The Bible: Walking in God’s Word (Jerusalem Declaration Clause 2.2)
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a series of articles by 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.
For those who believe the Bible to be God’s Word written, an important question arises: how do we, as believers, obey that Word? Psalm 119, a profound meditation on God’s Word, answers this way: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105, KJV).
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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.
This sentence has two parts, the first about the use of the Bible and the second about its interpretation. The uses of the Bible appear in a sequence echoing Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s prayer to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures.
The Use of the Bible
Translation
Unlike the Quran, fixed in Arabic, the biblical word is translatable. We, as Westerners, take for granted the easy accessibility of the biblical text in our local language. This was not always so. Translation from the original languages was key to opening the Gospel to every tribe, language, people, and nation, and it often came at a price.
I happened to be in London on the 500th anniversary of the birth of William Tyndale, translator and martyr, and listened with a headset to his straightforward, comprehensible English translation, which is the fountainhead of our “standard” versions.
In Uganda, the early missionary George Pilkington translated the Bible into Luganda, with the first converts called “readers.” Rural Ugandans often own this one Book in their local language, which they bring to church, having memorized portions of liturgy and hymnody. The work of reaching every people and tribe continues to this day through societies like the Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Reading
Reading the Bible comes in a variety of settings: privately in the prayer closet, communally in the study group, and publicly in the sanctuary. The genius of the Book of Common Prayer is that it presents, as Cranmer explains,
…the very pure Word of God, the holy Scriptures, or that which is agreeable to the same; and that in such a Language and Order as is most easy and plain for the understanding of the Readers and Hearers.
Every Prayer Book service includes Scripture texts, not to mention the lectionary course of readings for private devotion.
Preaching and teaching
As noted in Part One, there is a dynamic give-and-take in the Bible as God’s Word. Paul asks,
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
Rom 10:14
The church ordains the clergy to preach the Word for conversion (kerygma) and edification (catechesis). The people are to come ready, with “ears to hear” the Word from the lessons and sermon.
Obeying
Hearing is one thing, listening another, and heeding yet another. The preacher’s call is to “reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2). The pastor can only fulfill the hard part of this calling by gaining the trust of the congregation over time, convincing them that it is not he but God who is speaking from the pulpit. St. Paul describes his own ministry in this way:
Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.
2 Corinthians 4:1-2
Hearers of the inspired word preached have confidence in God’s Word, having the same Spirit as the preacher. So Paul continues:
Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak.
2 Corinthians 4:13
In the summer of 1999, my wife Peggy and I heard the Lord call us to come over and help the Anglican Church of Uganda found a new university. As we visited there on a Sunday, we both heard the Gospel reading about Jesus and the rich young man (Matt 19:16-22). We both thought, “Could that be me [Steve]?” As Peggy resisted that thought, she wondered if that text had been “planted.” Checking her lectionary, she discovered that Matthew 19 was not assigned. Whew! But the text the lectionary did assign became Jesus’ word to her:
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Matt. 10:37-39
Later during that trip, we learned that Matthew 19 was the assigned text in the Ugandan lectionary, and later that summer, we accepted the call to come.
Interpreting the Bible
The Jerusalem Declaration links the proper use of the Bible with understanding its “plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.” Plain, canonical, consensual. Like the proverbial threefold cord, this threefold approach for interpreting the Bible anchors the faith against every wind of false doctrine. Let me unpack this image.
The Plain Sense
One of the fundamental tenets of the Anglican Reformers was that readings and prayers should be translated and read “in a tongue understanded by the people” or more colloquially, by the “plowman” (Article 24). The poet George Herbert, who had exchanged his academic gown for a clerical cassock in a country parish, loved to teach by proverbs and aphorisms. Here is one example:
Sum up at night, what thou hast done by day;
George Herbert, “The Church Porch” in The Temple
And in the morning, what thou hast to do.
Dress and undress thy soul: mark the decay
And growth of it. If with thy watch that too
be down, then wind up both. Since we shall be
most surely judged, make thy accounts agree.
The reason the scholar and the plowman can share in reading Scripture has to do with the fact that the all-wise God has condescended to lisp his truth, as John Calvin put it, to his frail and fallen creatures. The Jewish scholar Meir Sternberg observes that “the Bible’s overarching principle of composition, its strategy of strategies, [is] maneuvering between the truth and the whole truth” (The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 50-51).
