2 The Bible and Human Sexuality

(I was asked to write this for use at the Methodist Youth Conference in 2004. I don’t know whether it was used or not.  It could be used in a Discussion Group)

1 Human Sexuality is a huge, complex and controversial subject. The Bible is a huge, complex and controversial book. Putting the two together is a huge, complex and controversial task. It is, however, one that must be done because neither Christian Ethics nor Christian Theology are optional extras for Christian Disciples.

2 Some Christians claim that the Bible is the absolute authority for thinking about anything at all because it is ‘God’s Word Written’. Others say that it is a useful historical document because it links us with our beginnings. Most Methodists probably come somewhere in between, and would agree that the Bible is a fundamental resource for thinking about all ethical and theological issues.

3 Some Christians think that saying ‘The Bible says’ and quoting verses as proof texts is enough to settle any issue being discussed, but that is not the Methodist way . We think that taking the Bible seriously is usually, though not always, more complicated than that, not least because the Bible can say more than one thing on any given issue. So simply quoting the Bible and doing what it says is not the Methodist way of using the Bible, as these three examples show.

3.1 ‘The Bible says’ that women should not speak in church (1 Corinthians 14:34-35) or have authority over men (1 Timothy 2:12): but the Methodist Church has women Local Preachers, Ministers and Deacons who preach and women Superintendents, District Chairs and Presidents of Conference who hold positions of authority.

3.2 ‘The Bible says’ that men should not divorce their wives except on the grounds of adultery and that divorced women should not remarry (Matthew 5:32, Luke 16:18 – and these are sayings of Jesus): but since 1945 we have permitted divorced people to marry again in our churches.

3.3 ‘The Bible says’ that slavery is okay (Ephesians 6:5-8, Titus 2:9-10) but one of John Wesley’s last letters was to the anti-slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, supporting his work to stamp out that ‘execrable villainy which is the scandal of England and of human nature’.

4 Here are three examples of where the Bible says something but the Methodist Church thinks and does differently. It is not that the Methodist Church ignores or sidelines the Bible, because in the debates about these things the Bible was considered very seriously, but it is that interpreting and using the Bible is a complex matter. Interpreting the Bible involves working out what individual texts say and what they mean (and that itself is a nightmare with the divorce texts in the Gospels because they are complex and contradictory), comparing texts with other texts on the same topic and then examining all of that in the light of the Bible as a whole (each of these three examples has to be looked at in conjunction with Galatians 3:27-28 for example). So just quoting the Bible is not enough, for the Bible needs to be interpreted, and interpreters can disagree. Using the Bible then involves setting our provisional conclusions from that reading and interpreting beside what we have learned from God in the life of the Church down the years, what we are still learning as thinking human beings and what we are learning from each other and God in our own experience of God’s renewing love in Christ in our lives. So, to put it crudely, our Methodist way is to work with Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience and come to a conclusion through conversation, discussion and debate, which is why our church’s governing body is called the ‘Conference’.

5 So now to human sexuality. In the first creation parable in Genesis 1 we are told that God made humanity in his own image, and that included making them male and female (Genesis 1:26-31). It also included giving them power and responsibility and making them religious. After that the Bible says a lot about these three gifts – sexuality, power and religion – because when these three powerful things go wrong the consequences can be catastrophic. That’s why warnings against the abuse of sexuality, power and religion feature so strongly in the Bible, especially in the preaching of the Old Testament prophets. These good gifts are so easily misused and people and society as a whole suffer as a result. Examples of such misuse would be rape and the sexual exploitation of women, social injustice and political corruption, and bad religion respectively. By contrast, in the area of human sexuality the Song of Songs celebrates the joys of sexuality as it was meant to be and Ephesians 5:25-33 almost gives us the model of a committed and sensitive ‘new man’.

6 The Bible assumes that the norm in human sexual relationships is a male/female bond of lifelong fidelity. It contains differing views on divorce, and the New Testament occasionally commends singleness (after all, Jesus was single) but that overall principle is clear. This leads many Christians today to say that the Church must take a bold and counter-cultural stand for marriage, and for chastity before it and fidelity within it, even if that sounds really old-fashioned. Others argue that our world is so different from the Bible’s that it just isn’t as simple as that. In those days, they point out, women were property and everyone married at puberty – and these days they aren’t and we don’t. These are indeed two hugely significant differences that affect all male/female relationships today, and at the very least they do have to be considered.

7 Another huge difference is that homosexuality is seen in our society as a perfectly good way of being human whereas the Bible does not see it like that. There is no doubt that its few references to homosexual practices are negative (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Timothy 1:8-11). Some pro-gay interpreters argue that these texts do not apply to modern gay relationships because these are different from the relationships and practices condemned in the Bible: but that is a very debatable point which depends on precise definitions of Greek words which are not so easily defined. The real question is - should we do with these texts what we do with those about women in church, divorce or slavery? Should we say the same about gay sexuality - that although the Bible says No, we say Yes? That is the bigger and harder question. Some say No, we cannot take that line about homosexuality even though we do so about some other things because the specific detailed texts are clear and because the ‘broad general principle’ of male and female sexuality is clear too. In general and in particular, they argue, the Bible opposes gay sexual practices. Other Christians say Yes, that although the Bible condemns gay sexuality, we no longer live in that world and we see things differently. The big issues, they argue, are respect for individuals and delight in all sexuality within committed relationships.

8 We must not, however, underestimate the amount of agreement there is among us on issues of human sexuality. The huge majority of Christians, gay or straight, agree that our sexuality is too important and too good a gift of God to be treated as trivially, commercially and promiscuously as our contemporary society treats it. Whatever our sexuality, divorcing sexual practices from committed relationships degrades them and us, and leads to hurt lives and a squalid society.

9 Working at these issues is no easy task. To love God, to love our neighbour (Mark 12:28-31) and to love one another (John 13:34) remain the key obligations laid on us as Christians. In doing that we have to take the Bible seriously, but also to take life’s and faith’s other lessons seriously too.n In this process, however, equally sincere and committed Christians do come to different conclusions. The unavoidable decision about the Bible and homosexuality is whether we treat the Bible texts about it as we treat those about women in church, divorce or slavery, or whether we don’t. And having answered that we then have to work out how to live with those whose views differ. But that is always the question and always the consequence!

Footnotes

[1] For a good introduction to these issues see C S Rodd, Thinking Things Through – the Bible, Epworth Press

[2] See ‘A Lamp to my Feet and a Light to my Path’, the statement of the 1998 Conference on the nature of authority and the place of the Bible in the Methodist Church  

[3] For a fuller discussion of what the Bible is and how we should use it, see my ‘Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding’ at http:xxx.  You can find it in the books section of this site

3 Bless the Lord – an invitation to affirm the Living God

(This appeared in the Expository Times, July 1995, vol 106, no 10, pp293-296)

The purpose of this article is to explore the meaning of the Hebrew expression bareku-YHWH, which used to be translated conventionally as "Bless the LORD," and to argue that contemporary translations of this by "Praise the Lord" or "Thank the Lord" do not reflect the strength of the OT idiom.

A useful way into the question is to ask if "bless" has a different meaning in this phrase from that which it has in the blessing of congregations or individuals? There God is the subject of the verb and the doer of the action and we are the object of the verb and the recipients of the action: in the phrase "bless the LORD" the situation is reversed. Prevailing assumptions can be seen in the recent monograph by C W Mitchell, "The meaning of BRK, "to bless" in the Old Testament" [1]. The book divides into three parts headed "God blessing Man," "Man blessing God" and then, "The Use of BRK in the Praise of God." Mitchell simply states that with God as the object of the verb the meaning cannot be "bless" but must be "praise," with little or no argument to justify the assertion other than repeating that the "synonymous collocations" clearly indicate this meaning, a point which we shall have reason to question. Thus, is this OT idiom simply to be rendered in modern English by "Praise the LORD," or alternatively "Thank the LORD," with Mitchell and many others besides? The answer to the question is important not only for Bible translation but also for liturgical practice and development.

1. The verb barak occurs with the divine name, YHWH, as its object, or with minor variations such as "Bless the name of the LORD," some 60 times in the OT. Of these about half are in passive forms, which are translated into English by "Blessed be the LORD" or "Blessed art thou, O LORD" or the like. The active forms can be divided into simple indicatives, statements that so and so will or did bless the LORD, or liturgical imperatives, directions or calls.

Among Mitchell's "synonymous collocations" is the expression, "Praise the LORD," eg at Ps 135:21,

"Blessed be the LORD from Zion,

he who resides in Jerusalem.

Praise the LORD!"

barak with the divine name is collocated here with the verb halal, "to praise," and the divine name in the form "Hallelu-Yah". Similar collocations occur at Pss 104:35, 106:48, and 115:18, to which can be compared 113:1f. In terms of the meaning of the verbs however it is not clear if these collocations offer any real help, for the "Praise the LORD" element functions as a general conclusion to the whole psalm without any specific link to the immediately preceding verses (cf its use as a general conclusion in the identical endings of Pss 104-6, 113, 115-117, 146-150). The two roots occur in strict parallel only three times at Pss 34:1 and 145:2 and 21 (cf Ps 66:8, "Bless our God," in parallel to "let the sound of his praise be heard" NRSV). The only collocations which are semantically useful are at Neh 9:5 and 1 Chron 16:35f.

Also found in association with halal plus the divine name is the verb hodah, "to thank," plus the divine name. There are two occurrences of the two phrases in parallel (Pss 35:18 and 109:30) with one collocation but not a strict parallel (Ps 111:1), and six other places where there are collocations but these exact phrases are not used (Ezra 3:11, 1 Chr 16:4, 23:30, 25:3, 2 Chr 5:13, 31:2).

The only parallel between barak and hodah is in Ps 100:4, which although it does not use our precise phrase is to be noted because in it all three verbs occur together, and also the whole psalm presents a clue which we will need to follow up:

"Enter his gates with thanksgiving,

and his courts with praise.

Give thanks to him, bless his name."

Thus although there are some collocations of the three phrases "Bless-", "Praise-" and "Thank the LORD" in Hebrew there are not many, and Mitchell's "synonymous collocations" phrase is misleading and his statistics questionable. In OT semantics a synonymous parallel is one thing, a collocation a decidedly less valuable other. At Ps 34:2 we have an example of synonymous parallelism where the roots barak and halal are used: each half of the verse says the same thing. By way of contrast at Ps 135:21 the most we have is a collocation, and probably one without any semantic significance: here the two verbs occur near each other, but there is no suggestion that the meanings of the two phrases are related. In defence of Mitchell it can be readily admitted that there are a number of Hebrew verbs of praising of which halal is only one, albeit the most common, and that the verb barak does occur in parallel or collocation with some of these others. But contrary to Mitchell and in support of a stronger meaning of "Blessing the LORD" we could point to its association with verbs which talk of praise in terms of "magnifying" or "exalting" the LORD at Pss 18:46 (= 2 Sam 22:47), 96:2f, 104:1, 145:1 and Ruth 4:14 (cf the Aramaic cognate at Dan 4:34). Or for less specific senses we could identify collocations with general verbs of "worship" or "doing obeisance" at Gen 24:48, 2 Sam 14:22, Pss 63:4, 96:2, 134:2, Neh 8:6 and 1 Chr 29:20. All this does nothing more however, than expose another of Mitchell's weaknesses, which is to lump all praise vocabulary together and to fail to attempt any differentiation within it. The vocabulary of praise is as rich in Hebrew as it is in English, and our worship would be immeasurably impoverished if we replaced every "bless the LORD," "acclaim...," "ascribe to...," "extol...," "magnify...," "exalt...," worship...," "revere..." and "thank..." with a single "praise the LORD." It is only by talking in such generalities that Mitchell's conclusion is possible, that to bless the LORD is to praise him.

Biblical statistics are as suspect as any other, but an incontrovertible point is that there are not many instances of the use of "Bless-," "Praise-" and "Thank the LORD" in synonymous parallel in the OT. The total occurrences of "Bless the LORD" are about 60, those of "Praise the LORD" about 80 and "Thank the LORD" about 50: but the total of parallels is only 6 and of other collocations only another handfull, about a dozen out of around 180 occurrences. At the very least this enables us to say that the verbs barak, halal and hodah plus the divine name are hardly full-synonyms or freely interchangeable, for if that were the case one would expect many more parallels and collocations. The three phrases belong to the same semantic field, that of the worship or praise of God: but they do not have the same meaning. They are related: but they are not identical.

2. Recognising that "Bless," "Praise" and "Thank" are only rough rule of thumb conventional translations of the three Hebrew verbs we have looked at, and that the whole question of translation and cross cultural linguistics is a highly complex matter, nonetheless if we look at the English translations of these three verbs something else becomes very obvious. It is that Mitchell's assumption that the Hebrew terms are closely related if not synonymous, which we have demonstrated is true only at the level of the highest generalisation, is widely shared.

Let us take Ps 103:1 as a first example. The Hebrew verb is barak, which is found as "Bless the LORD" in AV, RV, RSV and NRSV, JB and NJB, NJPS, NEB and REB: but in BCP, Revised Psalter and ASB among English liturgical texts, and in NIV and GNB we have "Praise the LORD." All of them do the same with the identical phrase at Ps 104:1, except for ASB which has "Bless the LORD" for that with "Praise the LORD" for the other. This proves the point exactly, either "Bless" or "Praise" will do equally well in English, it seems, for the verb "barak".

For a second example there is Ps 33:2 which uses hodah, "Thank," which is found as "Thank the LORD" in RV, JB and NJB, GNB, NEB and REB, and ASB but as "Praise the LORD" in BCP, AV, RSV and NRSV, Revised Psalter, NIV and NJPS. Seven of them change sides in the similar phrase at Ps 7:18a (BCP, RSV and NRSV, Revised Psalter and NIV from "Praise" to "Thank," and NEB and REB the other way round from "Thank" to "Praise." Again the point is demonstrated, that "Thank" and "Praise" are apparently thought to do equally well for the verb hodah.

For a last example we can look again at Ps 100:4, which has all three verbs together with one occurring twice, in the order hodah, halal, hodah, barak. AV, RV, RSV and NRSV, Revised Psalter, JB and NJB, NEB and REB and ASB render this combination by: "Thanks," "Praise," "Thanks," "Bless," which is the same as BCP except that it translates barak by "speak good." NIV and GNB have "Thanks," "Praise," "Thanks," "Praise," so they are consistent in translating barak as "Praise." NJPS has "Praise," "Acclaim," "Praise," "Bless," which again is consistent.

There does seem to be consistency within the translations, except for one detail in the Liturgical Psalter prepared by Frost, Emmerton and McKintosh in 1976/7 which is used in the ASB and elsewhere. Here "Bless" is preferred for barak almost everywhere except for the six occurrences of that verb in Ps 103. Why that should be different is not clear, and the difference is disconcertingly obvious when one compares the different treatment of the same Hebrew words with which the neighbouring psalms 103 and 104 both begin.

What emerges is that there is an unfortunate preference for the English phrase "Praise the LORD" as the translation for at least three different Hebrew expressions in translations old and new. Although both Hebrew and English sets of verbs and phrases can be used synonymously (though the Hebrew ones are not so used very often in the OT), this is not the same as saying that they are always used synonymously or are full synonyms and are thus simply interchangeable, or that they should be. For the Hebrew expression, "bareku YHWH," these three English verbs are not equally appropriate. Of course they can be used as if they were synonymous, and some modern translations do: but that must be called into question. No doubt these other expressions make good sense, for example, "Praise the LORD, my soul" makes perfectly good sense at Ps 103:1: but that is not the point, for "Praise the LORD" or "Thank the LORD" is not the meaning of the Hebrew phrase. It might be like it, or even part of it, but it is by no means all of it, principally because, at least in English, it is not a strong enough phrase.

3. So far we have focussed on the verb in the phrase, but the role of the divine name in the meaning of the phrase is also significant. YHWH, "the LORD," is the standard way of addressing God in liturgical settings in the Psalter and Chronicles particularly. To the 60-odd occurrences of barak in the phrase "Bless the LORD" can be compared only half a dozen or so occurrences with other names for God, and that is also true of the two other verbs we have looked at.

A fairly obvious point needs to be made here. In the ancient, but modern, verse and response, "Let us bless the LORD / Thanks be to God" (a blatant example of equating blessing the Lord with thanking him) the emphasis falls, invariably in my observation, on the words "Bless" and "Thanks." It is difficult to know where the emphasis would have been put in the liturgical usage of this phrase in ancient Israel, but there are a number of pointers to the fact that it would have been put on the nouns and not the verbs.

One such pointer is the later Jewish use of the phrase in an expanded way in Benedictions, where the standard form is "Blessed art Thou, O LORD, our God, King of the universe" (bareku ‘atta YHWH ’elohenu melek ha’olam), followed by a statement of what he is being acknowledged and valued for. The length and weight of this way of referring to God at least hints that the emphasis falls on that part of the sentence. Another similar and frequent use of "Blessed" is in Rabbinic mentions of God, where God is often called "The Holy One," followed in most cases by the bracketed affirmation, "Blessed be He" (berik hu’).

Another possible pointer is Ps 103:1-5 where the first two verses begin, "Bless the LORD, O my soul," and the next three begin and two continue with participles with the definite article. This is an unusual luxury in Hebrew poetry which is usually very spartan in the use of the article. The effect in the psalm is that of stressing that "It is the LORD who...." So we could read

"Bless the LORD, O my soul,

and forget not all his benefits,

he is the one who forgives all your iniquity,

he is the one who heals all your diseases...." etc.

