Encountering the Bible

By Andrew Village

Seeking to ask the questions which people ask about the relevance of the Bible to today's Church, this book aims to equip those who want to make the Bible more useful and to help them explore the difficulties of trying to use an ancient text as a guide for contemporary faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Release date: Jun 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780334053996

Book preview

Preface

Clearing out the attic, loft or garden shed is wearisome and delightful. Wearisome because sorting through piles of unused junk and putting most of it back where it was seems to be a pointless exercise. The idea of having a cup of tea first seems quite sensible. After the tea the urgency goes out of the job and we decide to leave it until ‘some other time’, when more tea will usually help us to avoid the task again, and allow the pile to grow even larger. When we do actually get stuck into the job it can be delightful to find things we forgot we had. Some are things that were in constant use before life moved on and they became redundant: the yogurt-maker (before you stopped making yogurt), the record collection (before the digital age), or the floppy disk drive (before computers could travel with us). You wonder if they might still be of use either for what they are intended or for some other novel function. Some are objects that were never useful because they weren’t meant to be useful: the children’s first drawings, old photographs, scrapbooks and unsorted scraps that speak powerfully about people and moments in our lives. Perhaps we pause the work, sit down and browse for a while, lost in a different time and place. Finally we pack it all away, switch off the light, close the hatch or door, and return to normal life.

For many Christians the Bible is like the stuff in our attic. We know where it is and we have a vague idea of what’s in it, but we seldom venture up there. When we do open it up the task of sorting seems daunting, and the more we look at it the more we wonder if we need all this stuff. Given that we don’t seem to use it much, wouldn’t it be better to just get rid of it? The idea of jettisoning the Bible from the Church seems like heresy, which it probably is, so what we tend to do is put it back in the attic of our lives and quietly tiptoe away. We like to know it’s there, and from time to time we might occasionally riffle through it for old time’s sake, but it doesn’t seem to have much use in our day-to-day lives.

This picture of the Bible is not true for all Christians, of course, and some use it all the time. They love its contents and read it with great expectation on most days of their lives, often using excellent study guides or devotional material. This book is not primarily intended for such people, unless they are finding that their reading has become disconnected from reality and their guides a little too simplistic and monotonous. It’s designed for people who would like the Bible to be something that enriches and transforms their faith, rather than something they know about vaguely but keep at arm’s length. To do that they may need to ask some penetrating questions, so they can decide what the Bible is, what it means to them and how they can make it an important part of their life.

For over a decade I have been investigating and thinking about how people read and understand the Bible, especially ‘ordinary’ readers who are not trained in academic theology or biblical studies. I have been helped by many people who have talked to me and completed my questionnaires, and I am grateful to them all. I do not report results as such here, but my thinking has been informed by what I and others have discovered, and by a host of other writers. This book in particular has received useful comments from colleagues and friends, including some ‘ordinary’ readers who kindly read the whole thing in draft: thank you, especially Bridget and Stephen. I would also like to thank my father Roy and my father-in-law John, who in very different ways, and unbeknown to them, have helped me to explore how the Bible might be useful within and beyond the Church.

Andrew Village

November 2015

1

Useful Stuff? Do We Still Need the Bible?

This book is intended for people who wonder if we need the Bible at all, rather than those who already read and use it. If you have read the Preface (few people do) you will know that I am using the metaphor of ‘sorting out the attic’ as a way of investigating what the Bible might mean for you. Attics are full of stuff, some of which is useful (or used to be useful) and some of which is deeply personal and poignant. The Bible is full of stuff, some of which looks old and useless, some of which looks as if it might be useful for something, and some of which is clearly precious and should be labelled ‘Keep for All Time’. The difference between the Bible and the stuff in our attic is that the Bible seems to be all of a piece: a single book rather than a box of books. We can easily sort through a box of old books in the attic and keep some while throwing out the rest, but can we do that with the different books of the Bible? Isn’t it all or nothing? Surely, we can’t go through our Bibles tearing out the bits we don’t like and leaving behind an odd-looking collection of mutilated scraps from here and there. Does that mean, then, that we have to keep it all and treat it all in the same way? If the Bible is still useful, how is it useful and could some bits be more useful than others?

When we pull something out of a pile of stuff in the attic we first have to decide what it is (not always easy with some long-forgotten paraphernalia) before we decide whether it might still be useful. One way of doing that is to try and remember why we had it in the first place. So, first we need to remind ourselves briefly what the Bible is and how it came to be.

What is the Bible?

A simple enough question, you may think. Perhaps before you read what I think it is, you should pause and dive into the first ‘To do’ box.

