An Experience of Anglican Diversity

Clara Luz Ajo

13. Vatican 2, Biblical Studies and the Anglican Church

Clare Amos

About the Contributors

Ellen Bradshaw Aitken is Dean of the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, where she also teaches Early Christian History and Literature. Her publications include Jesus’ Death in Early Christian Memory: The Poetics of the Passion (2004) and a co-edited volume, The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times (2008).

Clara Luz Ajo is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelical Seminary of Theology in Matanzas, Cuba, where she heads the Systematic Theology programme. She is an adviser of CIAET (International Anglican Centre of Theological Studies), which forms part of CETALC (The Commission for Theological Education for Latin America and the Caribbean). A lay member of the Episcopal Church in Cuba, she works actively in theological education in the diocese, preparing groups of lay ministers and preparing episcopal students for ordination.

David Allen is Director of Studies and tutor in New Testament at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education in Birmingham, UK. He previously worked as a youth and community worker and a mainframe computer programmer before moving into theological education. Much of his research concerns the way in which the New Testament uses the Hebrew Scriptures, and the intertextual and hermeneutical reading strategies this generates.

Clare Amos, an English Anglican, became Programme Co-ordinator and Executive for Interreligious Dialogue and Co-operation at the World Council of Churches in Geneva in September 2011. Previously she was Director for Theological Studies in the Anglican Communion Office, and in that capacity was involved in the work of the Bible in the Life of the Church project from its inception.

Ellen F. Davis is the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke University Divinity School, North Carolina. A lay member of The Episcopal Church, she is an active partner with the Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS) in building up theological education, including community health and community agriculture. She has long worked in interfaith dialogue, including with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Building Bridges seminars.

Kabiro Wa Gatumu is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and African Hermeneutics at St Paul’s University, Kenya. He is an ordained priest in the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) Diocese of Kirinyaga. He is also the co-ordinator of the African Theological Fellowship, East African Sub-Region. His publications include The Pauline Concept of Supernatural Powers: A Reading from the African Worldview (2008).

Stephen Lyon has worked within the Anglican Church for 35 years at parish, diocesan and national levels. He was Principal of a diocesan non-residential ordination training scheme before working in the national mission department of the Church of England. There he was responsible for co-ordinating its links with the wider Anglican Communion through the work of the mission agencies and diocesan Companion Links. After helping in the design of parts of the 2008 Lambeth Conference, Stephen was invited to act as the Co-ordinator of the Bible in the Life of the Church project.

Robert MacSwain is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at The School of Theology of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He previously served as Research Assistant to Archbishop George Carey at Lambeth Palace, as a parish priest in the Diocese of East Carolina, and as Ramsey Fellow and Chaplain at St Chad’s College, Durham University. His primary academic focus is on how theology, philosophy, ethics, literature, and spirituality all distinctively interact in the Anglican tradition. He has recently published Solved by Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith (2013).

Jonathan G. May teaches at the College of the Transfiguration, Grahamstown, South Africa, where he lectures in biblical studies and related disciplines. The College of the Transfiguration is the provincial theological college of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. He has a particular interest in the New Testament Letter of James.

David Moxon became The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Representative to the Holy See in 2011, and Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome. Previously he was Bishop of Waikato, the Senior Bishop of the New Zealand Dioceses, and an Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. He co-chairs the Anglican−Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC III), and was the Chair of the Bible in the Life of the Church project on behalf of the Anglican Communion. He is an honorary fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and a fellow of St Margaret’s College, Dunedin.

Charles Sherlock is an Anglican deacon and priest in active retirement after four decades of teaching theology and liturgy, most notably at Ridley College, Melbourne and Trinity College Theological School. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the MCD University of Divinity. Dr Sherlock played a major part in the preparation of A Prayer Book for Australia (1995). He is active in ecumenical dialogue, especially as a member of the Anglican−Roman Catholic International Commission since 1991.

Andrew Village is Reader in Practical and Empirical Theology, York St John University, UK. He served as a parish priest for nine years before joining Bangor University in 2004 and York St John University in 2007. His research interests include how the Bible is interpreted in the Church, religion and psychology, and studying congregations and clergy. His publications include The Bible and Lay People (2007), with Leslie Francis Preaching with all our Souls (2008), and The Mind of the Anglican Clergy (2009).