At Ps 100:4 we can see that the function of that whole psalm is to affirm the status of YHWH as the only God for Israel, and that our three verbs and phrases are all drawn together to that end. Significantly, the psalm is headed, "A Psalm for the Thank Offering," [NRSV ‘A Psalm of Thanksgiving’], which gives it a setting in a service which is unambiguously one of acknowledging God and his gifts. The element of affirmation is strong in v3, "Know that the LORD is God," which continues, "It is he that has made us," two strongly emphatic pieces of Hebrew using the pronoun: "Know that YHWH, he is God, he has made us." Then follows v4 with its verbs: "Thank," "Praise," "Thank" and "Bless." A A Anderson is representative of any number of commentators on this psalm when he writes,

v3. "Know": this is more than merely an intellectual exercise; in this context it implies the acknowledgement that Yahweh is God, and a self-involvement in all the demands and responsibilities which the LORDship of Yahweh implies (cf Deut 4:39, Isa 43:10, Jer 3:13, 14:20).

"the LORD is God": this was probably a well-known cultic phrase used to renounce all other gods, and to declare allegiance to Yahweh alone, as the Covenant God (cf Deut 4.35ff, Jos 24:18, 1 Kg 18:39). [3]

It is also generally recognised that hodah has these two senses of praise/thanksgiving and praise/confession/acknowledgement [4]. Such aspects can be seen in Josh 7:19, and Pss 26:7, 69:31 and 107:22 and especially 92:1-4. It could be argued that this is barely relevant after the argument that barak YHWH and hodah YHWH are not the same. The point however, is that they are not synonymous, not that they do not belong to the same semantic field, for they clearly do, both having the same form, setting in life and literary context.

The affirmation which is present in Ps 100:4 is also the meaning of "Bless the LORD" in Ps 135:19-21 and in 1 Chr 29:10-11, 20-22, which is worth a closer look:

"Therefore David blessed the LORD in the presence of all the assembly; David said, "Blessed are you, O LORD, the God of our ancestor Israel, forever and ever. Yours, O LORD, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all."

"Then David said to the whole assembly, "Bless the LORD your God." And all the assembly blessed the LORD, the God of their ancestors, and bowed their heads and prostrated themselves before the LORD and the king. On the next day they offered sacrifices and burnt offerings to the LORD, a thousand bulls, a thousand rams, and a thousand lambs, with their libations, and sacrifices in abundance for all Israel; and they ate and drank before the LORD on that day with great joy." (NRSV)

In vv10-11 we see David "blessing the LORD" at a fund-raising event for building the Temple. What he does is in fact to offer an ascription of glory, to declare how great the LORD is. Declaring God's greatness (as in v11) is to bless the LORD. Similarly in vv20-22 David calls on the congregation to "bless the LORD," and their response is to bow their heads, worship and offer sacrifices to God. "Blessing the LORD" is about acknowledging him, giving him due honour.

Of course Old Testament usage could have become as varied and as casual as ours can be, but these pointers at least suggest that in the phrase "Bless the LORD," the emphasis falls on the last word. A call to "Bless the LORD" is a call to affirm that it is the LORD who is to be acknowledged/blessed and not another (cf the use of ‘blessing’ in the choruses in Revelation and in such ASB verses and responses as ‘Bless the Lord …/ Sing his Praise and exalt him for ever’ (Evening Prayer – Bless the Lord, Morning Prayer – Song of Creation)).

This "strong" definition of "Blessing the LORD" has a powerful claim on our attention. At the very least we can say that Ps 135 and 1 Chr 29 encourage us to go on along the lines suggested by Ps 100:4, that there is a strong sense to the phrase, "Bless the LORD," and that it means acknowledging the deity of YHWH and affirming that he is God. This sense is present in the use of the verb in such passages as Ex 18:10ff, Deut 8:10ff and Josh 22:33, in addition to those passages cited above where it is collocated with exaltation language. No doubt it shares something of this with the calls to "Praise the LORD" or to "Thank him", but it goes further, as Ps 135 and 1 Chr 29 make explicit. This is why "Sing his praise and exalt him for ever," as a response to "Bless the LORD...." in the two ASB canticles is a step in the right direction.

4. The three phrases "Bless the LORD," "Praise the LORD" and "Thank the LORD" are stereotyped theological and liturgical technical terms in the OT. They are similar in form and function but they are not identical in meaning, possibly there is a sliding scale of meaning with "Bless the LORD" as the strongest of the three. We have of course no way of knowing whether this "original strong meaning" was retained for long, or whether the phrase became merely conventional. What we do know is that there was an established use of "bless" and the divine name in a strongly affirmatory sense in Jewish tradition. In the Christian tradition this is perhaps paralled most clearly in the Benedictus, "Blessed be he who comes in the name of the LORD," a clearly affirmatory use of "bless" in a liturgical context. This also means that we have an understanding of "bless" in which the difference between the meaning of this verb used with God as subject and that in which he is the object is considerably reduced if not eliminated.

How then can we translate bareku YHWH so that this stronger sense is heard in English? If we assume that we are unable to retain the traditional ‘bless’, other verbs to use instead could be ‘affirm’, ‘acknowledge’ or ‘acclaim’. If the traditional translation is retained then responsibility is put on those who create new liturgies to bring out the stronger sense, as is already done in the ASB canticles at Morning and Evening Prayer. It is too much to hope that ‘Let us bless the Lord’ might in future receive a response like, ‘We acknowledge him to be the Lord’, or such an existing liturgical response as, ‘We sing his praise and exalt him for ever’, but those are the directions in which I suggest we should look.

Other questions could be asked about this phrase, but this article has addressed linguistic questions only, appealing for a more rigorous meaning to be given to this Hebrew idiom in Bible translation, as well as for clarity and greater precision in the use of the English words ‘bless’, ‘thank’ and ‘praise’. A second plea is to liturgical scholarship for a use of ‘Bless the Lord’ to match liturgical practice much more closely with the strongly affirmative sense of that phrase in the Old Testament.

NOTES

[1] SBL Dissertation Series 95, Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1987

[2] All quotations are from NRSV

[3] A A Anderson, Psalms, New Century Bible, London. 1972, vol 2, p699

[4] R C D Jasper and P F Bradshaw, A Companion to the Alternative Service Book, London, 1986, p146

(This was published in Worship and Preaching, October 1991, vol 21 no 5, pp217-221. A sermon version of it can be found in sermon no 3, 'Jesus our Immanuel'  in the sermons (2) section of this site)

In the coming months there will be hardly a Methodist church where Matthew 1:18-25 is not read. The congregation will hear that the birth of Jesus fulfils the "Emmanuel" prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. This article is about what Matthew is doing when he quotes Isaiah 7:14 and other Old Testament verses in his stories of the birth of Jesus, and the implications of this for understanding what prophecy is or isn't.

If it wasn't for the quotation of Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1, the whole passage of Isaiah 7:1-17 would be relatively straightforward, at least by comparison with some passages from the prophets in the Old Testament.

A couple of additions have been made to the original message of Isaiah, for example the words in the second half of v8, which are for that reason put in brackets in my RSV, and the phrase "the king of Assyria" after the hyphen in v17, but this is a common feature in the books of the prophets.

The historical situation to which the passage refers is clear. It can be dated to around 738 BCE. Syria and Israel (Ephraim) have come together in a coalition against the rising power of Assyria and they wish Judah to join in. King Ahaz of Judah is thrown into a panic about what to do. Isaiah goes to him with a message from God about his predicament.

The message is plain enough. "Don't worry about the Syro-Ephraimite coalition. Ignore it and it will go away. Put your trust in God. If you don't put your trust in God, he will give you something far more terrible to worry about than these two tiny nations, the full might of the Assyrians themselves!" In a lovely bit of drama Isaiah goes along and tells the king not to worry about Israel and Syria for God is going to sort them out. "What are you worrying about?", he says, "Are you worrying about Syria? Syria is no more than Damascus its capital! Worried about Damascus? It's no more than Rezin its king! Worried about Rezin? He's nothing more than a 'smouldering stump of a firebrand'! You are terrified of a devouring fire, but all it is is a bit of charred and smouldering stick!" Then Isaiah invites Ahaz to ask for a sign from God, and now we see Ahaz the religious hypocrite. Up to now he hasn't had any faith in God at all and suddenly he comes out with the pious, "Far be it from me to ask the Lord for a sign". Isaiah is obviously getting thoroughly irritated by this point, and says that he's getting a sign whether he likes it or not.

The sign is the birth and infancy of a child. The meaning is plain, that by the time a woman can conceive, have her baby and that child grow old enough to tell right from wrong, then the threat from Pekah and Rezin will be past. One or two questions arise about this sign, but there are no real difficulties.

Most recent translations say "young woman" (RSV, NEB, GNB, NJB(!), REB, NRSV) and only two have "virgin" (JB, NIV). A GNB footnote puts the explanation succinctly, saying that the Hebrew work used here is not the specific word for a virgin but for any young woman of marriageable age. The use of "virgin" comes from the Greek translation made 500 years later, and is influenced by Matthew's use of that word, and by the Christian doctrine of the Virgin Birth.

Commentators make a variety of suggestions about which young woman Isaiah is talking about: one of the king's wives, or possibly the prophet's wife. We know that Isaiah's children were given peculiar names to bring home his message (7:3, 8:3) and Emmanuel would fit well enough as another name for a prophet's son as a sign of a new message. It is more likely, however, that the woman in question was one of Ahaz's wives, and the name could be a "throne name", the kind of name that was given to a royal child at birth (like the names in Isaiah 9:6, also read at Christmas), for the child is mentioned again in 8:8, where he appears to have grown up to be king. So these few questions part, there is no difficuly with Isaiah 7. As a piece of prophetic narrative it is as straightforward as any prophetic narrative you will find. It has a clear meaning in its historical context, and providing you ask the important questions about When? and Where? that meaning is easily discovered. However, we read this as Christians who also read Matthew1:22-23, where Isaiah 7:1-14 is taken up and used in a very different way. This creates a problem for us, for here Matthew says that this sign is "fulfilled" in the birth of Jesus to the virgin Mary. Actually he puts it the other way around, that the birth of Jesus to Mary, who was a virgin, "took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet", and then Isaiah 7:14 is quoted, and the meaning of the name "Emmanuel" explained. Matthew's translation is close to that of the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation (though none of his quotations are exact ones) and both translate the more general Hebrew word in Isaiah with the specific Greek word for "virgin". Matthew seems to be saying, and this is certainly how the verse is often understood, that Isaiah was predicting the birth of Jesus.

Before we go any further we should note that Isaiah 7:14 is only the first of several verses which Matthew quotes in connection with the events which surrounded the birth and early life of Jesus. All of these quotations, except 2:5 quoting Micah 5:2, are said to be "fulfilled" in these events. In 2:5 in answer to the wise men's questions about where they can find the newborn king, the scribes quote Micah 5:2 about Bethlehem. When Joseph and Mary flee as refugees into Egypt (2:14-15), this is said "to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet", and Hosea 11:1 is quoted, a reference which originally referred to the people of Israel coming out of Egypt in the Exodus. In 2:17 the massacre of the innocents is said to fulfil "what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah", and Matthew quotes the wailing in Ramah which in Jeremiah 31:15 refers to the distress that accompanied the exile. Their eventual return from Egypt in 2:23 and their setting up home in Nazareth (where according to Matthew they had never ever lived - Luke of course says something different here) is said to be in fulfilment of "that which was spoken by the prophets", and here Matthew quotes a little verse which causes endless problems because we can't find it in the Old Testament at all. There are references in the Old Testament to people being called "Nazirites", but that is about taking a vow. Presumably somebody living in Nazareth would have been called a "Nazarethite". Where Matthew got "Nazarene" from remains a mystery. These sort of "prophecy-fulfilled" quotations continue through the gospel, but we have looked at those which occur in the Christmas story, and there we must stop.

But what is Matthew doing? Obviously he is using the Old Testament in a particular way for his own purposes, and that way is rather different from the one to which we are used. Of all the quotations in Matthew 1-2 the only one that is legitimate by our standards is the one from Micah, because that one is actually about the coming of the Messiah, about how and when and where that will be. None of the other quotations which he uses are "messianic" in their original settings, none of them are predictions of the coming of the Messiah in the future. We have been taught to read the prophets in their original settings and take those historical settings seriously. We have been encouraged to read any verse in its context, and to take that context seriously. If we do that with the other verses Matthew quotes we see that not one of them has any obvious reference to anything other than what it happens to be talking about, be that the exodus or the exile or whatever. The Emmanuel, Ramah and "Out of Egypt" verses are taken out of their contexts by Matthew, and where he got the Nazarene verse from no one knows. So what are we to make of Matthew?

I want to assume that Matthew is neither a fool nor a charlatan, though we could of course dismiss him as both of these. We could say that he has no sense of the meaning of the Old Testament, and that he put in his thumb and pulled out the plum he wanted. We could say that he believed that all prophecy was about predicting the future, and that every prophetic word could be read as a prediction. We could say that he was quite deliberately finding texts that would prove his point and lifting them straight out of their context in order to make them do just that. We all do that at times, and as a way of using the Bible the method has a long history and a certain legitimacy, but I want to suggest that Matthew is actually doing something far more subtle and much more deserving of our careful attention.

Let me illustrate this from the Emmanuel text. At one level, Matthew's use of this text from Isaiah is not legitimate. The plain, obvious and straightforward meaning of Isaiah 7:14 is the one it had when Isaiah gave the sign to King Ahaz. In the setting of the king's panic in 738 BCE it is no use at all for Isaiah to go to Ahaz and to tell him not to worry because the Messiah is coming in 740 years' time! Isaiah's prophecy is not that sort of prediction. But at another level Matthew's use of Isaiah 7:14 is both legitimate and thought-provoking.

Why were the words of the prophets preserved at all? Why were the words of particular people in quite specific times and places collected and preserved for posterity? Why were the words of a particular prophet called Isaiah, to a particular king called Ahaz, at a particular time in 738 BCE about a particular historical situation, "sifted, chose(n) and then preserved"? The answer appears to be that those words were preserved because they were seen to be words that would be useful for the future, because they spoke of what God had done in a particular setting in the past. They were heard to be a message which God had given in a particular place which would enable people in similar times and places in the future to understand what the requirements or promises of God might be for them. In other words, and please forgive the jargon, such words or incidents were "paradigmatic": they were a paradigm or example of the way God dealt with his people in a particular situation. With God being the God of yesterday, today and tomorrow, the way that he had been seen to act in one generation must obviously be one sort of clue as to how he might be expected to act in another. So the words of the prophets were preserved so that people could gain inspiration from events or experiences from the past. Later generations could look back and read such words, and be encouraged: old stories could be retold in new situations. Is not this exactly what we do when we read the Bible in worship and preach sermons about texts, incidents, people or experiences from it?

Perhaps this is what Matthew is doing when he quotes the Emmanuel sign. In its original setting the Emmanuel oracle is about salvation, about God's deliverance of King Ahaz and the people of Judah from Pekah and Rezin. Isaiah promises through this oracle and sign that Ahaz and Jerusalem will be delivered, and they were. The Syro-Ephraimite coalition was destroyed by Assyria, and Ahaz sat there safely in Jerusalem while it was being done. So the oracle and sign "worked": God delivered Ahaz and Jerusalem as he said he would. Is Matthew using this story to make the point that a greater and fuller salvation is now here? That the Jesus whose birth he is recounting is the true deliverer and the bringer of full salvation? Is he saying that although God's deliverance of Jerusalem at the time of Ahaz was real, now in Jesus Christ we have something that makes that pale into insignificance? In this sense Jesus is indeed the "fulfilment" of Jerusalem's salvation, the real Emmanuel.

If this is Matthew's logic, then it solves not only the problem of the use of Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:23, but that of all of the rest of Matthew's Old Testament quotes in the Birth Stories. It also helps to clear up the persistent misunderstanding that prophecy in the Old Testament is about prediction of the future. When Matthew says that the coming of Jesus fulfils these words of Isaiah he is not saying that Isaiah predicted Jesus. We might read it like that, but I hope that I have said enough to suggest that that is not the way that it should be read, for if that is what Isaiah had been doing then his ministry to Ahaz is nonsense. When we read in Matthew 1:23 that the birth of Jesus to the virgin Mary took place "to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet", we read it best if we see the point that whatever happened with Isaiah and Ahaz though real enough is just a foretaste of the salvation and deliverance which is now present in Jesus.

In this matter I want to have my cake and eat it. I want to insist that Isaiah's words were addressed to and relevant for Ahaz in his crisis in the eighth century BCE. I also want to insist that Matthew is right to say that Isaiah's words really are fulfilled in "Jesus our Emmanuel". To say that Isaiah was actually predicting the coming of Jesus when he spoke these words to Ahaz, is to deny the first of these. To say that Matthew is simply pulling texts out of the air to make them mean what he wants them to mean, is to deny the second. It seems to me that the method I have outlined is the only way of holding the two points together, and of concluding therefore that Matthew is neither a charlatan nor a fool, but a skilled preacher and theologian.