TO DO

Imagine that someone who is not at all religious asks you what the Bible is. How would you answer without using any ‘religious’ language such as ‘word of God’, ‘revelation’ or ‘Scripture’?

The Bible is a collection of 66 books divided into two parts: the Old Testament (39 books, mostly written originally in Hebrew) and the New Testament (27 books written originally in Greek). Although there are many translations and some variations in the original-­language versions, the text of the Bible is remarkably consistent across different Christian traditions, and has been pretty much unchanged for almost two thousand years. There is some variation in the size of the collection because the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions include some Jewish writings, the Apocrypha (46 or 47 books mostly written originally in Greek), that are absent from Protestant Bibles. This fact alone reminds us that the Bible did not emerge ready-formed in an instant. It is the product of many different authors from different cultures and different times. The earliest writing may date back to the eighth century bc and the last books were produced in the first or second century ad. When you translate that to our times it is roughly equivalent of the span of time from the Norman Conquest to the Second World War.

The Bible, therefore, is in some ways more like a box of books than a single book, and very different from, say, the Qur’an, which was written in one language by one person in a few years at most. The Bible has epic sagas running over generations, rules of life, history, poetry, political commentary, oracles, visions, biography, letters and more besides. Whatever else it is, the Bible is certainly a bag of mixed stuff.

Where did the Bible come from?

Around three thousand years ago people began to write down things that previously they may have passed on only by word of mouth. The material in the Bible emerged at a time when great empires were forming across what we now call the Middle East. Writing meant the message could be detached from the messenger and widely circulated. It could travel anonymously (useful if your message might get you in trouble with powerful people) and be copied multiple times by people who might otherwise not be able to remember it very well. Writing was useful for recording the great deeds of warrior kings, or the day-to-day commerce of an empire. It was also useful for recording religious ideas and faith histories.

In the century or so before and after the birth of Jesus there were many Jewish and Christian ‘writings’ in circulation, mostly on papyrus scrolls. Not all of these became part of the Bible, and the process by which the Church arrived at a definitive list was long and complicated. The list of ‘canonical’ books was not initially decided at a meeting or council, but evolved as the first Christians read and used both the Jewish writings they had inherited and the gospels or letters produced by the new movement as it spread around the Mediterranean world. Those that were read most often in worship were copied and treated with great reverence, while others fell by the wayside and were forgotten. Great store was set by those writings that were thought to have originated from the Apostles, or from authors such as Mark or Luke, who were thought to be companions of Peter or Paul. The book of Revelation was originally associated with the Apostle John and accepted despite its rather ‘un-apostolic’ content.

Popularity and authenticity were not the only criteria by which books were deemed to carry particular authority. As time went on there was a growing consensus of what was in line with the new faith and what was not. This intuitive sense of what was at the heart of the faith (referred to in Latin as sensus fidei) promoted some writings and led to fierce debates over others. Hebrews was of unknown authorship but accepted by the Western Church because it clearly upheld the faith taught by the Apostles.

The question of what should be ‘in’ and what should be ‘out’ was given urgency by the rise of different movements within the Church that pressed for a radically different collection of sacred writings (McDonald, 2007, ch. 11). Marcion, a teacher in the church in Rome around the middle of the second century, suggested that Christians should abandon Jewish Scriptures and rely only on the letters of Paul and the Gospel of his companion Luke. He gained a lot of followers, but ultimately the Church rejected his view because the Jewish sacred writings were considered essential to understanding the life and teachings of Jesus. A crucial principle was upheld: the God of Christians was the same God that was worshipped by Jews, and their writings were witnesses to the work of God before the coming of Jesus.

Around the same time in what is now Turkey, a convert called Montanus claimed that the Holy Spirit was directly guiding him and others to produce oracles and new revelations about God. Some of these seemed to give a message that was different from the earlier writings, yet not wholly unbelievable or obviously incompatible with the growing sensus fidei. Suddenly the issue of what constituted ‘Scripture’, and what did not, became urgent because it was clear that there would always be different claims about what was truly from God and what was entirely human invention.

For the next two hundred years or more there were debates about which of the newly emerging Christian writings should be recognized as representing the faith of the first Apostles, and therefore Christian truth. The first time a list of the contents of the New Testament as we have it today was published was in ad 367, when Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria included it in a letter to the churches in Egypt. Eventually the list or ‘canon’ of Scripture became closed, and there were no more additions or deletions. This did not stop debates, however, which rumbled on into the Reformation and beyond. Martin Luther was so dismissive of James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation that some Lutheran Bibles relegated these books to an appendix.

TO DO

Are there any parts of the Bible you think we could do without? What are your favourite bits, and why?

For Christians, the issue of which books should be in the Bible is not simply