The Bible: Believing God’s Word Written (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 2.1)
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles by The Rev. Dr. Stephen Noll, titled “The Jerusalem Declaration: A Personal Commentary.” In this series, Dr. Noll draws on decades of experience in the GAFCON movement, especially his role as Secretary of the Statement group that drafted the Jerusalem Declaration and its accompanying statement.
We declare that the Anglican Communion will be reordered, with only one foundation of communion, namely the Holy Bible…
“The Future Has Arrived”
As noted in my historical preface (“From Canterbury to Jerusalem”), the overriding concern of the Global South bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference was the centrality of the Bible in the church over against secular assumptions of modernity, epitomized in the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality. In its recent statement, the Gafcon Primates make this concern foundational to the church’s identity and authority, in accordance with St. Paul’s dictum that the household of God is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20).
Sponsored
The Global Anglican Communion will be guided, the Primates continue, by the Jerusalem Declaration and its second clause, which reads:
2. We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.
In the following essay (in two parts), I plan to examine the meaning and significance of Clause 2, both in its historical grounding and its current application.
Believing the Bible
The Scripture clause opens with the words we believe. Belief and trust in God’s Word are essential to the gospel (de fide). This statement may seem a no-brainer to many church people, but in much of the world, owning and teaching from the Bible is a provocative and life-threatening act; even in the West today, speech codes are beginning to restrict the open statement of biblical truth.
Yet the Bible remains the best-selling book in the world, and millions “pick up and read it” and receive salvation, following the example of St. Augustine in hisConfessions. Personally, I responded to God’s call at the age of twenty. I had grown up outside the church and had never picked up the Bible. When I came to Christ and was baptized, a door opened for me to enter what Karl Barth called “the strange new world within the Bible.” I have been reading and teaching it ever since.
The Dynamic Movement of Scripture
Clause 2 has two sentences. Taken together, they capture the twofold dynamic of the Bible, moving from God’s gracious self-revelation to our thankful response. We see this dynamic repeated each week in the antiphon between priest and people:
“The Word of the Lord”; “thanks be to God.”
“The Gospel of the Lord”; “praise to you, Lord Christ.”
We can find this same dialectic in the classic Anglican Collect on Scripture, from the Advent Collects, written by Archbishop Cranmer himself:
Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them…
It has been a commonplace in many Western churches and seminaries to drive a wedge between Jesus Christ, the living Word, and the Bible, a written word of men, time-bound and moribund “like a patient etherized upon a table” (T.S. Eliot). The Jerusalem Declaration stands athwart this view and says No!, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Bible are of one piece, and as Christ is alive, so also God’s Word is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12).
Sola Scriptura: The Authority of Scripture
We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation.
The first sentence of Clause 2 brings together topics found in the Thirty-nine Articles:
- The primacy of God’s Word written: “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written…” (Article 20).
- The inspiration, clarity, and coherence of the canon of Scripture in two Testaments: “In the name of the Holy Scripture, we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church. (Article 6); and “The Old Testament is not contrary to the new; for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ…” (Article 7).
- The sufficiency of God’s Word to save: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Article 6).
God is the author of Scripture. Just as God comes first in the Commandments and the Creeds, God’s Word also stands above all other words and wisdom. The Reformation phrase sola scriptura (“scripture alone”)captures the primacy of the Bible as God’s Word written. We can, however, easily misuse the term sola scriptura. In his book Biblical Authority After Babel, Kevin Vanhoozer comments:
It is not that Scripture is alone in the sense that it is the sole source of theology [he dubs this view solo scriptura]; rather, Scripture “alone” is the primary or supreme authority in theology. “Scripture alone” excludes rivals such as the teaching authority of the church and church tradition when it comes to the role of infallible (magisterial) authority. It does not eliminate other sources and resources of theology altogether. The challenge for those who wish to maintain sola scriptura is to locate it rightly in the broader pattern or economy as the primal and final but not the sole authority.
Kevin Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After Babel, p. 111
It is in this sense that the Anglican Reformers were prepared to “prove” any doctrine or tradition by “certain warrant of Scripture.” It is this understanding of sola scriptura that I infer from the “Kigali Commitment” of GAFCON IV, which states:
The Bible is God’s Word written, breathed out by God as it was written by his faithful messengers (2 Timothy 3:16). It carries God’s own authority, is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom.
The Inspiration of Scripture
The Bible is God’s word written by men but inspired by God, its final author. There is no dichotomy of speech and text because both speaking and writing are the work of the Holy Spirit, as stated in the two New Testament proof-texts on Scripture:
No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
2 Peter 1:20-21
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17
In these passages, Peter and Paul are referring to the Old Testament Scripture, which was already congealing in its Hebrew and Greek canons. Soon after the apostolic age, the church recognized the same inspired nature of the Gospels and Epistles and bound them, figuratively and literally, with the Old Testament in one Bible. Together, they became privileged for use in its liturgy, preaching, and teaching.