(Friends of Queen’s Journal, 2000, pp3-8.  This short article could be used in a Bible Study or Discussion Group)

"We realise people will say we are playing God"; so the Daily Mail of October 5^th headlined the words of a Scottish couple who were threatening to use the new Human Rights Act if they were refused permission to choose the sex of their next child. The next page featured an American couple whose embryo had been specially selected so that his tissue would provide a perfect match for his six year old sister who suffered from a fatal genetic disease. When I read that story I wondered if they had called him "Adam" just because they liked the name. All of this came, of course, close on the heels of the anguished story of the conjoined twins Jody and Mary. What should be done? Should one of this pair of human beings be sacrificed that the other might live? Or should "nature be allowed to take its course" with the inevitable death of both children? Those questions had for weeks provided a media focus for the dilemmas posed by modern medicine, and you could hardly hear or take part in a discussion about them without someone using that phrase from the Daily Mail’s headline.

I am not an ethicist and so do not want to comment here on any of those three situations. Neither am I a systematic theologian, so I shall resist the temptation to comment on "letting nature take its course", though I must observe that I’ve never met anyone with toothache who is prepared to do any such thing. However, as a minor member of the guild of Old Testament scholarship I cannot let the expression about "playing God" pass without comment. Its meaning in common debate is plain. To "play God" is a bad thing. Those who do it can expect to be accused of overstepping the mark, transgressing proper boundaries and usurping God’s authority. They will be marked down as arrogant, selfish and dangerous. It is not right, the users of the expression insist, for human beings to "play God". In this short article I would like to question the pejorative sense of this phrase on the grounds that, at least as far as one Old Testament tradition is concerned, playing God is precisely and exactly what human beings were created to do and to be.

The tradition I have in mind is found in Genesis 1:26-31 and Psalm 8, though space prevents discussion of the psalm here. Genesis 1:26-31 is not, as Christian commentators so wrongly and frequently assert, the climax of the majestic liturgy in which God creatively speaks the world into being a day at a time. Humanity is not, as they so often say it is, the "crown of creation" - for climax and crown belong to Sabbath and Rest – but it is the result of the last but one of God’s creating acts. In this great and penultimate act God involves the great heavenly "us", surely nowhere better described than in the old liturgical panoply of "angels and archangels and all the company of heaven", in the creation of humanity "in our image, according to our likeness" (verse 26, NRSV). And that pair of parallel phrases, I submit, indicates that it is our human vocation to "play God".

Systematic theologians and many others down the centuries have read all sorts of things into these momentous phrases, sometimes even seeing them as referring to two distinct human faculties. Mostly they have found the first of the pair (usually in its Latin form imago dei) to be a wonderfully useful peg on which to hang whatever were those features which they saw as most distinctive of and precious in human being. Among these have been our immortal soul, reasoning capacity, spirituality, rationality, free will, moral sense and self-consciousness, to say nothing of our physical attributes such as our habit of standing upright. Despite recognising the "priority of the reader" in making meaning in dialogue with ancient texts, I cannot go that way. Neither of course, can we search for the intentions of the author. But what we can do is to give careful attention to the text of that paragraph. My conviction, and that of the work of von Rad, Westermann and Wenham which pays particular attention to the text, is that if we do so we see that being made in God's image says something not about human nature itself but about the purpose or function of humankind within God's purposes.

If we pay close attention to the text using NRSV we see that:

1 Verse 26, which states God's intention, consists of two parallel parts. In the first God decides to create humanity in his image and likeness and in the second the purpose of this creation is declared. Humanity is to "have dominion" over five classes of creatures.

2 Verse 27, which confirms the carrying out of this intention, is also in two parallel parts. The first confirms that God has created humanity in his own image and likeness. The second points out that that he has created them "male and female".

3 Verse 28 indicates God's reaction to the result. First, he blesses humanity and second, he commands humankind to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it and have dominion over its creatures.

Remembering the importance of the Hebrew technique of parallelism we can note the parallels within these verses and then between them which give: image//likeness // having dominion // male and female. The significance of the sudden and unexpected appearance of the "male and female" reference in verse 27 can then be seen from the collection of terms in verse 28, where the reference is to creativity and filling the earth. From this close reading of the text it appears that to be made in the image of God is to be given a share in his creativity and with it a responsibility for shaping and moulding the ongoing life of the creation. To put it another way, humans are created to be God’s agents or stewards, taking responsibility for the future of creation.

The Bible, of course, is a book full of stories and most of those stories are tragic rather than comic, stories of failure, disappointment and mess-making rather than of success, achievement and creativity. Very soon after humanity has been created, so the story goes, humanity begins its long history of fouling things up, of marring rather than making and of spoiling rather than enhancing. Hence the Biblical classic of Adam and Eve’s eviction from the garden and the post-Biblical one of the Fall of Satan in which the "brightest and best of the sons of the morning" falls from the sky because he sought to be God - not to "play God" or be "God-like" but to be God. Bible readers are, therefore, fully aware of the dangers that lurk in the kind of message that Genesis 1 contains and so were those who collected, edited and produced the Bibles as we have them. They were under no illusion about what humanity can do to undo God’s work but they still insisted on introducing the story of humanity by way of Genesis 1. And, to my mind, their subversive introduction which speaks of humanity’s greatness and potential must not be allowed to be submerged by the multitude of stories which show humanity as so often it really is.

The implication of the placing of Genesis 1 before Genesis 2-3 and of this understanding of imago dei is, therefore, that to "play God" or to be God-like is exactly what we were created to be and to do. Thus it is imperative that we do not shrink from taking the hard decisions which come with scientific and technological developments, as focused for us for example in these three situations to do with medical ethics and genetic modification, for to do that is to fail to face up to our creative responsibilities. Accepting that imperative does not mean that we will be willing to applaud every new development or realise every new possibility just because it has become realisable, but it does mean that taking the decision, making the choice, is open to us whereas "leaving nature to take its course" or refusing to engage with change is not. The one argument, therefore, which is not permitted to us in current or future debates is to say that "we must not play God", for it is to play God – with all the terrifying responsibility which this entails - to which Genesis 1 calls and commissions us.

(Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, vol 54, part 1, February 2003, pp1-10. This is the published version of the lecture with the same title in the lectures section of this website)

A tercentenary project exploring John Wesley’s concept of "Scriptural Holiness" for the twenty-first century invites an exploration, however briefly, of the adjective in that phrase; and that is what this article attempts. Although Wesley is passionate about this fundamental experience of ‘holiness without which no one shall see the Lord" (Heb.12:14) and fond of adjectives to qualify the various nouns he uses for it – ‘Christian Perfection,’ ‘Entire Sanctification’ and ‘Perfect Love’ as well as ‘Scriptural Holiness’ itself – he has left us no comprehensive treatment of what he means by ‘Scriptural’ or of his understanding of the Bible. He did write a number of theological treatises including, on this holiness theme, the Plain Account of Christian Perfection, but his preferred way of writing theology was by the published sermon. As, however, there is no sermon on the Bible itself, Wesley’s views on Scripture have largely to be deduced from how he uses it. I gratefully, therefore, take the use of the adjective in ‘Scriptural Holiness’ as an invitation to explore a little of Wesley’s attitude to Scripture, and then to ask if that attitude is sustainable today.

Wesley famously described himself as homo unius libri, a ‘man of one book’. Of both his commitment to reading and studying the Bible and his scholarly ability in so doing, there is little doubt. Any reading of the Standard Sermons, however, shows that he was not a reader of only that one book; that he was in fact widely read both in the classic literature one would expect a highly educated gentleman of his day to have read and in the literature of the Church down the ages. Nor did he tell the early Methodists that they should read only that one book, as his production of the ‘Christian Library’ shows. As he was well and widely read, so he encouraged the Methodists to be the same. He was, therefore, ‘a man of one book’ only but significantly in the sense that he accorded supreme ‘regard’ to the Bible and that for him ‘Scripture was the primary rather than the exclusive authority’.

Something of what Wesley thought of the Bible can be seen in this paragraph from the Preface to his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament of 1754,

Concerning the Scriptures in general, it may be observed, the word of the living God, which directed the first patriarchs also, was, in the time of Moses, committed to writing. To this were added, in several succeeding generations, the inspired writings of the other prophets. Afterwards, what the Son of God preached, and the Holy Ghost spake by the apostles, the apostles and evangelists wrote. This is what we now style the Holy Scripture: this is that ‘word of God which remaineth for ever’; of which, though ‘heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall not pass away.’ The Scripture, therefore, of the Old and New Testament is a most solid and precious system of divine truth. Every part thereof is worthy of God; and all together are one entire body, wherein is no defect, no excess. It is the fountain of heavenly wisdom, which they who are able to taste prefer to all writings of men, however wise or learned or holy.

Eleven years later he produced the Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament, in which he aimed to ‘give the direct, literal, meaning of every verse …sentence … word in the oracles of God’ so that the ordinary reader can ‘keep his eye fixed on the naked Bible’. Both Notes were adaptations of the work of others, the first of J A Bengel’s Gnomon Novi Testamenti of 1742, and the second of Matthew Henry’s famous Exposition of the Old and New Testaments of 1708-1710 and, more so, the Annotations upon the Holy Bible of Matthew Poole of 1665, with considerably more editing than he had used with Bengel. The Notes on the New Testament form part of the ‘doctrinal standards’ of British Methodism, those on the Old Testament do not.

Wesley was, of course, a prolific writer and selecting anything from his voluminous works to make any kind of point in a short paper like this is bound to be seen as tendentious. Fortunately, Scott Jones has done the spadework and those who want more detail can read there. Here I will simply cite a few details from both sets of Notes, the Sermons and, given the project of which this paper is a part, A Plain Account to illustrate the fairly obvious point that Wesley is a pre-Enlightenment reader of the Bible - a point I make as a statement of fact and not as a value-judgement on him or his writings.

In the Old Testament Notes he calls Moses ‘the inspired penman in this history’ (ie Genesis), uses Archbishop Usher’s chronology and thinks of David as the author of Ps.103. He reads the Old Testament Christologically throughout. In the New Testament Notes his comment on 2 Tim.3:16 is brief and low-key, ‘All scripture is inspired by God – The Spirit of God not only once inspired those who wrote it, but continually inspires, supernaturally assists, those that read it with earnest prayer. Hence it is so profitable for …’ In a sermon, however, after quoting this verse in the form ‘All Scripture is given by inspiration of God’ he adds the heavier note – ‘consequently, all Scripture is infallibly true’ and reminds the hearers that St Paul is here speaking ‘primarily and directly’ about the Old Testament. On that other proof-text, 2 Pet.1:20-21, he interprets ‘being moved by the Holy Ghost’ as ‘Being moved – literally, carried. They (ie the Bible writers) were purely passive therein’. In these Notes Wesley offers his own translation from the Greek in which he is prepared to amend the Authorised Version and to offer alternative textual readings on the basis of the developments in textual criticism pioneered by Bengel. He also regards the Rich Man and Lazarus of Luke 16:19-31 as real people.

Jones, paying particular attention to the Sermons, groups Wesley’s use of Scripture into five classes: textual – the use of texts as in preaching, explanatory – the use of Scripture to explain a doctrine or idea, definitional – ‘Scripture serves as a sort of authoritative dictionary’ settling the meaning and definition of terms, narrative – in which stories, characters and events are used as illustrations and semantic – ‘Scripture can provide the words and phrases to make a point that could easily have been made in other words without a change of meaning’ – ‘a substitution of words to take advantage of the authority associated with their source’. He also distils seven rules from him for interpreting Scripture: Speak as the oracles of God - use scriptural language wherever possible (cf the semantic use of Scripture just noticed), Use the literal sense unless it contradicts another Scripture or implies an absurdity, Interpret the text with regard to its literary context, Scripture interprets Scripture according to the Analogy of Faith and by Parallel Passages, Commandments are covered promises, Interpret literary devices appropriately and Seek the most original text and the best translation. Most of these uses and rules can be seen at work in almost any sermon you care to choose, and most are commonplace in the evangelical/Protestant tradition of Wesley’s day. On only one of these does Jones point to a special - unique is perhaps too strong a word - emphasis on Wesley’s part, and that is his particular use of ‘the analogy of faith’ which we shall examine below. Most of these features can also be seen in A Plain Account, which sets out in the form of a diary to track, defend and explain Wesley’s preaching of perfection throughout his ministry. Although he admits his debt to other books and other writers, this tract could more accurately be named ‘A Scriptural Account…’ In it he begins and ends his reasoning from the ‘Bible, as the one, the only standard of truth, and the only model of pure religion’, insists that his understanding of this doctrine is found clearly stated in ‘the oracles of God’, that it is in conformity with ‘the whole tenor of the New Testament’, and that it is provable from ‘express texts of Scripture’ and with examples from Scripture. There is therefore no doubt of the importance which Wesley ascribed to Scripture and the facility with which he used it.

Jones examines both Wesley’s conception of the Bible and his use of it, and concludes that his use of the Bible is largely consonant with what he says about it. He demonstrates that for Wesley there are five components to religious authority, of which Scripture is hugely primary though all are interdependent. He shows that for Wesley Scripture functions authoritatively as both source and norm, the place from which basic doctrines are obtained and the court of appeal in all disputes about teaching or behaviour, and that for him there are no doubts about the sufficiency, clarity and wholeness of Scripture. The rationale for Scripture’s authority lies in the concepts of revelation, inspiration and infallibility, about which Wesley uses the commonplace arguments of the time. He points out that Wesley reads the Bible with one aim in mind, which is to find the way to heaven. And it is clearly this reading, this agenda - his own salvation and the salvation of the individual - which gives Wesley his particular interpretation of the ‘analogy of faith’ or the ‘general tenor of Scripture’ by which the whole Bible is read, through which conflicting passages are reconciled and in which the meaning and unity of the whole Bible is seen to subsist. The elements of this determining way of reading the Bible are variously listed by Wesley: but the common core element of his key interpretative device – the ‘analogy of faith’ - is threefold: original sin, justification by faith and sanctification. In effect, therefore, Wesley offers us an example of a ‘Personal-Salvationist Reading of Scripture’.

All this, of course, needs to be understood in its context; which is prior to the beginnings of Enlightenment, critical, Biblical scholarship; prior to the debate on the authority and inspiration of the Bible associated with the birth and rise of ‘Fundamentalism’ in the twentieth century and prior to current debates. It is anachronistic, therefore, for any of the protagonists in these fields today to claim Wesley as ‘their man’ or their position as ‘his’. Methodists do, however, like to say that ‘the way in which Wesley used Scripture and his understanding of the nature of its authority are foundational issues’ and official formularies of the Church imply as much. But how the methods and views of someone who inhabited a radically different world than ours can be adopted by us as ‘foundational’ is a huge question. We can, and Methodists usually do, treat Wesley with respect. We can set him in his historical context, read him as a representative of mainstream interpretative tradition, and explore and appreciate his hermeneutics in a historical study of that discipline and of our own tradition of faith. It is questionable, however, whether we can do any more.

Jones argues that Wesley is not a pre-Enlightenment figure but that living in the period of transition between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment ways of thinking, he offers an ‘alternative way into modernity’ and a different way of interpreting Scripture. To justify this view he cites the value Wesley places on ‘experience’ and his particular understanding and use of the ‘analogy of faith’ as his key interpretative device. Whist Jones is right in these observations of Wesley’s methodology, the conclusion he draws from his observation is much less secure. And if the arrival of Enlightenment ways of thinking in Biblical Studies is to be recognised by the birth of the, now recently deceased, Historical Critical Method, as is usually thought, then Wesley must remain a pre-Enlightenment figure because he neither employs even the rudiments of such methodology nor shows any interest in its principal concerns. He may on occasion refer to authors and their settings in life, he may amend the Authorised Version and occasionally employ new text critical insights: but these are minor features of an approach which reads the whole Bible Christologically and soteriologically. He is not interested in any kind of historical investigation. He reads Scripture for one purpose only, ‘to find the way to heaven.’ His reading strategy and agenda, which shapes what he reads and enables him to read the Bible as a whole, see a single message in it and handle contradictory passages, is that the Bible teaches the individual soul the way to heaven. That is, put simply, the ‘analogy of faith’ or ‘general tenor of Scripture’ which determines how Wesley reads the Bible, and this is not at all consonant with the Enlightenment or the ‘modern’ agenda for reading the Bible.

Wesley’s reading of Scripture has, of course, resonances with ‘post-modern’ readings of Scripture, which, among other things, encourage individual readers to read for their own benefit, according to their own experience and for their own fulfilment. And that was certainly part of Wesley’s reading strategy and agenda. But before we acclaim Wesley as a postmodern, we need to remember that post-modernity rejects any meta-narrative and every claim to authority, and Wesley would have said that both were essentials, givens, found in and possessed by Scripture. Neither modernity nor post-modernity can provide a home for Wesley. He is a pre-Enlightenment reader of the Bible. Despite all his competencies and all that can be learned from him as a reader of Scripture in his particular setting, the hermeneutical problem remains. How can a person who reads the Bible as he does and the method he uses function as an authority for people who live in a different world?

