Emmanuel Church, Bungay, Suffolk

The Minister's Sermons

"..and he closed the book" (Lk.4.20)" by Revd Roy Robinson - 21st November 2004 at Princes Street United Reformed Church		Roy Robinson's new book "The Thoughtful Guide to the Bible" has just been published. Read about it here.
We were taking a late October holiday in Majorca, at Puerto Pollensa. Whilst you were being battered by gales, we were basking in Mediterranean sunshine. On Sunday, we went along to the Catholic Church in the middle of the resort, knowing that there would be an Anglican English language Service. There was a quite a large and lively congregation. The preacher, an Anglican vicar, said something of no great profundity, that nonetheless has stuck in my mind ever since. He was preaching from the familiar story of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, how he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, from which he read: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor…" at the end of which, so we read in the King James version Bible, "and he closed the book and sat down and began to speak". A modern translation would have had: "And he rolled up the scroll and handed it to the attendant". I can't remember how the preacher exploited and expounded the words, "and he closed the book", but his theme has stuck in my head from which it's been wanting to get out ever since.
So what does it say to me that I would like to share with you? Some of you may know that I recently published a book about how the Bible may be understood in today's world, so I propose touching briefly on issues that are dealt with much more expansively in the book. About three or four centuries before Christ, the Jews had become "the people of the book". The Old Testament scriptures, particularly the Law and the Prophets, had become their authoritative rule-book, inspirational guide, the source of delight on which the pious Jew would meditate day and night. He believed that in its pages, God had revealed his perfect will for his people. Prior to this time, their religion hadn't been like that. It had depended entirely on the stories of its past as these were celebrated in festivals and recited round the camp-fire or in the local sanctuary. What we call the Oral Tradition stretched back a thousand years to the days of Abraham and Moses. For all that time, authority for what they believed and what they did was in that remembrance; only belatedly recorded in writing. The recording in writing was of ambivalent significance. Without it there would have been no such thing as the Old Testament scriptures. (With it, there was always the danger that more attention would be paid to the dead pages of a book than to the living God)
Why ambivalence? Because the writing coincided with a failure of nerve in the Jewish soul. They actually believed (i.e. some three to four centuries before Christ) that God had withdrawn His Spirit from them such that they could not expect any more prophets to appear amongst them. It was as if their hitherto living and lively faith had been locked up inside a book. This in part explains why both John and Jesus had such a hard time with the Jewish religious authorities. The voice crying in the wilderness represented the renewal of prophecy. The descent of the dove on Jesus at his baptism demonstrated a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. Filled with the Spirit, Jesus embodied God's word in a person rather than in a book. The scribes and the Pharisees couldn't see that - it didn't conform with their blinkered views based on the written word. In John's Gospel, chapter 5, we hear Jesus chiding them as to their misuse of the scriptures: "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life;[and it is they that testify on my behalf]. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life" (Jn.5.39-40). Their heads were buried so deep in the written Word that they didn't see the living Word of God in Person standing before them. Isn't there still the same danger today (especially within fundamentalist sects)?
But we rightly value the Scriptures; for so long as they represent stepping stones rather than road-blocks. May I be autobiographical for a moment? My grandparents valued the Bible as if the very words of God in print. One could have called them fundamentalists. Every breakfast concluded with a Bible reading, seated round the breakfast table, by the patriarch himself, followed by prayers for the events of the day to come. My father was brought up in that household; so when he survived the horrors of 1918 on the Western Front, he entered Spurgeon's College, where he would, I guess, have received a thoroughly evangelical formation. But as I was growing up, I watched him opening up to the fresh insights of Christian scholarship which was teaching us to understand the Bible in a quite different light. We can no longer sensibly read the Bible as our grandparents did. Fundamentalism leads us into a cul-de-sac from which there's no exit. It condemns the Church to increasing irrelevance in today's world.
We've reached the stage when we have to adopt a new paradigm. I didn't know how to avoid that word. It's a word much used by philosophers of science and increasingly by theologians. It stands for a complete world view which is accepted as the basis for how one sees life. Let me give you a simple example: 500 hundred years ago, our forbears had a simple view of the cosmos within which we live. The Earth was the centre of everything - they knew of no other planets, nothing of the galaxies spread throughout Space - they understood the Sun and Moon and stars as like fairy-lights strung out along the firmament, a dome dividing earth from the heavens, above which God and his angels dwelt. At the centre of the earth was humankind, the uniquely special object of God's creation and providence. This was a cosy little universe. That was their paradigm. Then came Copernicus, the Danish priest. His mathematical speculations suggested we'd got the picture upside down - that the Sun must be at the centre of everything, not the Earth. (He didn't know of anything beyond our solar system). So began the scientific revolution. Galileo proved Copernicus theory by practical demonstrations which even the Jesuit scientists in the Vatican couldn't deny. That entailed a huge paradigm shift, the consequences of which still continue, spectacularly, to this day. If you watch any of the scientific programmes on TV, you will understand. As we know now, Earth is like a tiny speck of dust within a solar system itself part of a spiral arm way out in the suburbs of the Milky Way galaxy, which is itself just one of billions of galaxies in a universe of incomprehensibly huge dimensions.