Introduction

The Bible is fundamental to Anglican life and witness. It has been so from the days of the Reformation. Even a cursory reading of the Thirty-Nine Articles makes it clear how the Reformers sought to root teaching and life deeply in Scripture, and the extensive use of Scripture in the worship offered in the Book of Common Prayer is well known and often commented on.

The 2008 ‘Signposts statement’ exploring the ‘Anglican Way’ believes that as Anglicans we are ‘Formed by Scripture’ and sets out four guiding principles that it suggests undergird Anglican identity.¹ These are:

As Anglicans we discern the voice of the living God in the Holy Scriptures, mediated by tradition and reason. We read the Bible together, corporately and individually, with a grateful and critical sense of the past, a vigorous engagement with the present and with patient hope for God’s future.

We cherish the whole of Scripture for every aspect of our lives, and we value the many ways in which it teaches us to follow Christ faithfully in a variety of contexts. We pray and sing the Scriptures through liturgy and hymnody. Lectionaries connect us with the breadth of the Bible, and through preaching we interpret and apply the fullness of Scripture to our shared life in the world.

Accepting their authority, we listen to the Scriptures with open hearts and attentive minds. They have shaped our rich inheritance – for example, the ecumenical creeds of the early Church, the Book of Common Prayer and Anglican formularies such as the Articles of Religion, catechisms and the Lambeth Quadrilateral.

In our proclamation and witness to the Word incarnate we value the tradition of scholarly engagement with the Scriptures from earliest centuries to the present day. We desire to be a true learning community as we live out our faith, looking to one another for wisdom, strength and hope on our journey. We constantly discover that new situations call for fresh expressions of a scripturally informed faith and spiritual life.²

Yet what we mean when we talk of the authority of Scripture in the life of the Church is not always clear; nor indeed exactly how we should interpret Scripture. We are well aware that over the last 20 years or so there have been a number of issues that seem to create tension or disagreement in the life of the Anglican Communion. It is arguable that in fact these are simply ‘presenting issues’ and what really underlies them is the question of the authority of the Bible and how it is appropriate to interpret it in the varied contexts in which we live as Anglicans.

It was due to the perceived need to wrestle seriously with Scripture and how it is understood in our ecclesial life that the Bible in the Life of the Church (BILC) project was established by the Anglican Consultative Council in 2009. The impetus for its establishment came initially from the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia (ACANZP), which had as a Church sought to engage constructively with the different understandings of Scripture that could be found in this Church and had found the process itself, as well as its conclusions, to be both helpful and hopeful. ACANZP then suggested that perhaps a similar but Communion-wide process would be well worth undertaking, and the Anglican Consultative Council agreed.

As a result the BILC project was established on a three-year basis, working closely with the Anglican Communion’s Department for Theological Studies. Archbishop David Moxon of New Zealand was appointed as chair of the project Steering Group, and Stephen Lyon became its co-ordinator. The work of the project was largely carried on through the endeavours of a number of Regional Groups based in different parts of the world. In November 2012 BILC reported to the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council held in Auckland, New Zealand. This report is available on the Anglican Communion website.³

As a mode of operating, the Regional Groups were asked to take two of the five Marks of Mission of the Anglican Communion,⁴ and explore the ways Anglicans engaged scripturally with each of them, starting with the Fifth Mark, ‘To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.’ Following their work on that they were invited the following year to take the Fourth Mark, ‘The mission of Christ to seek to transform unjust structures of society’. In each case a selection of biblical passages were suggested to form the basis for discussion. These were deliberately chosen to incorporate both Old and New Testament texts and biblical passages reflecting different kinds of genre. The passages relating to the Fifth Mark naturally included a focus on creation. When we explored the Fourth Mark we chose to offer two complementary sets of biblical passages – a series that linked to concerns of economic injustice and another that engaged with questions of gender justice. These topics were deliberately selected as the BILC Steering Group believed that they reflected issues that were considered both important but also relatively uncontentious in the wider Anglican Communion, and therefore an exploration of the biblical resources linked to each would not be skewed by strongly held preconceived ideas on the subjects.

What we were asking the Regional Groups to do was not simply or mainly discover what these passages told us about the subject in question but additionally to reflect on what their engagement with the various biblical texts told us about their understanding of Scripture, its authority and what were the criteria for its interpretation.