Finally, to that modern invention which seeks to relate the Bible to other sources of authority for Wesley and for Methodism – the Quadrilateral of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. Wesley privileged the Bible over all other books, and I suspect that few Methodists of any kind would disagree with doing that. Much more controversial, however, is the debate about the true locus of authority in the Faith. This debate has been a violent one throughout the history of the Church and continues in its own little way in Methodism today in differing views of the proper relationship between these four sources of authority in the so-called Quadrilateral. Jones’ argument against geometric metaphors and for seeing one locus of authority in four aspects (five for Wesley himself) is sound: but debate continues nonetheless with growing use of the slogan of the ‘primacy of Scripture’. Despite its popularity, however, this slogan has little substance. It is, for one thing, a hermeneutical impossibility, because in any reading whatever primacy there is lies with the reader. It is the reader who opens the Bible, selects a chosen passage and then quotes and uses it – and without a reader a Bible remains closed and silent. The slogan is also, for another thing, historically anachronistic, for the Bible came on the scene last of the four, the creation of experience and reason in the vortex of the living tradition of the Church. Therefore, if we must talk of any ‘primacy’ within the Quadrilateral, though that is not really a very helpful way of speaking, the only conclusion we can draw in the light of contemporary hermeneutics and of Wesley's own methodology, is that whatever primacy there is lies with the Reader.

Wesley’s use of the Bible illustrates this contention beautifully. He read Scripture out of a deep personal need – albeit a need in part created by hearing others read Scripture in that way, for hermeneutics is always circular – which provided his reading strategies and his agenda. He sought what he needed in Scripture and found it, and taught others to seek, read and find in the same way. That is how it was for Wesley, and how it inevitably is for us too, no matter how different our contexts, interests and reading strategies are from his. Recognising this adds yet another complexity to any attempt in Methodism either to establish the meaning of ‘doctrinal standards’ or to formulate any statement of ‘authority’ among us. Wesley’s use of the Bible might be informative and instructive as Methodism moves on, and not only for reasons of historical interest; but whether many of his exegetical conclusions are able to survive in our age, cultures and contexts is open to much more serious doubt.

NOTES

[1] Readers of this journal will not need to be reminded that June 2003 is the tercentenary of John Wesley’s birth.  To mark that anniversary the European Methodist Council has commissioned its Theological Commission to prepare a study paper on ‘Scriptural Holiness for the twenty-first century’.  This article is based on a paper presented to the Commission at its meeting in Waiern , Austria , in June 2002.  

[2] Published in 1766, see A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Epworth Press, London , 1952.  

[3] cf, ‘I want to know one thing – the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore.  God Himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end He came from heaven.  He hath written it down in a book.  O give me that book!  At any price give me the book of God!  I have it: here is knowledge enough for me.  Let me be homo unius libri.  Here then I am, far from the busy ways of men.  I sit down alone: only God is here.  In His presence I open, I read His book; for this end, to find the way to heaven’ – The Standard Sermons of John Wesley, ed E H Sugden, Epworth Press, London, 1968, vol.1, Preface to the Sermons, paragraph 5, pp31f.   

[4] A point amply confirmed and illustrated in J T Clemons, ‘Was John Wesley a Biblical Literalist?’, Epworth Review, vol.6 no.3, September 1979, pp61-69, although the article is asking a very specific question.  The expectations Wesley had that other ministers would emulate him in this regard, as set out in his Address to the Clergy of February 6^th 1756, quoted on pp64f, are daunting!   

[5] See also S J Jones, John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture, Kingswood, Abingdon Press, Nashville , 1995, pp34f and 62.  For a list of his wide reading see Jones in W S Gunter, S J Jones, T A Campbell, R L Miles and R L Maddox, Wesley and the Quadrilateral, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1997, pp41f and p148, note 11.

[6] As can be seen from the word ‘comparatively’ in an aside in A Plain Account when he is speaking of the views on Perfection he held in 1730.  He describes that year as the year ‘when I began to be homo unius libri, ‘a man of one book’, regarding none, comparatively, but the Bible’ (p15).   

[7] J A Vickers, in ed J A Vickers, A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland, Epworth Press, Peterborough , 2000, p311.  

[8] Paragraph 10 of the Preface to John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, dated January 4^th 1754 at Hotwells, Bristol .   

[9] Preface to the Old Testament, from Wesley’s Notes on the Bible, ed G Roger Schoenhals, published by Francis Asbury Press, Zondervan, Grand Rapids , 1987, p19.    

[10] He acknowledges his dependence in para. 7 of the Preface and para. 10 quoted above is itself heavily dependent on Bengel.  In para. 3 he declares that he writes for ordinary people, and in para. 6 that he has omitted scholarly, critical material - ‘curious and critical inquiries’ – from these Notes.   

[11] Adam Clarke comments: ‘The notes on the Old Testament are allowed, on all hands, to be meagre and unsatisfactory’ and he blames the printer for using too large a type and so reducing the amount Wesley could write.  He adds, ‘This account I had from the excellent author himself’ (General Preface to vol.1 of his Bible Commentary published in 1810).

[12 S J Jones, op.cit.  

[13] On Gen 2:8-15.  

[14] Noting on Gen.7:11 that ‘the six hundredth year of Noah’s life was 1656 years from the creation’.  

[15] I cite this detail because it invites comparison with Adam Clarke’s treatment in vol.4 of his Commentary, published in 1822, which dismisses the Davidic authorship of this and other psalms.  Clarke retains belief in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and Usher’s chronology.  Arguably Clarke’s work represents the first stirrings of critical Old Testament scholarship in Methodism, see my ‘Adam Clarke: Methodism’s first Old Testament scholar’, Cornish Methodist Historical Association Occasional Paper no 26, 1994.  

[16] See p21 and pp25ff of W M Arnett, ‘A Study in John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament’, Wesleyan Theological Journal, vol. 8, Spring 1973, pp14-32.  

[17] Sermon 12, ‘The Means of Grace’ (1739), paragraphs 3.8 and 3.9.  There is an interesting entry on ‘infallibility’ in the Journal for August 24^th 1776.  Wesley is commenting on a book receiving much attention in the reading classes, written by a writer recently returned to the Faith who was promoting it in a way of which Wesley disapproves.  Thus Wesley writes, ‘I read Mr Jenkyn’s admired tract on the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion … If he is a Christian he betrays his own cause by averring that ‘all Scripture is not given by inspiration of God, but the writers of it were sometimes left to themselves and consequently made some mistakes.’  Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand.  If there be one falsehood in that Book, it did not come from the God of truth’, Journal of Rev John Wesley, ed N Curnock, Epworth Press, London , 1909-1916 vol.6, p.117.  See also Scott, Conception and Use, pp23-31 and p38 of Larry Shelton, ‘John Wesley’s approach to Scripture in historical perspective’, Wesleyan Theological Journal, vol.16, no.1, Spring 1981, pp23-50.         

[18] All the italics in the quotations from the Notes in this paragraph are Wesley’s.

(Church and Theology - Reflections on Ministry - Essays in honour of William Strawson, Buxton: Church in the Market Place Publications, 2004, ISBN 1 899147 36 5, pp18-26)

Handsworth was a grand Victorian building with a chapel, a library, teaching and assembly rooms, and a study and bedroom each for over seventy students, though half of them were occupied by lodgers when I arrived in September 1967. Its electric bell rang out the day, waking us at 7am and signalling the end of evening study time at 9.30pm. The thirty-five students were Methodist, full-time, male, white and mostly aged nearer twenty than thirty when they started and all were training for full-time, stipendiary, itinerant, circuit ministry. An international flavour came from occasional exchange students from overseas and from some of the lodgers. Women, Wesley Deaconess students, arrived and took over the east wing in 1968. The five staff, all full-timers, were addressed as ‘Dr’ or ‘Mr’ and delivered their morning lectures – Old and New Testament, Systematic Theology, Ethics, Church History, Pastoralia, Homiletics, English Literature (!) and Greek - from the podium in their classrooms. Visiting lecturers taught Psychology and Sociology and guest speakers at regular College Meetings brought a wide range of topics, concerns and challenges. The curriculum offered full academic rigour and vigour, not always appreciated by every student, and led to no validated diploma or degree whatsoever. Each year a couple of students with the right qualifications did the Theology degree at the University of Birmingham, a course not always as demanding as that done by our friends back at base, and this had to be supplemented by half a dozen Handsworth lectures a week, not only on practical and Methodist things, but also in Systematic Theology with ‘Doc Strawson’.

Once a week the Staff joined the students for lunch, and twice a day for Prayers. The students ran everything else: from football matches on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, to the debating session after lunch each day, to the Preaching Plan which sent us out for two or three services every Sunday of the term save one, to arranging the Christian Aid collection in the local area. Whatever administration was done was discreet – it was rumoured that the Principal had a part-time secretary. There were neither personal tutorials nor ‘self-assessment forms’ and if there were any annual reports to London they didn’t impinge on the consciousness of students. At some point in this four year programme there was a month’s ‘Circuit Practice’ in a rural circuit and usually in the final year a day a week in a local urban one. There were Friday night fellowship groups, with a member of staff present, and twice daily gatherings of each ‘Firm’ – for mid-morning coffee break and supper each evening. These groups of four or five, selected by the staff in the first week of a student’s time in college and unchanging for the four years thereafter, were the places of real ministerial formation and theological reflection, though neither of those phrases were part of anyone’s vocabulary at the time. It was lively, concentrated and demanding, and given that this was the 60’s, there were inevitably elements of student protest, some justified and some not.

My view at the time, still held, was that all this was a tremendous gift from Methodism which equipped me well for the hugely various and always changing demands and opportunities in ministry and mission to which God had called me as a Methodist minister.

The South West Ministry Training Course (‘SWMTC’), which now employs me, is rather different. There are no buildings, except for a small office and meeting room cum library located in the back of beyond near Launceston in the geographical dead centre of our catchment area, which is the peninsula triangle between Bridgwater, Yeovil and Land’s End – the real South West plus an eastern fringe. Some students never find it in all their three years on the Course. Every other meeting place we need we rent. The Library catalogue is on-line with borrowings made by post and via the ever-mobile tutors. The forty-five part-time students are overwhelmingly female, over-forty and white. They are Anglican, Methodist and URC, and they are preparing for a kaleidoscope of ministries – presbyteral and diaconal, full- and part-time, ecclesial and sector, stipendiary and non-stipendiary, itinerant and local. The official core staffing consists of a full-time Principal, four half-time tutors and an administrator, and all are known by their Christian names. They meet the students in all kinds of interesting places – for six residential weekends at a complex in Exeter, for a residential Easter School on the university campus, for monthly area-based Tutor Groups in church lounges or front rooms, and for termly tutorials in each student’s home.

SWMTC tutors rarely stand behind a lectern. They are not employed as subject specialists, and deliver neither traditional nor sexily-modern academic subjects. For these students attend University of Exeter evening classes each week in Exeter or Truro, where they enter the worlds of ‘levels 1, 2 and 3’, ‘modules’, and ‘credits’ as most of them work towards the modular degree in Theology, in the process sometimes encountering SWMTC staff wearing other hats. That curriculum is academically rigorous and it complements the formative work done in the rest of the student’s programme, which is also validated by the university and credit-bearing for the degree. This programme includes short and long placements and annual assessment of each student’s at most monthly leading of worship and preaching, all of which is processed through a Learning Journal in which theological reflection and ministerial formation can be assessed. Partnered with each student in this process is a Personal Tutor, usually a minister of their own denomination, with whom the Journal is reviewed after residential sessions. Only occasionally will two students be found following the same pathway and doing the same set of courses. A world church focus is provided by an annual exchange with the United Church of Zambia. Inevitably in the changed climate of adult education, lifelong learning and quality control there are self-assessment forms, course and module evaluation forms and reports galore as the students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning and as the churches monitor their progress.

The ground plan of Handsworth College was, more or less, in the shape of an E. The student rooms were located in the top and bottom horizontals and the upright, and the teaching rooms and chapel in the central horizontal. At the end of the horizontals were the loos, which were traditionally named ‘Change equals Improvement’ and ‘Change equals Catastrophe’ respectively. Readers will already, no doubt, have applied one or other of those epithets to the programme offered by SWMTC. In what follows I will try to show how what is offered today by SWMTC fulfils, in the changed environment of the twenty-first century, the principles and practices of ministerial formation which were exemplified at Handsworth in the mid-twentieth. I make no claim that Handsworth was better at this than any other of the Methodist colleges of that day, nor that SWMTC is better at it than any contemporary Course. If space permitted, I would claim that in today’s situation ministerial formation is done better by the Courses than the Colleges, but it does not. What I would counsel, however, is that if the relative merits of Courses and Colleges are to be debated, comparisons should be made between the Courses and the Colleges as they are and not as they were. No College today offers the four-year, full-time, fully-residential, commitedly corporate experience of preparation for a uniform ministry which Handsworth offered to its students. That world no longer exists anywhere in ministerial training in the UK, much though its passing may be mourned by some.

If we turn from a comparison of logistics and arrangements to look at whys and wherefores we encounter a problem. Living in the world that it does, SWMTC undergoes a revalidation process every five years in which it has to submit a document to its three sponsoring churches setting out and justifying its programme for the next period. There are four set questions: 1. What is the training institution’s understanding of the mission to which the Church of God is called and the patterns of Church life and order through which the (sponsoring churches) respond to that calling? 2. In the light of that understanding, what are the main characteristics of ordained and other public ministries for which the training institution seeks to train its candidates? 3. What is the process and content of ministerial education and formation which will most appropriately prepare candidates to begin the lifelong exercise of these ministries? 4. What forms of assessment are most appropriate for determining the suitability of candidates to begin the exercise of these ministries? One would have thought that the sponsoring churches ought to know the answers to these questions, and then ask the training institutions how they propose to deliver the goods – but that’s not the way it’s done. Given this odder way of doing things, I can write about not only what SWMTC is currently doing but also why. I suspect that no such thirty-page document ever had to be produced at Handsworth, but if it was I have no recollection of ever seeing it. Again, the world has changed. I imagine, though possibly wrongly of course, that Methodism, having appointed the Principal and staff, trusted them to work with the College Council and deliver what they believed was needed, with the official college ‘visitors’ providing support and encouragement. Today, as almost universally trust has been replaced by ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’, for all theological colleges and courses there is a quinquennial revalidation, a quinquennial inspection, and an annual visitation and moderation which students (and staff) certainly know is taking place!

So how does SWMTC see its role? When we consulted with the Church Leaders in the Region as part of our preparation for writing a new validation document in 2001, the key point of agreement was that the Church in the South West needed flexible ministers able to read and interpret a changing world to the church and to engage in mission in that world through a changing church. There would, of course, be some continuities. There remain congregations to pastor and manage; worship to offer in which the Eucharist is celebrated and the Word preached; baptisms, weddings and funerals to be done; community commitments like school assemblies and Remembrance Sunday parades to be honoured; the sick and dying to be cared for and the Gospel to be spoken and lived in an increasingly ungospelled society. We concluded, therefore, that what was needed were ministers who were located in their tradition, who knew who, where and why they were as Christian ministers - as representatives of Christ to the Church and the Church to the World - but who also were alert observers of a society in the process of change. The radical edge of this, for us, was and is that we wanted to see a Church which lives out that mutuality and reciprocity of Trinitarian faith which has not so far been very fully appropriated in the life of the church, and so the word ‘collaborative’ features strongly in our course life as the alternative to the ideas and practices of hierarchy which are so hugely prevalent in the Church and among its ministers.

The programme which emerged from this need and commitment has two elements. Unique among the Courses, SWMTC confidently relies upon its partner university – Exeter – to deliver its academic programme in thirty two-hour evening sessions through the year: Introduction to the Bible and the Study of Christian Doctrine at level 1 with level 2 and 3 modules to follow. Where possible students are encouraged to begin to work at level 1 before selection for ministry, and most are able to complete the degree in their post-ordination or probation studies. This year students will be offered fifteen week modules at Truro on ‘Postcolonialism, Culture and Christianity’ and ‘Theology in the Old Testament’, and at Exeter on ‘Images of God and the World in the Hebrew Bible’, ‘Theology, Culture, Ideology’ and ‘Stories, Parables and Social Exclusion.’ In all this SWMTC students study beside all kinds of other people working for Certificate, Diploma or Degree, and do so in the midst of the rest of their lives.

The second element is that of ‘formation’ which is focussed in the Course’s Weekend programme, Easter School and monthly area-based Tutor Groups (Spirituality, Ethics and The World and the Imagination in a three-year cycle). The first year Weekend programme is devoted to helping students learn to ‘interpret’ the church and its context and to read situations and themselves. So there is work on listening skills, the church and worship, local contexts and the stories churches tell and don’t tell, with preparation for preaching too. Second and third years work together in a rolling programme in which listening to themselves and groups features significantly in both years. In one year this ‘Ministry Development Module’ has an outward, mission, look with weekend titles like ‘Gospel and Culture’, ‘Engaging with a World of Many Faiths’, ‘Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation’ and ‘Evangelism and Apologetics’ linked to an Easter School called ‘The History of the Church in Mission and the Mission of the Church in History’. In the other it looks more inward, with weekends on Baptism, Eucharist, Ecumenism, Ordination and Marriage and an Easter School on ‘Death and Dying.’ The aim of all this is to prepare people to be faithful and alert interpreters of the stories of God, the world and the Church, to enable them to grow as people in relationship with God and others as those who know their strengths and weaknesses, and to equip them to be confident and competent to take on the role and tasks of public ministry to serve the church’s mission and ministry in a rapidly changing world. If that sounds a bit like the language of a mission statement, it is because it is.

