The Bible has been in the press quite a bit recently, not necessarily for the right reasons. It has been used as a weapon by a group within the Church to try to beat the new Archbishop of Canterbury over the head and force him to stand down. Unfortunately for them they have picked a man steeped in the Bible so he is not going to be frightened off by their narrow interpretations. Behind the presenting argument about human sexuality, which is by no means as straightforward as they make out, are very different approaches to this library of books. The group of extreme evangelicals making all the noise have a very literalist approach, they are what is commonly called fundamentalists, which is itself a bit of a slippery term. Perhaps it would be helpful if I spend a few moments this morning cutting a path through some of this.

Firstly, let us be clear what the Bible is. The Bible is a library of books formed over something like a thousand years or more. The earliest bits have their roots in the mythology of the ancient near East, the Mesopotamian fertile plains, and were passed on through tribal cultures by word of mouth. It was only as the Hebrew people became a settled nation that these stories were written down. Other parts were added over the centuries that followed. Some of it is poetry with all the allusions and resonances that the poetic can offer; some of it is history written to make a particular point; some of it is myth - a particular form of story that tries to capture the essence of a belief and express it in an imaginative way. There are letters, socio-political comment and analysis, challenging words calling people to faithful living, strange things called Gospels which employ just about all the other forms from everywhere else in the Bible, and apocalyptic literature - a highly symbolic form that tries to hint at the future culmination of all things.

Individual books have been edited and changed over the years and occasionally we can see the traces of the blue pencil. There are three Isaiahs separated by centuries, not just one; two creation stories with different emphases, again dating from different times; two accounts of the giving of the Ten Commandments. All of it is rooted in particular times and unless we understand something of those times we cannot know what it is trying to say and allow that to speak to us today. It was also written in different languages, ancient Hebrew and Greek, which it goes without saying need translating. With such a vast array of styles, cultural backgrounds and times it is not surprising that it is not supposed to be taken as a book that dropped from the sky in its final form. That is what Muslims believe about the Qu’ran, every word was dictated by Allah to Muhammad, but it is not what mainstream Christianity believes about the Bible.

So the Bible is a collection of books that emerged over many centuries and which were shaped by different cultures and times. That said, as we read it we find that there is within it a stunning level of inspiration. That inspiration works on us as we allow the text to play around with our imaginations. It is as we let it live that it has profound things to say to us and that we discover its ability to communicate something divine to us. Letting it live means going deeper than just how it appears on the surface.

The trouble with fundamentalism is that it takes the Bible at too literal a level and to my mind doesn’t go deep enough or take enough account of the massive cultural differences between when it was written and now. It doesn’t take account of the startling advances in understanding that we have at our finger tips. It is now astounding to hear someone argue for the earth being created in 6 days and to talk as if dinosaurs didn’t exist. We need to go deeper than that. No one would seriously argue that the earth is flat today, so any talk about heaven above and hell below has to be figurative to say the least!

The term ‘fundamentalism’ actually comes from the beginning of the 20th century, from a conference in the United States where there was an attempt to focus on what a particular group thought to be the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It is now a shorthand for those who don’t take on board the discoveries of other disciplines like science and psychology, of literary criticism and the development of thought. It is a shorthand for everything that is illiberal. ‘Liberal’ is another one of those slippery terms. Whe I use the term I mean an attempt to combine different areas of study, to have truly joined up thinking. Being ‘liberal’ is not about being wishy washy or licentious, but a necessary part of living in the real world where different disciplines of study meet. The Bible is no more immune from that than anything else is.

In our Gospel reading (Matt 22:34-end), Jesus was approached by a group trying to trip him up. They fire a variety of questions at him and then one comes forward and tries to get him to say which bit of the sacred scriptures is more important than the others. They want him to declare what text is for him the defining issue. Jesus’ reply is that if you want to understand the scriptures, the Law in this case, you have to understand love. He tells them that they have to love God with all their soul and their neighbour as themselves.

That is how we are to approach the Bible, this vast array of books and styles. We are to approach it as people with a deep love for God which grows out of knowing that we are loved by God. We are to approach it as people who love their neighbours and know what it is to be loved. We do not stand on our own before this library, but as people in relationships.

Now talking about love can very easily slip into a shallow emotional haze. If we want to understand love we have to look at the God who comes close to us in Jesus, in his life, death and resurrection. That is the key to reading the Bible. It is interesting that Jesus follows his answer with a question, with a riddle, about the Messiah. To understand the Bible we have to be in communion with the God who inspires it and allows us the freedom to be inspired by it to let its text live so that it may speak beyond the centuries that formed it and the understandings that would otherwise confine and strangle it. To understand the Bible we have to be in communion with other people, so that it is rooted in human loving and can therefore inspire human living in all its fullness and complexity.

Today is Bible Sunday, a day to celebrate the power of this remarkable collection of texts to inspire and challenge, but they will only do that if we approach them through the two great commandments to love God and our neighbours. It was produced by living communities over many centuries and it can only be understood when it engages with our communal living in all its complexities. This will also help us go into it more deeply than the fundamentalist approach allows and therefore free us from the cages that narrowness locks us into.

© Ian Black 2002

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