The Clarity of Scripture
Two implications follow from the doctrine of divine inspiration: clarity and coherence.
The clarity of God’s Word derives from the truthfulness of God, as testified by the Psalmist: “The sum of your word is truth” (Psalm 119:160). At the Last Supper, Jesus breathes on the apostles the Spirit of Truth, and he prays to the Father, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 20:22; 17:17). Based on this magisterial commission, apostolicity, direct or indirect, became the criterion for inclusion in the New Testament canon.
The Coherence of Scripture
What complicates a simple reading of the Bible from cover to cover is the multiplicity of its authors, the diversity of its literary genres, and its two Testaments, one looking to the Christ who is to come and the other testifying to the Christ who has come. The coherence of the canonical books of the Bible assures us that these two streams converge in the economy of salvation in Jesus Christ from creation to consummation. The Letter to the Hebrews, itself a tour de force of biblical interpretation, states:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
Hebrews 1:1-2
From the early days of the church to the present, there have been those who sought to simplify the Bible’s message by excising the Old Testament and parts of the New (Marcion) or by reducing it according to some historical or philosophical schema (Schleiermacher). Credal Christians resist such shortcuts and confess with Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
I was influenced during my teaching career by the work of Prof. Brevard Childs of Yale University. Childs’ Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments seeks to identify the “discrete witness” of each Testament, as part of the Church’s “rule of faith.” Childs’s influence on a new generation of scholars attuned to reading Scripture holistically has been immense and beneficial.
The Sufficiency of the Bible in the Anglican Formularies
We find the authoritative Anglican definition of “sufficiency” in Article 6:
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.
The sufficiency of God’s inspired Word refers to its purpose, which is “to make one wise for salvation” (2 Tim 3:15). No one was more emphatic on the goal of Bible reading than Thomas Cranmer. In the very first sentence of the First Book of Homilies, titled “Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” Cranmer writes:
Unto a Christian man, there can be nothing either more necessary or profitable than the knowledge of Holy Scripture; forasmuch as in it is contained God’s true word, setting forth his glory, and also man’s duty. And there is no truth nor doctrine, necessary for our justification and everlasting salvation, but that it is or may be, drawn out of that fountain and well of truth.
At their ordination, the bishop examines the Anglican clergy and asks them specifically to uphold the doctrine and discipline of Scripture:
Bishop: Are you persuaded that the holy Scriptures contain sufficiently all doctrine required of necessity for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ? …
Answer. I am so persuaded, and have so determined by God’s grace.
The Reformers and Holy Writ
The Anglican Reformers included a wide range of biblical mandates, doctrinal and moral —“God’s glory and man’s duty”—as necessary truths. It was the weight of this responsibility that led the founders of Gafcon to conclude that they had no other course but to separate from those teachers who promoted an explicit violation of Scripture, which excludes a believer from eternal life with God (1 Cor. 6:9; Eph. 5:5; Jude 4-8).
Not every teaching of the Bible involves a “salvation issue,” as explained by Richard Hooker in his classic work The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity:
Two opinions there are concerning the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, each opposite to the other, and both repugnant to the truth. Rome teaches Scripture to be so insufficient that, unless traditions were added, it would not contain all revealed and supernatural truth necessary for the children of men in this life to know they may in the next be saved. Others [Hooker’s Puritan opponents], justly condemning this opinion, grow likewise into an opposite extremity, as if Scripture did not contain all things necessary for salvation, but indeed all things simply.
Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I.8.7
Hooker’s distinction applies in Article 20, which speaks of the Church’s role as “witness and keeper of Holy Writ.” According to this Article, the Church has discretionary authority in its “rites and ceremonies” and in secondary “controversies of faith” so long as it does not “enforce anything to be believed for the necessity of Salvation.”
Clauses 11-13 of the Jerusalem Declaration will lay out a template for the Global Anglican Communion to discern how it is to relate to other Christian churches ecumenically and to confessing Anglican churches, which display a variety of views and practices, and to churches that are Anglican in name but which violate the clear teaching of Holy Writ.
Concluding Prayer
Having examined the nature of the Bible as God’s Word written, in the second part of this examination of Clause 2, I shall look at how we as believers receive and apply that Word. For now, let us conclude by praying Cranmer’s great scripture collect in its entirety, that in believing the Bible we may receive comfort and hold fast to the gospel of Christ:
Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and the comfort of your holy Word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Image: Scripture Study at GAFCON 2008, by Peter Frank. Used with permission. Digital editing by Peter Johnston and Jacob Davis.
The Bible: Walking in God’s Word (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 2.2)
The Jerusalem Declaration offers a set of principles to guide us in our Christian walk, as outlined in the second sentence of Clause 2: “The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.”
Confessing the Gospel in Our Day (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 1)
The Jerusalem Declaration is the confessional basis for a reformed and reordered Communion. It is not only a memento of the first GAFCON in 2008, but it is also the ongoing “contemporary standard for Anglican identity” for individual and corporate membership in the Global Anglican Communion.