The logistics, forms and structures of SWMTC might be significantly different from those of Handsworth, but are these aims significantly different from the unstated aims of Handsworth? I think not. Handsworth had two considerable strengths. One was its commitment to academic rigour in a thorough engagement with the same issues of Bible and theology which engaged ‘the academy’, to use a bit of modern parlance. The other was its lack of cant. Students were treated as adults, at least as far as their formation was concerned. The staff may have been addressed by ‘hierarchical titles’ but they trusted the students with a remarkable degree of responsibility for their own ministerial development, not least in and through the ‘Firms.’ Just how remarkable was only seen when we moved to Queen’s in 1970 and encountered something rather different. SWMTC is committed to those same aims, and demonstrates, I believe, the same two strengths.

Preparation for the ordained ministries of the churches on SWMTC in 2003 is not the same as training for the Methodist ministry at Handsworth in 1967. Almost every world you can think of has changed since then. But given what Handsworth offered me and the Church, I personally rejoice that in respect of the continuities and changes in ministerial education since then we can really say at least in respect of SWMTC that ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ as Alphonse Kerr said thirty years before Handsworth College was built.

Finally, a word of tribute to Doc Strawson who, with his colleagues, incarnated these Handsworth principles and strengths. There was little room to escape in his Theology classes. In week one of year one we were into MacQuarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology, fresh from the publishers, and grappling with ‘Being’ and ‘letting be’. In year two it was Adam Clarke and Pope and Scott Lidgett and other Methodist theologians of whom we had never heard, but who had formed our tradition. In dialogue with them we were helped to begin to see how and why we were as we were. Serious questions were addressed, and inadequate responses were exposed, and more than once I remember a frisson of tension around that classroom. The rigour of the classroom was not left behind in the pulpit in the College Chapel, where the great themes of the Faith and the huge questions of discipleship were addressed with depth and passion and, coming from where I did, one learned what the ‘Holy’ was in our weekly Holy Communion. Just occasionally one longed for a lighter moment, not least at Friday lunches when Doc Strawson evicted me from my seat at the serving end of the back right-hand table and full enjoyment of the meal really required smaller talk. In the corridor a nodded smile and brief greeting was the norm, but at some crucial moments – how did he know that? - there was more, a word of enquiry about how my university studies were going, a word of encouragement or a question along the lines of ‘Have you read ….?’ And when we moved to what I experienced as an alien environment at Queens, that support and encouragement became stronger and more focused still. In Doc Strawson I saw, and admired, a life and ministry which was lived in defiance of trouble and difficulty, which asked the best from me and demanded much, though never more than Doc Strawson demanded of himself. My life and ministry owe much to Handsworth, and therefore not a little to Dr Strawson, and I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge both of those facts and to say to any who might listen, that those ideals which Handsworth and Dr Strawson exemplified have not disappeared.

(Bread of Heaven – A Christian Companion, ed Susan Hibbins, Inspire, 2007, pp14-17.  This short article could be used in a Bible Study or Discussion Group)

In 516 BC the Jerusalem Publishing House published the Book of Praises for use in the new Temple, built to celebrate the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon. It contained congregational hymns, choir anthems and solos, ancient and modern, and has been in print ever since. We call it the Book of Psalms. Favourites have come and gone, changing over the centuries, but for the last hundred years one psalm has always featured near the top, if not at the top, of the Christian Top Ten - Psalm 23 – ‘The Lord is my shepherd’. The version from the Scottish Psalter of 1650 which is sung to the tune ‘Crimond’ features highly in all polls of most-requested funeral hymns, and new versions are constantly appearing, one of the latest being the one by Stuart Townsend with the lovely chorus ‘And I will trust in you alone’ which is no.1008 in Complete Mission Praise. We don’t know who wrote the original or when. It’s called a ‘Psalm of David’ which probably means that it is a psalm from the Royal Collection from the first Temple, of which the kings of David’s line were patrons.

Psalm 23 speaks very powerfully of a God who cares and provides. In the first part it pictures God as the Good Shepherd who leads his sheep to green pastures and good water; and in the second it describes God as the Good Host who lays on a rich banquet for his guests.

The picture of God as a Shepherd and the people of Israel as his flock is one of the commonest images of God and his people in the Psalms (eg Psalms 95.7 and 100.3). It is a powerful one. It was quite common in the ancient near east for kings to be spoken of as the shepherds of their people, and that picture is used in the Old Testament too. This probably explains why Psalm 23 can move so easily from the picture of a shepherd providing for his sheep to that of a host providing for his guests. The reality, however, was often quite different. So it was that the outspoken prophet Ezekiel attacked the kings and the leaders of Judah in his day as bad shepherds, who cared nothing for the sheep, and who did nothing except exploit them (Ezekiel 34). In the New Testament we find the same image used about Jesus and the same contrast made. He is the Good Shepherd, quite different from the hired shepherds who care nothing for the sheep (John 10).

The first four verses of Psalm 23 describe how God the Shepherd provides for every sheep in the flock so that none goes without. He knows where to find green pastures, rare in a land which was often arid and dry. He knows where there is good water, neither brackish nor running dangerously fast. Going between them, he knows the safe routes to travel. And when dangerous places can’t be avoided, he can be trusted to defend his sheep from attack and harm. When he gets the flock to the good places, he gives them time to recover from the hard travel in between. In every conceivable way this Good Shepherd has the best interests of the flock at heart.

The picture of God as a Host and the people of Israel as guests at a banquet is not very common in the Old Testament, but it is found in one important reference which the Church has taken up. Isaiah 25.6 speaks of the great banquet to be celebrated when God finally rights all the wrongs currently experienced by his suffering people, a picture used in some of our Communion Services which talk of the ‘heavenly banquet prepared for all people’. It is clear that Jesus himself thought a lot about this picture, and that he made a big point of ‘eating and drinking’ with all kinds of people – quite against the usual rules of hospitality – as a sign that God’s new ways were beginning and that all and sundry were invited to the Feast.

Verses 5 and 6 of the psalm speak of just how lavish the banquet that God the Host provides is. It is not something quickly thrown onto the table, but it has been carefully thought out and it is beautifully presented. Each guest is given the special honour of being anointed with oil in welcome. There is plenty to drink. And everyone is safe. Even if they are surrounded by enemies outside the banqueting hall it doesn’t matter, because this generous Host is never going to turn them out. This great feast is going to last a lifetime!

It would be easy to dismiss this ancient psalm as too cosy or rosy by half. To say that life is not like this. That people don’t live happily ever after. That for most of us at some time, and even for some of us all of the time, life is hard, painful and deadly without any relief at all. That we cry out to God, and he doesn’t seem to be there. That God neither cares nor provides. At times all of this is true, and plenty of psalms shout complaints like these directly at God, something we never do in Christian worship, but which perhaps at times we should? But Psalm 23 is worth a closer look. It knows about the shadow side of life. It knows that life is a journey through some hard places, and that that journey takes its toll and can sometimes destroy our very being. It knows about dark valleys, about evil and about enemies. It knows that these things are real enough, both in the lives of individuals and in the lives of communities. But the anonymous author of Psalm 23 knows something else too, that these things do not have the last word. And so he writes this psalm to testify that the last word lies not with death but with life; not with darkness but with light, and not with evil but with good. That, in the end, it is true that God does care and provide. That the journey may be hard, but that God is there both in it and at its end. And his short psalm encourages all those who journey in faith with its two pictures of God as a Shepherd and a Host providing his sheep with pasture and his guests with a banquet.

The journey of life and faith is not easy, its rough places are not smoothed out nor its uneven ground made level. Stuff happens, as they say. But this psalm is testimony from someone who has been there that nothing in any of it can separate us from God’s love, ever. Therefore thanks be to God for this ancient author and this old testimony, for the encouragement his psalm has given to so many down the centuries, and for the encouragement which it still gives to us today.

(Review article, The Epworth Review, July 2004, vol 31, no 3, pp71-77)

It seemed a straightforward brief – three thousand words on books on the authority of the Bible which had appeared in the past five years – but it began to look more difficult when I discovered that the book I had taken to be my starting point was older than I thought. The next week brought more complications. In a moment of charity towards viewpoints other than my own, and in the interests of comprehensiveness, I had emailed friends for suggestions about the books that should not be omitted: but when their lists began to come in they were all exceeding short. Most began with apologies along the lines of – actually, when I sat down to think about this, I couldn’t find much done on the authority of the Bible in the past five years! And when I tried to gather the few suggested books together, the theological libraries I use had virtually none of them, which itself said something.

Next, conversations at the European Methodist Theological Commission reinforced my own view, and that stressed by one of my emailing friends, that ‘the authority of the Bible’ is a ‘modern’ concept which is out of date in a ‘post-modern’ one marked by a strong aversion to ‘authority’ of any kind. The best that the Bible can hope for in this new age, another friend said, is that it might be found in the ‘mind and spirit’ section of your local bookstore cum coffee shop, where the autonomous pick-n-mixer in the supermarket of images, values and experiences on offer there might discover its intrinsic potential to enhance their life-style choices and satisfy their search for self-fulfilment. The Bible can appeal, or entice, or invite – tell its story/stories and evoke a response - and its supporters can enable that to happen: but the days have gone when it could command, demand or insist. No doubt, another said, it will continue to be used by churches and preachers to impose and reinforce their power, but that is about the ‘authority of the Church’ or its liturgy or its interpreters of Scripture, and not about the ‘authority of the Bible.’ The ‘authority of the Bible,’ it seems, is ‘a very yesterday topic’.

In the world of the ‘academy’ traditional debates about the authority of the Bible, and of its inspiration and inerrancy, are indeed passé. A good illustration of this is to compare The Oxford Bible Commentary (ed John Barton and John Muddiman, OUP, 2001) with its best predecessor Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (ed Matthew Black and H H Rowley, Nelson, 1962). The ‘new Peake’ began with a long leading article on ‘the authority of the Bible’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury. OBC has no equivalent. Its short ‘General Introduction’ looks at why and how readers read the Bible, a significant change. Another example of the post-modern situation is The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (ed John Barton, CUP, 1998). This useful handbook intended to give students a complete guide to the present state of Biblical studies has no chapter on ‘the authority of the Bible’ or any of the issues traditionally bundled up with it, an omission which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago in a work with that title. The second part looks at what contemporary study has to say about the Biblical books, as you would expect, but the first and longest part, headed ‘Lines of Approach,’ offers eleven different ways of approaching or reading the Bible, including ‘historical-critical approaches’, ‘literary readings’, ‘Poststructuralist approaches’, ‘political readings’ and ‘feminist interpretation.’ Such is the post-modern, academic, variety of approaches to the Bible. Whilst some of the writers discuss which method really is the fairest of them all, the overall feeling is that all approaches are equal and all are concerned with engaging the reader with the text in a creative encounter. This attitude assumes that meaning is created by readers as they engage with the text, and as different readers bring different interests to the texts they use, so different reading strategies can be employed to foster that engagement. The implications of this changed methodology are many, but we can note two here. First, that this late twentieth-century scene is indeed not very friendly towards any traditional idea of the ‘authority of the Bible.’ But, second, that this lively current debate about how to read the Bible and engage with it in the making of meaning is actually saying something about the Bible’s ‘authority’ even if the word itself is shunned.

Then there is the other picture. Post-midnight television last autumn featured panels of bishops, who really ought to know better, bashing each other night after night with ‘the Bible says’ texts against and for potential gay colleagues. ‘Proof-texting’ was alive and well in that confrontation. As usual, the mantra was repeated that it is only ‘Bible-believing’ churches, ie those with a firm doctrine of the authority of the Bible, which are growing in today’s post-Christian West and which are the true representatives of an authentic, counter-cultural, genuinely Christian spirituality. There was not much post-modernism or diversity of reading strategies in that particular Anglican debate. It made me sad and angry, partly because learned clerics were using hermeneutical methods (‘The Bible says – therefore!’) which would not pass muster in a first-year student essay. And partly because it seemed to me that I was seeing the result of twenty years’ use of that bad liturgical formula – ‘This is the word of the Lord/Thanks be to God’ – introduced in the Alternative Service Book (1980) and now parroted universally after even the most incongruous of Bible readings. The flaws in this traditional ‘authoritative’ use of the Bible by the Church have been pointed out many times over decades, but it still goes on. It comes in for sharp criticism from Anthony Harvey in a short chapter on the authority of the Bible in By what authority? (SCM, 2001). He points out the obvious problems in creating social policies on the basis of ‘what the Bible says,’ but then exposes the flaw in the alternative ‘liberal’ method, which is to draw ideas from elsewhere but then feel obliged to show that they are actually ‘Biblical’. Methodists too are familiar with church reports which have introductory sections of Biblical and theological material which are then ignored in the rest of the report: but it illustrates the way in which the ‘authority of the Bible’ remains an issue in and for the church. The papers of The Modern Churchpeople’s Union annual conference of 2002 (By whose authority? ed J Clatworthy, MCU, 2003) offer a sharp critique of increasing authoritarianism in the church, and the short chapter on the authority of the Bible by Hugh Dawes is good. But bigger than all else here, almost needless to say, is the huge and inescapable phenomenon of fundamentalism – ‘the most conspicuous form of religion to emerge during the 20^th century.’ James Barr pointed out twenty-five years ago that fundamentalism is less about the authority of the Bible than it is about the authority of ‘sound Bible teachers,’ and Fundamentalisms (ed Christopher H Partridge, Paternoster, 2001 – from which that quote is taken) examines the many current manifestations of this complex phenomenon and is a book worth knowing.

Tension between the use of the Bible in the university and in the Church is, of course, nothing new. The growth of critical Biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century was not universally welcomed, as illustrated in Graham Slater’s article on Peake in the July 2003 issue of this journal. Suspicion of ‘academic’ attitudes to the Bible by Christians is familiar to us all, and the reverse is also true. Much mainstream Biblical scholarship has tried to bridge this gap (eg James Hastings’ industry in nineteenth century Scotland, Peake’s Commentary itself, Methodist Preachers’ Commentaries etc): but it sadly remains, as illustrated dramatically in a series of articles entitled ‘In honesty of preaching’ in the Expository Times (April-November 2000). There is, however, a new variant on this old tension. In Whose Bible is it anyway? (Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) Philip R Davies argued that this gap should be legitimated and universities engage in the secular study of Bible (the really important and proper way of studying the Bible) while theological colleges engage in the sacred study of Scripture (which is not proper Bible scholarship at all). Much the same thing – though reversing the prejudice – was said from the Church’s side, prominently by Francis Watson (eg Text and Truth, T and T Clark, 1997), though the shrill Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (C A Braaten and R W Jenson, T and T Clark, 1996) is more accessible. Against this background, the importance of confessional, committed and church-friendly Biblical study is being promoted by the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar, a consortium of Biblical scholars sponsored by the University of Gloucester and the Bible Society. The issues are explored in four volumes of essays, with a fifth to come, edited by Craig Bartholomew and others (Renewing Biblical Interpretation, Paternoster, 2000; After Pentecost - Language and Biblical Interpretation, 2001; A Royal Priesthood?-The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically, 2002 and ‘Behind’ the Text – History and Biblical Interpretation, 2004). These are important books, though some of the papers in them are clearer and more relevant to the search for a new way of reading the Bible as Scripture than others. At heart the Seminar argues, though this way of putting it is mine, that the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ which has ruled in academic Biblical studies since the 1970’s should itself be treated suspiciously, and that the time has come to read the Bible also with a ‘hermeneutic of trust’ or of ‘humility’. The earliest use of the first of these two phrases known to me is in Anthony Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (HarperCollins, 1992), and the second is used by Kevin J Vanhoozer in his important, Is there a meaning in this text? (Apollos, 1998) and there is much to commend them if they are used dialectically with the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’. Which takes us back to gaps and the need to work at ways of bridging them rather than encouraging them, which is what the Seminar itself might be accused of doing.

We are indebted to OUP for The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (ed A Hastings, A Mason and H Pyper, 2000) with a good article headed ‘Bible: its authority and interpretation’ by John Barton. He sets the issue out historically and concludes that ‘a theory of biblical authority that takes seriously the reality of historical biblical criticism is still not available’, a sentence which would make an excellent discussion topic. David R Law’s Inspiration (Continuum, 2001) takes a rigorous look at ‘inspiration’ – one of the traditional features of discussions of authority – and what can be said about it in relation to the Bible, as does Paul Achtemeier (Inspiration and Authority, Hendriksen, 1999). V George Shillington’s student introduction Reading the Sacred Text (T&T Clark, 2002) also makes an attempt at what Barton wants, although the words ‘authority’ or ‘inspiration’ do not feature in the index or section headings. Its final section is headed ‘Reading the Bible Responsibly’ which is not far off the issue.

DLT publish some good small books in their Exploring Faith: Theology for Life series, and The Authority of the Bible by William Strange (2000) is no exception. It covers the traditional ground well, is up to date with recent developments in Biblical studies and hermeneutics and features boxes and exercises to be done. It uses the important distinction, emerging recently, between extrinsic and intrinsic authority and ends, very appropriately for a learning tool, with the question of which one the reader thinks describes the Bible’s authority. This would be my way in to where things are now at if I had to recommend one. Using the Bible: Studying the Text by Robert Evans is a good companion to it from the same series (1999). My second choice as a way in would be Richard Bauckham’s Scripture and Authority Today (Grove Booklet B12, 1999). Coming from this conservative stable one might have expected a defence of inspiration, even inerrancy, but those yesterday questions are not touched. Instead we are straight into the distinction between ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ authority and thence to the postmodern rejection of authority and to the ‘authority of Story and of Grace’. An excellent twenty-four pages. Richard Briggs’ Reading the Bible Wisely (SPCK, 2003) offers a lot of sense and insight in a little paperback and an important popular book to look out for here is Marcus Borg, Meeting the Bible Again for the First Time (Harper, 2001).