A similar paradigm shift has affected our understanding of the Bible. It stems from the same causes that sparked off the scientific revolution. It all belongs to the same shifts in human thinking which we dub the Renaissance and its grandchild the Enlightenment, with the Reformation sandwiched in between. It's the period within which Western peoples appear to have woken up (as if from a long deep sleep, Rip van Winkle-like)and said, "Hey chaps, God gave us brains, let's use them." And use them they did. Hitherto they had believed everything on trust. They started asking critical questions. At the turn of the 17th - 18th Centuries, two Frenchmen, Richard Simon, a priest, and Jean Astruc, a doctor, made some critical observations regarding the five so-called Books of Moses. It had been traditionally supposed that Moses had written every word of them by dictation from God. Simon and Astruc asked, how came Moses to write the report of his own death? How was it that he used two different words for God, the Hebrew Elohim and Yahweh, and that these accounted for the repetitions and the contradictions to be found within one and the same story? Other scholars went on to discern within these books at least four different hands, each with their own outlook and theology. Most or all of the books of the Old Testament are anonymous; their writing was complex, a matter of gradual accumulation over many centuries.
The same critical research went into the Gospels. There's no literature in the world that has been subjected to such minuscule scrutiny. With the result that we see them quite differently than did our grandparents. They weren't directly written by apostles of Jesus, but rather by the preachers and teachers of the second or third Christian generations. What we have in the Gospels is not direct evidence of Jesus - as if somebody had followed him about with a Camcorder - but rather how the Church in various parts of the Middle East remembered him in their own day. The Gospel writers (all of them anonymous) were doing much as preachers do today: they take an episode or a saying of Jesus and try to relate it to life in our own times. To give one example, that of Matthew. The Gospel of that name was probably written in Syria, the hinterland lying behind Antioch, in the 80s or 90s AD, for a congregation originally wholly Jewish but in which Gentile converts to the faith were now outnumbering them. It was a congregation facing much hostility, even persecution. Its author took the stories and sayings of Jesus and slanted them (we might say "spun" them) for the particular needs of this congregation.
It used to be supposed that Protestants believe in the Bible whilst Catholics go rather by Tradition. Neither of these suppositions is accurate. We realize now that the Judeo-Christian Tradition, by which we indicate how the faith has been handed on from generation to generation, covering the entire time-span from the days of Abraham until here and now constitutes one continuous stream. When we meet for worship, when we seek to teach our children, we are part of what began with the call of Abraham. The Bible represents the moment when the traditions of the past, carried for centuries in the hearts and minds of the Jews, or in the case of Christians for decades, came to be written down. So we should say, not: "In the beginning was the Bible", but rather, "In the beginning was the Tradition", the Bible being a part of that Tradition. When I was a child, wholly cocooned within the life of the Church, I used to suppose that the Bible represented a sort of magical "never-never-land", occupying a certain holy space quite other than our own. The Bible characters weren't real "flesh and blood" people, but figures in a stained-glass window. It gradually dawned that that was not the case - that they were real people of flesh and blood, with whom we can be in dialogue. We are in the same tradition; simply two thousand years further down the road. This has consequences. I love the apostle Paul, for he both inspires me and appals me. In dialogue, I can say, "Paul, thank you for 1 Corinthians 13 - what a wonderful insight you had into the nature of true love - but, Paul, you did say some absurd things about women. What was your problem?"
Whatever issues face us, we will always, as Christians, begin our search within the pages of the Bible. These are the foundational records of the Church. They give us the ground plan. We are called to build on that foundation. Of course, through the millennia that separate us from the early Christians, we have all sorts of new tools and techniques to hand. We can use materials unheard of by the apostles: the spiritual equivalents of steel and alloys and plastics, with which we may build structures inconceivable two millennia ago. Today we face issues inconceivable previously: things like genetic modification of crops, stem cell research from which new limbs could be grown to replace lost ones; replacement of faulty genes that might eradicate the genetic disorders that afflict new-born children; not to speak of overpopulation, diminution of resources, global warming, war and terrorism that threaten the very survival of humankind. About many of these, the Bible tells us nothing. None of them are resolvable by quoting appropriate (often wholly inappropriate) verses from the Bible. Our grandparents assumed that the Bible offered us solutions to every problem; it doesn't. Instead today, we have to supplement what the Bible tells us with the huge resources of modern knowledge. There comes a time when we have "to close the book" and move on.
God's word, as spoken by prophets or apostles long ago, was always specific to a particular time, a particular place, in a particular situation. We could pick out some such words that are of universal significance, applicable to every time and situation - you can readily think of them, such as "For God so loved the world…" But most are not like that. For example, we would not know anything at all as to what Jesus thought about marriage and divorce had a man in the crowd not asked him: Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? His reply apparently showed a total condemnation of divorce and remarriage, but which, when you ask what was meant by "hardness of heart" or by "what God has joined" begs many a question. To base a huge weight of Canon Law (as the Roman Catholic Church does) on this one episode is, I think, quite unjustifiable. It can never be Christian to imprison people into loveless, sometimes violent, relation-ships. There comes a time when we have "to close the book" and seek what is God's word to us for now. Surely, for us, all truth is God's truth. When scientists cracked how heredity actually works and unravelled the genetic code, they were discovering how evolution actually operates. That is truth about God's creation, knowledge that has been hidden to every human being who ever lived until our life-time.
A few years ago, Dr. Leslie Houlden was our speaker at the Norfolk Theological Society. He said this: "I find the assumption odd that God spoke the last word on every matter two thousand years ago." So do I. I believe with Galileo that beside God's Book, the Bible, there is also, God's Book of Nature. Today we would call it the Book of Science. Christianity stands today at a cross-roads: if it clings to fundamentalism, or evangelicalism as many prefer to call it, I believe that Christianity is headed down a cul-de-sac, destined for extinction. But if we will accept the picture that Christian scholarship has depicted of how the Bible was written and what is its core message, the Gospel, then it may yet play, we may yet play, a full part in the world of the 21st Century as it seeks to resolve the huge problems that confront humankind. We shall not lock God up in a book, but heed his Spirit at work in the world.