So while the beginner may pick up and read, the Spirit plumbs the depths of God for those who seek wisdom. Bible study is an inductive process that involves technical competence, literary attentiveness, and willingness to hold one’s presuppositions modestly. The grammar of a text is determined by the basic semantic rules of its language. Particular genres convey the text’s artistry; these may be discourse, narrative, lyric, saga, history, realistic history, prophecy, wisdom, or apocalypse. Hence, literal interpretation honors the textual integrity of God’s Word, what we might call the wing-prints of the Holy Spirit.
The Canonical Drama
As noted in the first part of this essay, God’s revelation in history is dynamic and dramatic, “when in the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4). While the Articles note that “the Old Testament is not contrary to the New,” the challenge remains to relate the witness of the Testaments. The apostolic writers themselves indicate various ways of doing so. Matthew, for instance, cites proof-texts: “This took place to fulfill the word of the prophet…” Paul contrasts the “letter” which kills, with the Spirit, which gives life (2 Cor 3:6). Hebrews employs a typology of the heavenly and earthly temple and priesthood of the Law and of Christ. John’s Gospel links creation with incarnation in the Person of the Word.
I mentioned in the first part of this essay my appreciation of the work of Brevard Childs. Being fully conversant with the “higher criticism” of his day, Childs pioneered a “canonical approach,” looking to the final form of each particular book of the Bible and of the two Testaments. This approach was to be guided by its “literal sense” and the “rule of faith.” Over the past quarter-century, the canonical approach has been developed greatly by biblical scholars.
Historical and Consensual Readings
The rule of faith was a brief summary of the early church’s catechesis. The Apostles’ Creed, for instance, was derived from baptismal instruction. Guided by this rule, church fathers developed various reading strategies.
Irenaeus read the Scripture as Christ’s “recapitulating” of the life of Adam and vanquishing Satan to raise believers to the heavenly life. The so-called schools of Alexandria and Antioch developed allegorical and narrative approaches to the text. Augustine combined sensitivity to the rhetorical senses of Scripture with spiritual enquiry, which became a standard approach in Western scholasticism. Near the end of the patristic period, Vincent of Lérins summed up its rule of reading, stating that readers
…must interpret the sacred Canon according to the traditions of the Catholic Church, as marked by universality, antiquity, and consent of all (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus).
As mentioned in the Jerusalem Statement, the Church of England claimed this Vincentian rule in stating that its doctrine “is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures.”
The phrase “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” commends an attitude of humility in the presence of one’s elders (Prov 10:1). Respect does not imply patristic fundamentalism; indeed, the early Fathers appealed to the text of Scripture and often disagreed with one another. Likewise, Renaissance humanists returned directly to the sources (ad fontes) to find new light from God’s Word.
Richard Hooker provides a clear and subtle example of an Anglican approach to the Bible:
Be it in matter of the one kind or of the other, what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place of credit [faith] and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatever any man can necessarily conclude by force of [sanctified] reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think [i.e., in indifferent matters] and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgments whatsoever.
Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.8.2 (my interpolation)
Hooker begins with the plain sense of “all things necessary for salvation,” then acknowledges that a careful, God-given exegesis of the text may convey a fuller sense of biblical teaching. Lastly, he speaks of the “voice of the church,” referring to the tradition’s cumulative wisdom. In applying biblical teaching to the Elizabethan church in his day, Hooker contributes a further voice to the church in ours.
Conclusion: The Imaginative Sense
Scripture is not all work and no play. Just as David played the harp, so interpretation can be a joyful exercise. An exemplar of the imaginative sense in our age is C.S. Lewis. Lewis wrote only one exposition of Scripture, Reflections on the Psalms, but his fantasies, from The Screwtape Letters to his Space Trilogy to The Chronicles of Narnia, are alive with biblical characters, themes, and allusions.
My concluding example of imaginative interpretation comes once again from my mentor in the faith, the holy Mr. George Herbert of Bemerton. This deceptively simple sonnet, titled “The Holy Scriptures,” invites us to take simple joy in God’s Word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path:
Oh Book! infinite sweetness! let my heart
George Herbert, “The Holy Scriptures”
Suck ev’ry letter, and a honey gain,
Precious for any grief in any part;
To clear the breast, to mollify all pain.
Thou art all health, health thriving till it make
A full eternity; thou art a mass
Of strange delights, where we may wish and take.
Ladies, look here; this is the thankful glass
That mends the looker’s eyes: this is the well
That washes what it shows. Who can endear
Thy praise too much? thou art Heav’n’s ledger here,
Working against the states of death and hell.
Thou art joy’s handsell [down payment]: heav’n lies flat in thee,
Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.
Image: Scripture Study at GAFCON 2008, by Peter Frank. Used with permission. Digital editing by Peter Johnston and Jacob Davis.
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