Walter Brueggemann, one of the Old Testament’s liveliest commentators, must be mentioned somewhere here. For forty years he has supplied us with books written, with academic rigour, in the conviction that the Bible must be allowed to shape our imaginations, our discipleship and our construction of reality – in other words, he writes from a position which takes the Bible immensely seriously, which credits it with considerable (intrinsic) authority and which also sees it as bearing the (extrinsic) authority of Church and Synagogue. His Introduction to the Old Testament (WJK, 2003) promises to be a classic and its short but powerful introduction is compelling. How the Bible creates a meaningful world is the theme of The Bible Makes Sense, (WJK, revised edition, 2001). And, with William C Placher and Brian K Blount we have the short Struggling with Scripture (WJK, 2002) in which he offers a moving thirty pages headed, ‘Biblical Authority: a personal reflection’. This would be my third way in.

Another area we must notice is that of the Bible and Ethics, for ethics is obviously one place where the Bible has traditionally been seen as authoritative. Four of the first five chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (ed Robin Gill, CUP, 2001) look at issues here, as does John Rogerson’s chapter in Text and Context (ed A D H Mayes, OUP, 2000, the latest update on Old Testament scholarship produced by the Society for OT Study). As far as the OT is concerned there is R N Whybray, The Good Life in the OT (T&T Clark, 2002), G J Wenham, Story as Torah (T&T Clark 2000), John Barton (Understanding OT Ethics, WJK, 2003) and sharpest in its argument, Cyril Rodd, Glimpses in a Strange Land (T and T Clark, 2001). All of them, in quite different ways, ask what this ancient text has to contribute to contemporary concerns, and offer answers – though rather different ones. For the New Testament, Richard B Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (T&T Clark, 1996) remains, I am told, unsurpassed. Remnants of the older ‘extrinsic authority’ view that the Bible has moral authority because it is ‘God’s Book,’ or in its more recent ‘canonical’ variant because it is ‘the Church’s Book,’ are found in Hays and Wenham; and Whybray and Barton tend to work with an ‘intrinsic authority’ approach which says that what is available to us in the Bible can be insightful. Rodd is more sceptical: we can glimpse landscapes of value and interest in the Old Testament, but it is a strange land which is quite different from our own. They do things differently there and we cannot import their understandings here. But glimpsing into that strange land at least alerts us to the fact that our understandings might themselves not be as natural or inevitable as we customarily assume, and that is itself an important lesson for ethics. And if that is so, it is inappropriate, to put it mildly, to claim authority in any traditional sense for the Bible despite the persistence of attempts to do so (see especially chapter 20). This is probably the place to mention Sarah Lancaster, Women and the Authority of Scripture (Harper, 2001) but I have not been able to access either the book itself or any review of it. But ethics and the Bible really deserves a review article of its own.

What of Methodism? Out of the timeframe we have the tame Conference Statement of 1998, A Lamp to my Feet and a Light to my Path. There is also Cyril Rodd’s underused Thinking Things Through – the Bible (Epworth, 1996), and my own Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding, available (on this website), both of which deal with the issues raised for a doctrine of the authority of the Bible by what the Bible actually is, what it contains and how it came to us. Wesley and the Quadrilateral (W Stephen Gunter, Scott J Jones, Ted A Campbell, Rebekah L Miles and Randy L Maddox, Abingdon, 1997) introduces us to a major discussion taking place in American Methodism about the relative place of the Bible in the authority nexus of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. This is also discussed in my chapter, ‘Revelation in Methodist Practice and Belief,’ in the forthcoming Unmasking Methodist Theology (ed Clive Marsh, Brian Beck, Angela Shier-Jones and Helen Wareing, Continuum, 2004).

The place I thought I should start was John Goldingay - Models for Scripture (Eerdmans/Paternoster, 1994) which examines the Bible under the four models of Scripture as Witnessing Tradition, Authoritative Canon, Inspired Word and Experienced Revelation, and Models for the Interpretation of Scripture (Eerdmans/Paternoster 1995) which explores the ways of interpretation pertinent to each model. And these remain a rich resource for the plethora of questions to do with the interpretation, authority and inspiration of the Bible. They recognise the diversity of material in the ancient and alien text which is the Bible. They recognise humanity’s long engagement with the Bible in our search for meaning. And they recognise that the Bible, as all literature and story, creates a world and invites its readers to inhabit it. If this is what ‘the authority of the Bible’ now means, and this is rather different from what the phrase used to mean, then debate about it is actually alive and well.

(The Epworth Review, April 2003, vol 30, no 2, pp51-57. This is the printed version of the paper read to the European Methodist Theological Commission, in the lectures section of this website)

The word ‘spirituality’ did not feature in John Wesley’s vocabulary and its meaning is prone to vagueness in ours.[1] Marie McCarthy’s definition is probably as good as we can get: ‘Spirituality is a fundamental component of our human beingness, rooted in the natural desires, longings and hungers of the human heart. It is concerned with the deepest desires of the human heart for meaning, purpose and connection, with the deep life lived intentionally in reference to something larger than oneself.’[2] That understanding of the word, now in universal use inside and outside faith communities, is not found before the late twentieth century, but on the basis of that definition we can identify ‘Scriptural Holiness’ as Wesley’s spirituality.[3] In this paper, therefore, I hope to examine briefly the parameters and key features of the spirituality of ‘Scriptural Holiness’ which was both Wesley’s own spirituality and that which he commended to the early Methodists.

For Wesley ‘Scriptural Holiness’ is a search, a process or, to use a common word from contemporary spirituality, a journey. It is a journey from new birth to spiritual maturity, from sinfulness to perfection, from ‘original sin’ through ‘justification by faith’ to ‘entire sanctification’.[4] The goal of ‘holiness of heart and life’ is an integrated life filled with awareness of the love of God, marked by freedom from the guilt and power of sin, and lived in love towards others – a mature, responsible, fulfilled life.[5] It is, for most, a journey begun and continued, rather than a destination reached or goal achieved.[6] It is a journey undertaken in company with others, in ‘fellowship’, not one walked alone.[7]

The starting point of this journey of Scriptural Holiness lies for Wesley, both in theory and in the realities of his own life, in the experience of dissonance. From a very early age, encouraged particularly by the religious upbringing he received from his mother, John Wesley was aware of the reality of sin and the need for faith, that there were two paths of life and that a choice had to be made between them, a choice which had eternal consequences. Whether or not as a child Wesley thought of himself as not being the person he ought to be, that he was a ‘sinner’ and that the gap between his life as it was and his life as it ought to be and could be was unbridgeable without the help of God, is open to question. The famous line from his Journal that until he was about ten years of age he had not ‘sinned away that washing of the Holy Ghost which was given [him] in baptism’ is instructive, as is what follows it.[8] It may reflect Wesley’s childhood feelings, or the reflection of the older man. None the less, this legacy of puritan and evangelical Christianity was to shape Wesley’s search for authentic Christian faith and experience in adult life, and, once that meaning and experience were found, would provide the engine and energy for his life’s work of offering this meaning and experience to others. Alienated from God and unacceptable to him, he felt himself lost for eternity, worthy only of Hell. This was certainly the view of himself held by the 34 year old priest of the Church of England on his return from Georgia,[9] despite the fact that later on he modified that harsh view, saying, ‘I had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a son’.[10]

The distinction between having the ‘faith of a servant’ and ‘the faith of a son’ is significant, and is one which Wesley came to use frequently in his preaching.[11] If we use it for the period between Wesley at age 10 and Wesley after May 1738 we can see what an intense matter ‘the faith of a servant’ was. In this period Wesley lived his religious life with great, and to his detractors laughable, seriousness. He was committed to rigorous personal discipleship, expressed in private prayer, Bible reading and almsgiving and to regular corporate worship and shared study, spiritual exercises and charitable service in groups. There was nothing frivolous or in any way irreligious about the young Wesley. From the serious schoolboy at Charterhouse, through the studious and meticulous member of the Holy Club at Oxford, to the ordained priest who went as a missionary to America, there is a single-mindedness of purpose, a commitment to the life of faith, a generosity of social concern and the highest standard of personal morality which adds up to an almost exemplary, if very intense, life and faith.[12]

For Wesley, however, all this was not enough. There remained a fundamental sense of dissonance, a restlessness, a missing element.[13] So strong was Wesley’s sense of need and incompleteness that he seems to have been driven almost to despair and depression, and an unsympathetic observer might justifiably describe him in this stage of his journey as neurotic or even pathological. The change came about at 8.45pm on 24^th May in 1738. In his Journal entry for that day in which he describes his new experience, the crucial phrase is ‘an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’. It was at this point that Wesley felt, and that is a very important word for Wesley, that he was accepted, that his sins were forgiven and that he was ‘saved’. That moment and that experience did not solve all his problems or meet all his needs, but that moment of ‘assurance’ seems to have given Wesley the sense of inner peace which his driven life had hitherto lacked. Whether the traditional naming of this experience as John Wesley’s ‘Conversion’ is the best way to describe it is not my concern here, nor is the related question of whether this is the moment at which he was ‘justified by grace through faith’: but there is little doubt that the experience of ‘assurance’ received in that moment was a crucial point in Wesley’s spiritual journey.[14]

His journey did not end there, and in terms of the practicalities of his life a whole new phase opened up from that moment which would take him externally and internally into undreamed of areas of change and personal development. He continued to be restless, to be aware of dissonance, to ‘struggle against sin’, but now largely without the huge levels of anxiety which prior to May 24^th had both driven and disabled him. Thus it was that he did not rest content with his experience of ‘justification’ but went on to seek ‘sanctification’, and to make that search and the preaching of it the central plank of his mission.[15] The faith which he then preached and professed was no longer that of a servant but of a son; the experience he offered to others was that of receiving the ‘spirit of adoption’ by which they would be able to cry ‘Abba, Father’, and in which they would know and feel that healing light had broken in on their souls freeing them from both the guilt and power of sin.[16]

Marie McCarthy argues that the ‘restless seeking for meaning, purpose and enduring values is the primary marker of the spiritual quest’.[17] Wesley’s driven restlessness is obvious. She also points out that every authentic spirituality – her phrase not mine – is ‘rooted in a tradition’ which supplies its vocabulary and forms.[18] That of Wesley is the complex blend of puritan, evangelical and High Church Anglicanism of eighteenth century England in general and the rectory at Epworth in particular. She also points out that a spirituality will often embody a particular charism, a ‘particular manifestation of truth’,[19] and on this understanding it could be argued that the charism of Wesley’s spirituality was the ‘doctrine of assurance’.[20] McCarthy then goes on to describe six marks of ‘authentic spirituality’,[21] and we will continue our exploration of the spirituality of ‘Scriptural Holiness’ by using her markers.

The first is contemplative awareness, a discipline which involves ‘deep listening’ marked by ‘waiting, attending and presence’, particularly nurtured in the practice of silence. From his diaries we see how Wesley kept his resolution "to devote (to retirement and private prayer) an hour morning and evening – no pretence or excuse whatsoever." In his sermon on ‘The Means of Grace’, in which he sets out the three principal ways in which spirituality is to be nurtured, the first of these is ‘prayer – whether in secret or with the great congregation’.[22] It is of ‘absolute necessity’. The second way of ‘waiting’ is by ‘searching the Scriptures.’ The third is not, as we might have expected, meeting in fellowship or in worship generally, but ‘partaking of the Lord’s supper’ and in this section Wesley stresses the need for self-examination. The journey of Scriptural Holiness is sustained therefore, for Wesley, by rigorous use of disciplined time in which we reflect on the state of our soul, on the one hand, and on the counsels of God on the other; being aware of self and of God and open to the moving of the Spirit in and towards us.[23]

The second is effective action in the world, which ‘works towards the healing of the world and the wellbeing of all creation’. Wesley’s own lifestyle is instructive here; from the prison visiting of the Holy Club at Oxford, through his own generosity of ‘almsgiving’ to the letter to Wilberforce at the end, Wesley’s life was characterised by ‘doing good’. Exaggerated claims should not be made about his contribution to reform in the eighteenth century – nor about Methodism’s since – for he was neither the initiator nor the organiser of any major reform. He was, instead, ‘an instinctively benevolent ‘friend of mankind’’[24] for whom faith was to be demonstrated in works. His instruction to the Methodists to ‘do all the good you can, to all the people you can, in all the ways you can’ was born out of his own reading of Scripture and backed by his own example. As was his sermon on ‘The Use of Money’ with its three points of ‘Gain all you can’, ‘Save all you can’ and ‘Give all you can’.[25]

The third is community because spirituality is not an ‘isolated, privatised, individual affair’. Wesley’s ‘Scriptural Holiness’ had been ‘social holiness’ from the days of the Holy Club onwards, and the genius of his organisation was to create and sustain groups in which the early Methodists met regularly to ‘build each other up’, to encourage each other in their spiritual lives and in their common enterprise. As ‘societies’ emerged they were grouped into the larger units of ‘circuits’ and then into a ‘connexion’, while their members were formed into the smaller groups of ‘classes’ and ‘bands.’ ‘Meeting together’ for mutual support, encouragement and accountability was an essential part of the journey as far as Wesley was concerned.[26]

The fourth is a disposition of openness, especially an openness to the new and unexpected, an openness to a future that would be different and a willingness to risk. Many examples could be cited from the Journal of Wesley seeking guidance from the Bible or in prayer in his openness to the future and willingness to go where God would lead. Three major examples of real risk-taking openness are his venture into the new world of ‘field preaching’ in 1739, in which he ‘submitted to be more vile’ as he engaged in a task he found both theologically suspect and personally distasteful,[27] his acceptance of lay preaching also in 1739 and the reluctant brazenness of the ordinations of 1785. His mission policy was marked by countless new initiatives along the way, illustrating a spirituality marked by a pragmatics of openness. One of his legacies to the universal Church and an important liturgical expression of this aspect of the spirituality of Scriptural Holiness is the annual Covenant Service, first borrowed and used in 1755, the essence of which is an intensely personal reflection on the past year and a total willingness to be open for the future expressed in a corporate act of public worship.

The fifth is non-dualistic thinking and acting, in which life is integrated in a capacity to hold opposites together and to form a new synthesis, of contemplation and action, of private and public, individual and social. Some of the examples already cited illustrate this aspect of spirituality in Wesley, but perhaps the best is to be found in the title of Henry Rack’s historical biography of Wesley and in the reason for Rack choosing it. Rack argues that Wesley’s life was full of paradoxes – instances of opposites held together in a new synthesis – and that ‘Reasonable Enthusiast’ captures the main one, that Wesley was neither an ‘enthusiast’ nor a ‘man of reason’ in eighteenth century dualist terms, but a synthesis of both.[28] Methodist spirituality and history subsequently found that particular paradox difficult to maintain and the failure to do so contributed to the denominational splits of the nineteenth century. That dualistic tendency remains today, contrary to ‘Scriptural Holiness’ as envisaged and lived by Wesley though it is.

The last is discernment, and McCarthy’s paragraph can be quoted in full,

‘A final mark of authentic spiritualities is that they generally offer a set of guidelines and practices for discerning the path we are being called to follow. They invite us to put our lives in dialogue with the tradition through prayer, reflection, meditation, individual and group guidance, and other practices. They encourage attentive listening and awareness of how we are being called and where we are being led. In this sense authentic spiritualities are marked by a sense of obedience to something or someone larger than and beyond oneself. In the process of discernment one looks for certain signs such as a sense of inner and outer freedom, an awareness of the connectedness and interrelation of all creation, a rootedness in tradition coupled with openness to the new, and a sense of deep, inner peace.’[29]

In this paper we have attempted to sketch out Wesley’s spirituality of ‘Scriptural Holiness,’ using Wesley himself as the exemplar of the spirituality he advocated. This paragraph from McCarthy demonstrates that his ‘Scriptural Holiness’ has all the marks of what she calls an ‘authentic spirituality’. It can also be used as a summary both of his spirituality and of his life and mission.

[1] To mark the tercentenary of John Wesley’s birth the European Methodist Council has commissioned its Theological Commission to prepare a study paper on ‘Scriptural Holiness for the twenty-first century’.  This article is based on a paper presented to the Commission at its meeting in Waiern , Austria , in June 2002.  

[2] Marie McCarthy, ‘Spirituality in a Postmodern Era’ in The Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology, ed. Woodward and Pattison, Blackwell, 2000, p196.  

[3] Using ‘Scriptural Holiness’ here in the way Wesley used the phrase to describe the mission of Methodism as being  ‘to spread Scriptural Holiness over the land’.   

[4] These three form the core components of Wesley’s version of the ‘analogy of faith’, his basic theological position and hermeneutical strategy.     

[5] As he comments on Ephesians 3:19 in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament: ‘That ye may be filled – which is the sum of all.  With all the fulness of God – With all His light, love, wisdom, holiness, power and glory.  A perfection far beyond a bare freedom from sin’.   

[6] Wesley stoutly advocated that the goal was achievable and that he could name some of those who had ‘reached perfection’s height’.  At the same time he admitted that he himself had not and that that was the case with most of the rest of us too, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Epworth Press, London , 1952, pp58, 62-69.    

