Today is Bible Sunday – the day when we give thanks for the Bible in the life of Christian faith. The bible is of course the most read book in the whole of Christian history, and it is deliberately excluded from the bestseller lists because it would skew the results.
It is not a normal kind of book however, it is more like a collection – a collection of 66 different books in the bible we use that was written over 1500 years. It has been Translated, so far, into 700 languages; and today 5.6 billion people have access to a Bible in their own language.
The Bible is the source and bedrock for what Christians believe and the means by which we come to know most clearly the saving love of God in Christ Jesus. Truly the Word of life. It is therefore indispensable to the Christian life.
However we must be careful of not thinking that the bible is God himself. We are not worshippers of the bible. We cannot reduce God to a book. We are worshippers of the living God revealed to us through Jesus Christ. I think of the bible as a giant signpost that points us to the living God.
We would do well to remember that when St Paul was writing in 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 about “scripture being God breathed” the new testament just didn’t exist at the time that he was writing. The books of scripture available to St Paul at the time would have been most of the old testament only. Paul would have been writing 2 Timothy in the latter part of the first century and it was not until the fourth century that the church came to agree which set of texts comprised Holy Scripture. Some texts were included whilst others were dismissed.
We might also want to reflect on the point that when Paul was writing his many letters in the new testament he probably had no idea that what he was writing would be deemed by the church subsequently to be holy scripture. It seems likely that Pauls letters got sent around different churches and they gained greatly in popularity and as a consequence of that the church came to believe that they were inspired texts and revelatory and included them in the Canon of scripture. It took a few centuries after Paul wrote his letters for them to be deemed Holy Scripture. Whilst the 27 texts of the new testament were largely agreed upon by the church from the 4th century, it was not until 1546 that the RC church approved the entire set of books comprising holy scripture.
One important thing to remember is that there is no statement about the bible in the creeds of the church. None of the creeds of the church ask us to believe in the bible in a particular way. Indeed it was not until the advent of the printing press in the 16th Century that the general public and most Pastors started to have access to the bible. It is fascinating that the church flourished around the world for 1,600 years without most people having a bible.
Evangelical Christians have a specific belief in the infallibility of the bible – that it is literally 100% true and correct in everything that it affirms. Whilst 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching it never uses the word ‘infallible’ or ‘inerrant’. I think that a better understanding of the Bible – that it is God breathed and useful for teaching – is to see it as pointing to Jesus – the true word of God made flesh.
All Scripture is the product of the writers’ ongoing and profound dialogue with God, but I would contend that the content of the books of the Bible also reflect the human circumstances of the authors. When weighing any part of scripture – such as the instructions in 1 Timothy that women should remain silent in church – we need to consider whether it looks like the character of Christ. If not, it is probably best to understand it as a reflection of the writer’s culture and worldview rather than the eternal word of God.
Because the bible matters so much to us, we should take the bible extremely seriously and seek to understand what it says but that does not mean that we should take it literally. Scripture contains many different genres of writing from hymns and poems, to letters, to pictorial visionary writings to biographical type literature. These all must be understood in their own terms and interpreted accordingly. Surely none of the biblical writers took dictation from God and were not copy typists from the divine hand. They were human beings writing out of their own experience of God in their own culture and time.
There is a tendency for some churches to assert that they are “bible believing churches” with the implication that others are not. I want to contend that we are a church that takes the bible extremely seriously. We at Christ Church Bexleyheath follow what is called the Lectionary. The Lectionary sets out exactly which readings from the bible should be followed week by week. It also means that we go through the whole bible from front to back every three years – years A, B and C. We are about to finish Year B, and will commence Year C on Advent Sunday. Our practice following the rules of the Church of England means that we go though the while bible every 3 years. It means that we can’t just preach on our favourite passages, we have to engage and preach on those texts that we find hard to understand and difficult. Many of the so called “bible believing” churches do not go though the bible is this systematic way.
The most difficult area of discussion around the bible is how we interpret the bible. The Roman Catholic church still maintains to this day that it alone has the correct interpretation but then…..so does everyone else. The truth of the matter is that nobody – no church, no denomination – has the perfect and correct interpretation of the bible. Very wrongly in my view some have used their interpretation of the bible to legitimise practices such as slavery, patriarchy and a band on women Pastors or Priests.
So when we approach the bible and read it, we should realise that interpreting the Holy Scripture is difficult – and so we need to come with humility, and we need to recognise our own lenses with which we read it – that we bring our own prejudices and our own preferences when we read the text. However, as tough as it might be we need to wrestle with the text and make sense of it.
I do think that following or using some kind of bible study notes is helpful so that you can use the notes to steer you in your thoughts. Even better of course is to meet up with others in a bible study group so that we can learn from each other and am always keen that we should have more home groups in our church and that more people should join them.
Every Sunday here in church, I would contend that the Word of God is preached, broken open, and seeking to ‘bring to life’ the words on the page that can fire and inspire us on our journey of faith.
So when we read the words of Paul to the Colossians, “Let the word of
Christ dwell in you richly”, that’s an encouragement to us to focus on, to
ponder, to dwell upon the Good News of Jesus Christ, and for that to influence
everything we do and everything we say. Let the word of Christ make its home in you and me. Make sure you’re well-stocked with the treasures of God’s word. Make sure the riches of the word of Christ take up residence in your life. Throughout the history of humankind, the Bible has provided a source of comfort, assurance and hope.