The current book is based on the work of BILC. Part 1 includes reflective reports from several Regional Groups that engaged with the project. These vary considerably in style and in length: some are more straightforward reports; others are wider reflections linked more generally to the work of one of the Regional Groups. Part 2 contains a number of essays from different geographical contexts exploring aspects of biblical interpretation. The authors of these pieces were involved with the work of BILC. Some of the essays are directly linked to the work of BILC – for example, that by Stephen Lyon entitled ‘Mind the Gaps’. In other cases the link is more tangential. The article by David Moxon explains the process that had taken place in New Zealand that then led to that Church proposing the establishment of BILC at the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council.

Running through many of the articles – and a theme of the project as a whole – is the question of the role of the reader in biblical interpretation. Given, of course, that the contexts of those who read the Bible are very different in different parts of the Anglican Communion, this then raises the question of how far context can or should be taken into account as we interpret the Bible.

A number of principles were drawn up by the Steering Group as a result of the work of BILC. It is worth reiterating them here:

1. Anglicans accord Scripture a central place in the life of the Church.

2. Anglicans value biblical scholarship while acknowledging that Scripture must also be read within the context of the Church’s practice in order for us to hear its fullest meaning.

3. Anglicans experience the Word of the living God through the words of Scripture as we participate in liturgy and worship.

4. Anglicans recognize that the application of Scripture to complex issues requires serious study and prayer.

5. Anglicans recognize that there is a healthy and necessary diversity of views on the interpretation of Scripture but that such diversity exists within limits.

6. Anglicans recognize that both the original contexts in which biblical texts were written and the contemporary cultural contexts in which they are heard are important to the way we read Scripture.

7. Anglicans recognize that Scripture ‘reads’ us as we read the Bible.

8. Anglicans recognize that we hold a great deal in common on these issues with our ecumenical partners.

9. Anglicans recognize that the dynamic interplay between Scripture, reason and tradition constitutes a classic Anglican way of viewing and approaching Scripture.

10. Anglicans recognize that every generation has to approach anew the task of engaging with and interpreting Scripture.

The work of BILC made clear that for virtually all those who would call themselves Anglicans, the Bible is of prime importance. It ‘reads us’ and will not let us go. It is indeed life-giving. We explored together the interface between Scripture and those missiological themes set out in the Marks of Mission, themes key for the life of the Church, of humanity and of our world. So it was and is appropriate to conclude by remembering the words of the great Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, who famously commented, noting John 20.31, that the very reason that Scripture was written was that human beings ‘might have life in his name’.

Clare Amos

Notes

1 ‘The Anglican Way: Signposts on a Common Journey’, the Anglican Communion Working Party on Theological Education, London: The Anglican Communion Office, 2008.

2 See www.anglicancommunion.org/ministry/theological/signposts/english.cfm.

3 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/ministry/theological/bible/docs/pdf/FULL.pdf.

4 1 To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom. 2 To teach, baptise and nurture new believers. 3 To respond to human need by loving service. 4 To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation. 5 To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. Adopted by meetings of the Anglican Consultative Council in 1984 and 1990. See more at: www.anglicancommunion.org/ministry/mission/fivemarks.cfm.

PART 1. Regional Reflections

1. Australian Anglicans and the Bible – A Reflection

Charles Sherlock

A Somewhat Generalized Overview

Major shifts have come about in Australian society since the mid-twentieth century: the Depression, successive wars – as Australians have fought in the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, East Timor and now Afghanistan – the emergence of ‘teenage’ subcultures, ongoing large-scale immigration, the revival of indigenous communities, colour TV, the internet, mobile phones and so on. The Catholic–Protestant sectarianism, which scarred the nation until the 1960s, has faded away, but due in part to the way Church and society have shifted steadily apart over the past half-century, widespread biblical illiteracy and a growing gap between ‘thoughtful’ theology and ‘popular-faith’ Christianity, has been the outcome. This sad claim (now a commonplace observation in both the general and Christian media) is supported by the work done on the BILC project in 2009–11, though evidence is also given of high capacity for effective and informed use of the Scriptures among theologically informed Australian Anglicans (both clergy and laypeople). Australian Anglicans generally hear the Scriptures in much the same way as other Anglicans, through the Sunday lectionary.⁵

Since 1977 this has been based on the