[7] This is what Wesley means by ‘there is no holiness but social holiness.’  His ‘social holiness’ does not include our agendas of social engagement, social justice or commitment to social issues; and when Wesley encourages us by his own example and word to engage in these things, as he does, he uses different language.  This quote originated in controversy with the quietists who urged solitary religion, and against that, Wesley writes, ‘Directly opposite to this is the gospel of Christ.  Solitary religion is not to be found there.  ‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers.  The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social, no holiness but social holiness.’  (Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739).      

[8] In the Journal entry for May 24^th, 1738 he gives an extended retrospect of his life and search to that point.  The first sentence of the opening paragraph reads, ‘I believe till I was about ten years old I had not sinned away that ‘washing of the Holy Ghost’ which was given me in baptism, having been strictly educated and carefully taught, that I could be saved ‘by universal obedience, by keeping all the commandments of God’ in the meaning of which I was diligently instructed.’  

[9] In his Journal entry for October 14^th, 1735, the day he sailed for Georgia , he notes that their reason for going was ‘to save our souls’.  In his comment on returning to England on January 31^st 1738 he notes that ‘I who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God’ (though in a later note he was to add – ‘I am not sure of this’) and after listing all he ‘did know, say, give, do and suffer’ concludes that he is still not ‘justified’ in the sight of God.  He concludes that this American learning experience has taught him that he falls short of the glory of God, that his heart is corrupt, that he is alienated from God and a ‘child of wrath’ (but note the later note here too – ‘I believe not’) and an ‘heir of hell’.  Another one of these later notes says, ‘I had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a son’.     

[10] Ibid.  

[11] It is expounded fully in Sermon 9, ‘The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption’ and in another metaphor in Sermon 2, ‘The Almost Christian,’ which contrasts the ‘Almost Christian’ and the ‘Altogether Christian.’   

[12] Which is what any impartial reader would conclude from reading the full text of the Journal entry cited in note 7.  

[13]  See ‘An Early Self-Analysis’ in John Wesley, ed A Outler, Oxford University Press, New York , 1964, pp41-50.  On 8^th January, 1738, Wesley writes – ‘By the most infallible of proofs, inward feeling, I am convinced: 1. Of unbelief – having no such faith in Christ as will prevent my heart from being troubled, when it could not be if I believed in God and rightly believed also in Christ; 2 – Of pride throughout my life past, inasmuch as I thought I had what I find I have not; 3 – Of gross irrecollection, inasmuch as in a storm I cry to God every moment; in a calm, not; 4 – Of levity and luxuriancy of spirit, recurring whenever the pressure is taken off, and appearing by my speaking words not tending to edify; but most by my manner of speaking of my enemies.’, pp41f.     

[14] See Outler, op cit, part 1, chapter 2, ‘The Aldersgate Experience’.   

[15] In the terms set out in note 2 above.  

[16] See especially the two sermons cited in note 9 above.  

[17] McCarthy in Woodward and Pattison, op cit, p194.  

[18] Op cit p197.  

[19] Op cit p199.  

[20] As set out in Sermon 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit’.  

[21] Op cit pp199-201.  

[22] Sermon 12.  

[23] We perhaps ought to add fasting to this list of ways of listening deeply to God, a practice Wesley advocates in Sermon 22, ‘Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 7’.    

[24] H D Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, Epworth Press, London , 1989, p360.   

[25] Sermon 44.   For a more upbeat treatment of Wesley’s action see T Runyon, The New Creation – John Wesley’s Theology Today, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1998 especially chapter 6 and David Guy’s chapter 6 in John Wesley – Contemporary Perspectives, ed J Stacey, Epworth Press, London, 1988.  

[26] See chapter 10 of John Telford’s, The Life of John Wesley, Epworth Press, London , 1947.  This is a classic of Methodist hagiography – and why not!     

[27] Journal, April 2^nd, 1739.  

[28] Rack, op cit.  He quotes on the frontspiece the words of Alexander Knox that ‘I think [Wesley] would have been an enthusiast if he could … [but] there was a firmness in his intellectual texture which would not bend to illusion’, see also ppxi-xii.  

[29] Op cit p201.

13 Walking Humbly: Micah 6.8 Revisited

Scottish Journal of Theology, 1988, vol 41, no 3, pp331-339

 You have been shown, man, what is good,

And what the Lord requires from you,

Just this: to act justly, to love faithfully,

And to walk humbly with your God.

The importance of this well-known verse has been frequently noted. It is cited as a high point in the literature of Israel , as a classic summary of the teaching of the eighth century prophets and as a statement of great lasting and theological value. In Jewish tradition it is used as one of the memorable summaries of the whole Law. It does contain, however, uncertainties of meaning and interpretation. In form it is a priestly or prophetic torah, giving an answer to the worshipper’s question in vv.6-7, What has a sinner to do to be restored to a right relationship with God, and then how is that relationship to be sustained? With a general statement like this questions of date and authorship are minor matters.  

Since Professor G. W. Anderson wrote about this key verse in this journal (vol. 4, 1951), a number of articles have appeared which suggest that the traditional understanding of the third phrase in Micah’s catechism is flawed. It is suggested that God does not demand that we should walk humbly with him, but that we should walk wisely or circumspectly in his presence. This understanding is repeated in three recent commentaries (Hillers, Allen, Renaud) but has appeared in only one major new translation so far, namely N.E.B.  

In Professor Anderson’s article the discussion of this third element was itself rather bland. The phrase in question, chasnea‘ leketh, which occurs only here in the Old Testament, was simply taken to refer to living in communion with God. Important though such an idea is to Christianity, or at least to parts of it, it is far from clear that such spirituality can be assumed for the Old Testament. It is very doubtful indeed if the expression in Micah 6.8c refers to such communion, even if the traditional translation is retained. Perhaps therefore the time has come for another look at Micah 6.8, specifically at its problematic concluding phrase.   

The traditional translation, ‘to walk humbly with your God’, has been called in question for a number of reasons. At Micah 6.8 the Greek versions all have different words or phrases which suggest attentiveness to God, receptiveness and a readiness to discern and do his will. The one who does this is guarded in his language and reserved in his bearing. This idea is maintained in Ben Sira where words from the Hebrew root occur four times (R.S.V. 16.25, 31.22, 32.3 and 42.8) in the sense of ‘carefulness’ and ‘guardedness’ rather than ‘humility’ and ‘lowliness’ though the reconstruction of the Hebrew text is far from certain. In the literature from Qumran the same phrase as in Micah is used for the wise and prudent bearing of those who are devoted to God and who ‘walk wisely’ with their fellows, obeying the Community Rule and observing its conventions governing relationships between the members of the different orders. Equally little support for the traditional translation is to be found in the other ancient versions, for both the Peshitta and the Vulgate seem to be following the Greek. No help is forthcoming from the Aramaic Targum which simply repeats the difficult Hebrew term, for which the meaning of ‘humility is not attested until late.  

Thus for Micah 6.8 the following English translations have been offered recently: ‘to walk wisely before your God’ (N.E.B.), ‘to walk wisely with your God’ (Hillers), ‘living wisely in fellowship with your God’ (Hyatt), ‘to walk circumspectly’ (Winton Thomas), ‘to walk modestly’ (Goldman), ‘to walk carefully’ (Allen), ‘to walk heedfully’ (Wolff, cf. Veilleumier and Keller) and ‘to walk in purity’ (T. H. Robinson), as well as the traditional ‘to walk humbly’ (R.S.V., N.I.V., N.J.B., cf. G.N.B.).  

There is however ancient support for the traditional translation. The same root is found elsewhere in the Old Testament only at Proverbs 11.2, where the substantive is used for the ‘wise’ who are marked by a reticence which deprecates self-advertisement and a deliberate curbing of self-assertiveness, in contrast to the pride (Hebrew zadon, Greek hubris) which brings disgrace. These modest people pay attention to God but the proud listen only to themselves. In the sentence literature of Proverbs this theme occurs frequently. Zadon recurs at Proverbs 13.10 and 21.24, and especially seems to be used for pride and arrogance manifested in intemperate, forward or abusive speech. The Septuagint renders the opposite term at Proverbs 11.2 by tapeinos which is translated by humilitas in the Vulgate. Thus both the Greek and Latin understand the word at Proverbs 11.2 to belong to the vocabulary of humility.  

The dictionaries, B.D.B., Jastrow and Even Shoshan support the traditional translation of Micah 6.8 on the basis of later Hebrew, and in the light of recent developments in Old Testament studies the facts of usage in later Hebrew itself are to be given more weight than has sometimes been the case. Various words formed from the root are found in the Talmud. The Hiphil Infinitive Absolute, the form found at Micah 6.8, occurs with the meaning of chastity. The verb speaks of the act of hiding something, keeping it in reserve, or of restraining someone. The masculine noun means chastity or modesty and a feminine noun adds decency and discretion to that sense, plus another meaning of secrecy or retirement. In modern Hebrew the phrase used in Micah 6.8 means ‘walk humbly’, ‘behave modestly’. Significantly the only citation of the verse in the Midrash Rabbah has the plain meaning of modesty, and so does the use of it in the Midrash on Psalm 17.22.  

Further support for the traditional translation comes from a careful examination of the context of the phrase in the Book of Micah, both of the immediate verbal context and the wider context of meaning in the book as a whole. In Micah 6.8c the phrase functions as an adverb in a verbal phrase whose meaning is plain. The worshipper is to ‘walk with God’, that is to pay attention to God by rendering him obedience. It is therefore an unnecessary duplication to understand the adverb as meaning ‘circumspectly’, ‘heedfully’, ‘carefully’ or the like. If emphasis was all that was required the writer could have used other and simpler forms to express it. The grammatical form used here suggests that a statement is being made about the mode or style of walking with God which is more than solely emphasis. On the basis of this the translations ‘modestly’, ‘in purity’ and ‘humbly’ stand apart from the newer suggestions.  

Support for the traditional translation may also come from Micah 2.3, which says that people will no longer walk haughtily (R.S.V.). The reference may be to the evil behaviour condemned in vv.1f, which is often seen in the prophets as an example of human pride (cf. Amos 6.8, Isaiah 28.1, 3, Jeremiah 13.9, Zephaniah 3.11-13, Ezekiel 16.49f). The adverb used occurs only here, but the cognate noun and verb are both used in a significant number of instances with the bad sense of pride and arrogance. However it may be that this reference is to conditions in the coming servitude where the people can no longer walk in the good pride of independence, but go around bound and ashamed. If there is a strong link between the teaching of Micah and that of Isaiah, then this would support the sense of evil pride here, for Isaiah is very forceful in his condemnations of pride, cf. especially 2.9-19, 10.12-19 and 16.6.  

The full expression in Micah 6.8c may have been coined by Micah himself. It may be that other words for humility were shunned because they had inappropriate overtones, such as material poverty or piety, whereas the overtones of the words used especially in the Wisdom traditions are more appropriate to the writer’s intentions. Words such as dal and ‘ani would have been avoided, certainly in the pre-exilic period, because of their associations with material poverty. They denote the poor, and often the poor who cry out in desperation to God because of their various afflictions. Micah regards poverty in all its forms as an aberration and a blight on the nation’s life, and is on that score hardly likely to use any vocabulary which could encourage an acceptance of poverty. Also these words are essentially stative whereas the adverb required by the context at Micah 6.8 must be dynamic. Similarly ‘anaw may have been avoided for its stative feel, and also because of the strong element of anguish and distress which it retains almost everywhere, or if this verse is to be dated in a later period, because of its use to denote the pious who humbly wait upon God. Neither of those elements of piety or submission are appropriate at Micah 6.8. It is difficult to be any more precise because the dating of verse 8 and the changes in meaning of the ‘humility’ vocabulary cannot be charted with certainty.  

We may therefore conclude that the case against the traditional understanding of the third of Micah’s demands remains unproven. Attempts to amend the text have been made, but have met with little acceptance. Attempts to redefine the meaning of the word translated ‘humbly’ on the basis of its meaning in other Semitic languages can be regarded as unnecessary, and a meaning of ‘humility’ retained from the word’s sense in Hebrew from a later period. It must also be remembered that its use only here in the Old Testament may be merely fortuitous. We may retain the traditional understanding of the third phrase and see it as a demand for obedience to God, characterised by careful attentiveness to his will, personal modesty and due consideration of one’s fellows. There is no place for pride, self-assertion or any other form of hubris in man’s relation to God, his behaviour towards others or his understanding of himself. This is what it means to ‘walk humbly with your God’.  

The relationship between the three elements required by God is also not clear. Is there an ascending movement from man’s actions through his attitude to his relationship with God? Are the first two elements to be seen together as applying to man’s relationship with his fellows, while the third applies to his relationship with God? These are possibilities, though each of the members of the triad can be seen to have both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ applications. It may be best to think of all three requirements as facets of the ‘good’ which God requires, chosen as examples to illustrate that all-embracing term.  

Lists of virtues with three or more members appear elsewhere in the prophets at Amos 5.14-15, Hosea 12.6, Isaiah 1.16-17 and Zechariah 7.7-10 where they are used in exhortations, and exhortations to good behaviour containing two ideals are even more frequent. From a Wisdom background a similar long exhortation is Psalm 24.11-14. It is much more likely that the demand made in these exhortations is for an orientation of the whole person to do God’s will rather than an appeal to keep three, four or more separate goals in view. The exhortations listed do not give individual commandments to be observed but general principles to be followed, and their effect is cumulative.  This is confirmed by the recognition that Micah 6.6-8 has the form of a torah, and is dealing with the same general question as the forms at Psalm 15.2-5, 24.3-6 and Isaiah 33.14-16, ‘Who is worthy to worship Yahweh?’ The answers to that question all vary in detail but in each case the questioner is made aware of the fact that there is only one requirement, namely, the quality of the worshipper’s life. The worshipper is therefore not encouraged to answer each part of the question asked, though he may be challenged with detailed specific questions at times, but he is expected to see the question as a whole and answer concerning the totality of his life. In the answer to the almost identical question of v.8a at Deuteronomy 10.12, it is plain that all the five things mentioned in the reply are one, each viewing the one requirement from a different perspective, that one requirement is obedience. The triad in Micah 6.8 is perhaps best understood in the same way.  

It is possible that the third element in the series at Micah 6.8 is being emphasised. It is longer than the other two and contains what appears to be an unusual and possibly original expression. The reversal of verb and qualifier in the last member of the triad may also point to this. The concluding word of the series, ‘your God’, rounds off the whole of this torah, for the pronominal suffix refers back to the questioner of v.6, and this term for God was the one used in his question. However, an examination of series and numerical sayings used in the Wisdom literature shows that in none of these can it be said that the last saying is the most important or emphatic. It may be so at times but it is neither necessarily nor often so. That possibility is a real one here but cannot be categorically asserted.  

It must be observed in passing that Micah 6.6-8 is not an attack on the place of the cult in religion. The old view which saw the prophets as opposed to the cult per se has now come to be regarded as too one-sided. These verses must be seen alongside such other prophetic statements as Amos 5.21-17, Hosea 6.6 and Isaiah 1.10-17, which are now more generally regarded as attempts to correct the imbalance in contemporary Israelite religion which stressed the importance of rituals but minimised the place of morality. Micah 6.8 stresses that belief and behaviour go together, at least in the sight of God; and that what he requires fundamentally is personal commitment to moral living. Micah 6.8 is a statement of the major virtues to be cultivated by those who would seek to be faithful to the God of Israel. Worship, and no doubt many other things as well have their place; but morality is paramount.  

To whom is the oracle addressed, and to what prior disclosure is the prophet referring? If ‘man’, ’adam, is to be seen as an address to mankind in general, then the picture here is of Yahweh as the one who judges the behaviour of all people in the light of the generally accepted moral norms, or even ‘Natural Law’, by which they live and which in reality originates with him (cf. Amos 1-2 and elsewhere). If the address is to ‘Israelite Man’, then there are many possibilities. The reference may be to Mosaic traditions, ‘covenant ideology’, or legal maxims, handed down through the cult, the wisdom circles or through Micah’s immediate prophetic predecessors, or surely more likely, to various combinations of these. The wording of the verse argues for the widest interpretation. In different ways and by means of diverse traditions everyone has come to know how they should behave. The verse does not allow itself to be side-tracked into debating the merits of varied traditions. Immediately it proceeds to emphasise (‘just this!’) the contents of the goodness which everyone knows is expected of them.  

The speaker refers here to what people did know, or to what he thought they ought to know. The reference to humility in the third part of his advice is therefore all the more remarkable. In the first two clauses of his instruction he uses well-known vocabulary, possibly even theological clichés. The people are to ‘act justly’ (doing mishpat) and to ‘love faithfully’ (loving chesed). There is no theological technical term in the Old Testament for humility on a par with such important theological terms as these. But does not Micah’s use of the idea here suggest that he at least would place humility high on his list of virtues? The humility which he designates a virtue expresses itself in action towards other people, the association with the other two terms here indicates that. The humble person is aware of other people and attentive to them in practical ways. He also pays attention to God, for humility is that mark of true discipleship which is seen in receptiveness towards God and in a willingness to listen quietly to him and let him direct one’s way.  

