Homily for 27th July 2008
The Very Revd Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
Genesis 29:15-28
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52
We have, for some time, been reading the stories of the ancient founders and heroes of Hebrew Scripture. Today we read of Jacob finding a wife for himself, and being tricked into acquiring two wives. A few weeks back we read the story of how his father Isaac had also found a wife. At the end of that Eucharist someone suggested that these narratives are so demeaning of women that we should no longer read them. I have some sympathy with that position. This, of course, is what Thomas Jefferson did. He cut out from the Gospels all that he did not agree with, and left the moral teaching of Jesus as the Jefferson Bible. It needs to be said that the God in whom we trust, as we spend our greenbacks, is not the self revealing God of traditional Christianity. Like the creator who endows equal humanity with certain inalienable rights, he is the God of deist philosophy. It is that philosophy which provided the criteria for Jefferson's selection. This demonstrates the problem which comes about when we try to decide which part of Scripture to read, and which to leave unread. If I were to delete from the Bible all the passages I did not agree with, there might be not much left. I also believe that if I were to do it today, the results would be quite different from those I would have produced five years or ten years ago.
By contrast, the status of canonical scripture accorded to the texts we know as the Bible during the first four centuries of the Christian faith, suggests that the whole Bible is honoured as sacred text. The lectionaries for Eucharist and Daily Office, which came out of the English reformation, were arranged so that over the course of a year the whole old Testament was read and the new Testament was read twice. In the more recent revisions the reading is spread over three years, and we do now miss out the more egregiously awful passages, particularly those with a violent content.
So despite my sympathy with the position with which I began, I feel there is still something important about honouring the whole text, for otherwise the criteria for selection can be personal, idiosyncratic, and provided by philosophies and ideologies of a particular time and culture. But I also believe that what we read is of less importance than how we understand and how we interpret it.
One of the strangest beliefs of modern times (and it is of modern times and only slightly less strange than belief in the rapture) is the belief that every word and every phrase in the scripture has to be taken literally and at face value. This way of understanding scripture takes no account of the genre and period of writing of the texts. It takes no account of the overall theology of the texts, or of the differences between them. And it takes no account of the fact that until quite recently in our history, the texts were most often not interpreted literally.
There was an excellent series of Lectures delivered in England at the beginning of the sixties, which D.E. Nineham edited into a book under the title The Church's use of the Bible past and present. 1 The contributors show how, from the use of the methods of halakah and haggadah by the earliest Christian writers using the Hebrew Scriptures, through the use of allegorical interpretation by Paul and the Greek theologians, and then through the centuries, each age has used different methods in interpreting and preaching the scriptures for its own time. Literal interpretation, as it is now practiced by conservative Christians played little part in the tradition.
The really major challenge to understanding the scriptures began with the Enlightenment, first with Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, but in an acute way with Darwin, and the scientists in all branches who followed him. The problem was that the global understanding that they offered of our world and universe just did not fit with the global image offered by the Bible. Not only that, but the methods and criteria of the new knowledge were also applied to understanding the Bible itself. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, many Christians, including Anglicans, tried to understand the books of the Bible, not as a magic document with answers to all their questions, but as the record of the historical, religious and political experiences of people of the Jewish Christian tradition across two millennia, and particularly as a record of their response to the experience of the Risen Christ. This approach to the texts required, and requires, a respect for the original authors' intentions and meaning, and understanding of their sources and editorial methods, together with an understanding of the spiritual and secular contexts in which they wrote. From that understanding comes the task of interpreting and preaching the scriptures, using methods which continue to evolve, to find ways in which they ancient texts can help us in our spiritual and secular lives today. Using this method, usually called the historical-critical method, also makes it much easier to accommodate the knowledge and insights of the all the physical and human sciences.
I pause for a moment in my train of thought to show, in brief outline, how this method might work with our Hebrew Scripture lesson this morning. We know that the Book of Genesis is a series of collections of originally oral traditions about the life of the early tribes who eventually became the Jewish people. The stories are probably not about historical individuals. The persons named in the stories are the narrative bearers of their tribal history. So as we look at the story today, we should not expect it to tell us how to find wives, or even less how to treat women. We read it to understand something of the cultural background in which the later beliefs about God and life were beginning to be formed. Knowing the cultural background enables us to discern what can be useful insight for today, and what should remain just as history.
This way of working with scripture, however, was not universally accepted. There were and are those who closed their eyes (or at least their spiritual eyes) to the discoveries of the new sciences. They challenged, with fury, the work of Darwin and the geo-physicists, whose understanding of planet earth differed so much from the pictures in Genesis. They insisted that the Bible presented incontrovertible facts and history, and if Darwin and company had different opinions, they were wrong. Strangely, however, the very concepts of fact and history which they were using arose out of the enlightenment and subsequent scientific and cognitive quest. The very idea of objective fact and scientific history would have been unknown before then. This then is the bifurcation in understanding of scripture which is dividing the whole church (not just the Anglican Church today. I believe that the divide in scriptural interpretation is far deeper and far more uncrossable than all the historical divides between denominations and confessions.
As you will realize, I am firmly within the historical-critical tradition, and have been ever since studying scripture in high school under the guidance of a very enlightened and progressive teacher (who had studied under some of the contributors to the book I mentioned earlier). You may also realize that, in a contrary fashion, I am quite conservative liturgically. My understanding of liturgy as drama, rather than as ceremonial, may be somewhat different from that of many of my colleagues, but I believe that the form of our liturgy continues to serve us well in the process of making the Christian story known and available to our generation. Within the liturgy it is the sermon or homily which bears the task of enabling people to understand and interpret the whole of scripture and to find what insights it offers for our spiritual and secular lives today.
But I also value the Protestant tradition that Scripture is the property of the whole church, not just of the clergy and theologians. But for the whole church of the laity to understand the scripture, particularly within the historical critical tradition, requires hard work of study and thought. This is important because otherwise the lay members of the church depend on priests and theologians and can be misled by them. This is just what the reformers wanted to get away from.
So I believe that all members of the church need to read and study, individually and together both in the parish setting, and through the excellent courses made available through our seminary and universities (and I am sure through those of the places from which our many visitors come). This may sound like hard work, but let me offer you the insight of St Matthew:
"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it." 2
I believe that to understand and find real meaning in our scriptures is a treasure and a pearl of great price, worth every effort we need to make to pursue it.
As you know, our Bishops are presently meeting at Canterbury in the once in ten years Lambeth Conference. At least most of them are. Much is happening behind closed doors and we do not even know names or numbers of those present. But it seems that approximately 20% of the bishops have refused to take part. It may seem that homosexuality is the only item on the agenda, but in fact they are discussing other things like the United Nations millennium development Goals and Evangelism in the post-modern word. It is around the question of homosexuality, however, that the great divide has occurred. Behind that though, is always the question of how we use and interpret the Bible. The conservatives insist that a literal understanding of each word and phrase is necessary to be a true Christian and Anglican. The mainstream Anglican tradition has, since the 19th Century always worked with the historical critical method, which has been taught in most universities and seminaries But if you follow my logic, despite the rhetoric (one might say propaganda) of the debate, you will see that it is the mainstream liberal progressive Anglicans who are traditional, while it is the conservatives who are modernist and innovative.
1. S.P.C.K. 1963. The book is now out of print, but second hand copies are available.
2. Matthew 13:44-46