There is perhaps one other theological point to draw out here. There is surely a link being made by Micah between the character requiring to be cultivated by the worshipper and the character of the God he is seeking to worship. God is just, and hence requires his worshippers to act justly; God loves faithfully and therefore expects his people to do the same. Can we not draw the same inference with the third requirement, that God himself is humble and requires humility of his followers? That God is humble is an idea found in the Rabbis’ interpretations of the difficult term ‘anawah which occurs six times in the Old Testament (Zephaniah 2.3, Psalms 18.36 and 45.5, Proverbs 15.33, 18.12 and 22.4),  and while Micah’s expression is not used of God, it does not seem that applying the adjective ‘humble’ to God should be ruled out of court. God’s humility is his ‘condescension’ to his people, his stooping to interest himself in them and care for them, and without later technical terms for humility being used this can be seen in the Old Testament for example at Isaiah 57.15 and 66.1f and Psalms 113.5-9 and 138.6. The theme is not a negligible one in Jewish theology.  

Humility and Pride are, needless to say, ambiguous terms for there are good and bad varieties of both. This is also not the place to pursue an examination of the place of humility in Old Testament ethics, though important references to it there most certainly are in the Old Testament. If the third term in Micah 6.8 is in fact its climax then this verse offers the Old Testament’s most powerful assertion of the importance of humility as a virtue, and even if it is not the climax but simply on a par with the other two parts of the statement, the importance of humility here cannot be denied. Its definition must be vague, as the first two demands are many-faceted in their implications, dealing with the relationship of the worshipper to God, to neighbour and to self, so too the final one. The worshipper is to be humble towards God (recognising his dependence upon him and being willing to subject himself to him?), towards his fellows (being ready to put others first and give himself away in service to them?) and towards himself (shunning undue ambition, and cultivating a realistic sense of his own place and value?).  

Whatever its precise definition, the last statement in Micah 6.8 refers to something much more concrete than ‘communion with God’, and early Jewish tradition joins with later Christian translations in understanding that reference to be to the important virtue of humility. It is still commonplace to read that it was in Christianity that humility was first recognised as a virtue, and there are still those who would see it as a vice and a weakness rather than a virtue and sign of strength of character. Micah 6.8c gives the lie to both misconceptions. It is no doubt wrong to concentrate on Micah 6.8 to the detriment of vv.1-7, as Professor Anderson noted, and if we have concentrated on Micah 6.8c to the detriment of Micah 6.8a-b we must doubly apologise. In mitigation we enter a plea on behalf of the justifiable attempt to treat Micah 6.8c seriously, and to learn from it that walking humbly with God is an important virtue to be cultivated, no matter how difficult or even unpopular the idea of humility may currently be.

14 Fundamentalism

(The Methodist Sacramental Fellowship Bulletin, no 134, Epiphany 2007, pp14-23.  This is the published version of a paper with the same title in the lectures section of this website)

There are times when I hanker for the good old days when Bibles were written in Latin and were chained to pulpits, deliberately inaccessible to the man in the village street and the man on the Clapham ox-cart, and infinitely more so to the woman in either of those places.  Those were the days when such people were told what they needed to know about the Bible, when they couldn’t read it for themselves and so couldn’t go around using that dreadful expression, ‘The Bible says’.  In that mood I don’t quite congratulate the one who lit the brushwood under William Tyndale, but I do regret that they didn’t find a nicer way to silence him sooner, for by then his threat to a local clergyman that ‘if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost’ was too far advanced to be stopped.  On such days I would gladly re-route the delightful Cotswold Way from ascending and pausing in veneration at his monument on the scarp above North Nibley, because the Bible is a dangerous book and the descendents of Tyndale’s ploughboy have done some pretty dreadful things to their lives, their churches and their neighbours because ‘the Bible says’.  Letting just anyone read the Bible is like opening Pandora’s box, and out of it have come many demons, not least ‘Fundamentalism’.

In 1994 the Methodist Conference instructed the Faith and Order Committee to set up a working party to look at the Authority of the Bible in and for the  Methodist Church. The result was ‘A Lamp to my Feet and a Light to my Path’ – and a pretty tame report it is too, but that’s another story.  Ten years on, the battle for the Bible still goes on as different churches or different groups within the different churches impose their different readings on it.  Some offer readings of the Bible which promote visions of ‘justice, peace and the integrity of creation’, of a new, diverse and inclusive humanity, held in the loving care of an Eternal Yes.  Others make a series of nightmares of the same anthology.  Some individuals read it and their lives are transformed with goodness; others and their lives are transformed in a different way.  There is no doubt that the Bible can be an inspiring book, but it can inspire people to some very different goals, attitudes and values.  It can generate vision or nightmare and, of course, one person’s vision might be someone else’s nightmare.

The Bible continues to be highly regarded officially by the churches, though the evangelicals in some churches, not least our own, might dispute that this is the case.  Most church reports seem to feel obliged to have strong sections on what the Bible has to say about the issue in question, and the prevalence of the Revised Common Lectionary ensures that most of us are reading most of the same passages in our worship Sunday by Sunday.  At the same time, there is ample evidence of neglect.  Every Bible Society report on Bible reading in the churches in the last 15 years has bemoaned it.  Lip-service may be paid by and in all the churches to the importance of the Bible, but fewer and fewer Christians seem to be actually reading it much.  The growing number of ‘fundamentalists’ would have us believe that there are more and more ‘Bible-believing Christians’ about (and that very phrase has become a badge of belonging to the party), but even there the Bible Society statistics suggest that on the ground it ain’t necessarily so.  There is, it seems, much less Bible-reading around than there was, but that does not prevent an increasingly vocal, if not downright noisy, use of ‘the Bible says’ in all the churches and an increasingly commonly and loudly voiced demand that the churches should conform their internal lives and structures, their policies and strategies, and their message and mission to what the Bible says.

There is no doubt that the growth to power, and in some quarters even to respectability, of ‘fundamentalists’ is one of the distinguishing features of the life of the British churches in the last quarter of the 20^th century.  Some of us bemoan that fact, others applaud it, but fact it is.  Calling themselves by a variety of names – ‘Bible-believing’, ‘Born-again’, ‘Conservative Evangelical’ or just plain ‘Evangelical’, for example, and in each case their appropriation of these terms is itself highly contested - the biblical fundamentalists have returned and have become a force to be reckoned with.  And even though most of them do not promote the full-scale version of the parent American fundamentalism – they are British after all – they are still promoting something significantly different from the Biblical stance of the traditional mainstream churches and their members.  The stance of the mainstream churches can be fairly described as that middle of the road form of Biblical interpretation nurtured in British universities and incarnated in the original Peake’s Commentary and its descendents; and that of the traditional British churchgoer can be described as that reverent acceptance of the Bible and its stories learned in Sunday School which manages never to connect with the real life of the Christian adult.  Against that the fundamentalist insists that the Bible matters and must make a difference.  Against Peake, the fundamentalist insists that the Bible is inerrant – that’s the key word – written by men but inspired in its total accuracy by God as the supreme authority for all Christian doctrine and practice.  In this battle for the soul of the 21^st century Church, fundamentalism, mild or strong, is worth a careful look.

James Barr begins what is still regarded by many as the definitive critical study of fundamentalism with the question, ‘Is there really such a thing as fundamentalism, and what exactly is it?’ (Barr 1981:1).  He then proceeds to show how it is very difficult to provide a simple answer to that apparently simple question, not least because ‘fundamentalism’ is a complex social and religious movement.  Twenty-five years on it is clear that the situation has got significantly more complicated as in the intervening years the term has moved out of its original location in Christian discourse and is now used much more widely.

Barr described what many or most Christians perceived of or classified as ‘fundamentalism’ as: 

1 a very strong emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible, the absence from it of any sort of error;

2 a strong hostility to modern theology and to the methods, results and implications of modern critical study of the Bible;

3 an assurance that those who do not share their religious viewpoint are not really ‘true Christians’ at all.  (Barr 1981:1)

Writing about the situation in the USA in the mid-twentieth century, Harriet Harris adds another three characteristics, and says that ‘‘Fundamentalism’ became the name-badge of those who did not engage in social action, who did not attend mainstream educational institutions, and who did not mix with non-fundamentalist Christians even for mission purposes’ (Partridge 2001:5).  Much the same could be said of the same groups in Britain.

Barr pointed out that most Christians, himself included, had problems with the three points he saw stressed by the fundamentalists, and here we encounter a major difficulty.  Barr clearly writes from the perspectives of mid-twentieth century western mainstream Christianity, a broadly liberal theological position and a traditional, historical-critical location in academic Biblical scholarship.  At the time of writing what he said would probably have been agreed, officially at least, by ‘most’ western Christians and endorsed by their churches, not least Methodism, but even then there would have been a significant sub-culture which might have had more questions about Barr and his position than about the fundamentalism he was criticising.  The Christian scene has, however, changed since then in at least two important respects.  First, the ‘consensus’ position represented by Barr has disintegrated into the multiplicity of approaches to Scripture, authority and scholarship opened up by ‘post-modernity’ and post-colonialism.  Second, that what was in the mid-twentieth century a Christian subculture has by the beginning of the twenty-first century made a significant bid to be recognised as the norm and the mainstream, a prospect opened up by globalisation and the political and cultural dominance of the USA on the world scene.  Despite that, or maybe because of it, the terms ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘fundamentalism’ remain pejorative terms in Christian discourse.  They are used of people and a position of which the users disapprove and which they wish to denigrate.  The people so named would not name themselves in this way.  Their preferred self-descriptions are different, as we have seen.  And that would also be true of those in other religions, cultures, philosophies and ideologies to whom the ‘F-word’ is now widely applied in the media.  They would have other preferred ways of describing themselves and designating their positions.  In this respect, what Barr wrote about Christian fundamentalism in 1981 is equally true of the fundamentalisms of today,

‘ … fundamentalism is a bad word: the people to whom it is applied do not like to be so called.  It is often felt to be a hostile and opprobrious term, suggesting narrowness, bigotry, obscurantism and sectarianism.  The people whom others call fundamentalists would generally wish to be known by another term altogether’ (Barr 1981:2).  

In terms of origins, the words ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalist’ are derived, of course, from the series of booklets called The Fundamentals, which were published in America between 1910 and 1915.  These were written out of the lively and bitter controversy between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ which had dominated north American Protestant theology, especially in the area of Biblical interpretation, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  The ‘mainline denominations’ of the northern states had adapted to the changing ideas of that century by taking on board evolution, biblical criticism and the social gospel, to name the three big areas of controversy.  Conservative Protestants denounced all this as ‘liberalism’ or ‘modernism’ and attempted to turn the tide both in North American Protestantism and American culture generally, but, as Gifford writes, ‘by the mid-1920s it was obvious that these fundamentalists … had failed on all fronts’ (Gifford 2000:255).

Britain and Europe were caught up in the same controversy, and the result was the same on this side of the Atlantic.  By the 1930s fundamentalism had failed to establish itself as a coherent theological position.  As far as British Methodism is concerned, the obituary of A S Peake in The Times of 20^th August 1929 has become famous,

‘Perhaps it was Dr Peake’s greatest service, not merely to his own communion but to the whole religious life of England, that he helped to save us from a fundamental controversy such as that which has devastated large sections of the Church in America.  He knew the facts which modern study of the Bible has brought to light.  He knew them, and he was frank and fearless in telling them, but he was also a simple and consistent believer in Jesus, and he let that be seen too, and therefore men who could not always follow him were ready to trust him, and let him go his own way.  If the Free Churches of England have been able without disaster to navigate the broken waters of the last thirty years, it is largely to the wisdom and patience of trusty and trusted pilots like Arthur Samuel Peake that they owe it.’

C H Dodd writing in the Dictionary of National Biography Twentieth Century 1922-30 summarises Peake’s life and work thus:

‘his work did much to save the Free Churches of Great Britain from the baneful effects of ‘Fundamentalist’ controversies.’

The same point can be seen graphically in H Maldwyn Hughes’ introduction to Christian doctrine published by the Epworth Press in March 1927 as the official textbook for Wesleyan local preachers and candidates for the ministry published under the title, Christian Foundations.  There is no reference to fundamentalism in its index, but the penultimate sentence to Note B, Theories of Inspiration, could not be clearer in its repudiation of it,

‘It is no longer claimed that the Bible is inerrant in such matters as those of science and history; indeed a passage is not necessarily inerrant even in matters of faith and morals’ (p34).

Such official pronouncements did not, of course, satisfy every local preacher or candidate for the ministry, and many church members can be described as ‘folk fundamentalists’ to this day.  By that term I mean that they are, for whatever reason, largely oblivious to the issues and approaches of post-Enlightenment Biblical scholarship.  ‘Ideological fundamentalism’, on the other hand, ie that fundamentalism which is aware of the options and deliberately opts for an anti-critical position, remained in the mainstream churches only as a discredited, underground and minority viewpoint.  That situation continued until the early 1970s when, for a variety of reasons, American fundamentalists ‘re-emerged into the public arena’ (Gifford 2000:256).  Since then, with growing confidence allied to considerable wealth, they have established themselves in the USA as a force to be reckoned with.  The original three-point description identified by Barr remains true, and so do the second two of Harries’ three points, but contemporary American fundamentalism is marked as much by powerful social teaching, awareness and action as it is by its teaching on the Bible, indeed the ‘politicisation’ of fundamentalism in the USA in recent decades is probably its most prominent feature (Pope 2001: 183f).  In this new and different world it is adept at making alliances on social issues in pursuit of its rigorist ‘Biblical’ ethic, and given the reality of globalisation this form of Christianity is both militant and triumphant at home and abroad.  Attempts to suggest that the growing new churches of Africa and the Pacific Rim are not ‘fundamentalist’ according to either the earlier or the later twentieth century parameters, by arguing for example that they are pre-critical rather than anti-critical as is done by Gifford (2000:257) are, sadly, unduly optimistic and reassuring.  A similar attempt is made by Harries to suggest that it is important to recognise the difference between contemporary ‘evangelicals’ and ‘fundamentalists’ both in America and in  Britain.  She concludes, however, that despite important caveats ‘fundamentalism exists in the evangelical world’ (Harries 2001:47).  We should perhaps conclude that it might be best to think of these two as being on a spectrum with considerable shading of the one into the other.

Since the 1970s ‘fundamentalism’ has taken on a wide usage beyond that in Christian discourse.  Not only has it been extended to evangelicals who resist the label, but also to diverse groups of many different faiths, philosophies and ideologies that are in some way radically conservative.  Currently its preferred usage in the media is as a synonym for ‘fanatic’ or ‘extremist’ with reference to militant activists or groups in Islam.  This kind of usage can, however, also be encountered in the media treatment of politically active conservative groups in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism as well as for political activists whose focus is on ethnicity, culture or land rather than religion.  It is now more appropriate, therefore, as in the title of the important symposium edited by Partridge, to speak of ‘fundamentalisms’ rather than ‘fundamentalism’ (Pope 2001:185).

The most comprehensive study of this new phenomenon is that undertaken by the Fundamentalism Project of the University of Chicago and published in five volumes between 1991 and 1995.  This project identified nine recurring characteristics of ‘fundamentalism’, demonstrating a ‘family resemblance’ among the disparate groups it identified: 

1 Reactivity to the marginalization of religion, especially to secularisation, both in opposing it and exploiting it

2 Selectivity, both in selecting and shaping particular aspects of their religious tradition, and in selecting some aspects of modernity to affirm and others to oppose

3 Moral dualism, dividing the world into light and darkness, good and evil

4 Absolutism and inerrancy, affirming the absolute validity of the ‘fundamentals’ of the tradition and, in the case of Abrahamic religions and Sikhism, treating sacred texts as inerrant

5 Millennialism and messianism, promising victory to the believer in the culmination of history

6 Elect membership, viewed often as the faithful remnant

7 Sharp boundaries, separating the saved from the sinful

8 Authoritarian organisation, with a charismatic leader and no possibility of loyal opposition

9 Behavioural requirements, treating the member’s time, space and activity as a group resource (Partridge 2001:xvii).

Although a number of these new fundamentalisms share with the Christian variety a commitment to an ancient, authoritative, divinely inspired and sacrosanct sacred canonical text, others do not, as point 4 in the list acknowledges.  It is necessary therefore to look elsewhere for what the plethora of emerging fundamentalisms might have in common and why this phenomenon is occurring as it is now.  One word keeps appearing in both facets of this discussion and it is the slippery term ‘postmodernity’ (Partridge passim, but especially Lyon pp252ff).  In a world in which traditional understandings of truth, absolutes and authority are being replaced by an apparently total freedom of choice in a supermarket of lifestyles, ideas and values, and in a world where established traditions of political power, social cohesion, and ethnic and community life are being undermined by the militant consumerism of globalisation, it is hardly surprising, the argument runs, that there should be a reaction and that some if not many will look for security rather than opt for the new freedoms.  Fundamentalism is, the argument runs, a readily understandable reaction and alternative to postmodernity.  It is the value system of postmodernity, it is argued, which is fuelling the new fundamentalisms with their

‘defensiveness on the part of a traditional culture under threat; discontent, reaction, counter-attack, perhaps even militancy; a selective appropriation of the past, a quest for authority, a flight from ambiguity or ambivalence, even the adoption of a new identity through the formation of a new community’ (Gifford 2000:257).

But it is time to return to Christian fundamentalism and briefly revisit its hermeneutical stances and its fundamental claim, for in their own understanding those who others label as ‘fundamentalists’ see themselves as ‘Bible-believers’ and loyal ‘people of the Book’ (Boone 1989:5).  For them, fundamentalism is an all-embracing hermeneutical strategy based on an authoritative revelation.

Barr argues persuasively that Christian fundamentalism is less about a commitment to the Bible than about a commitment to ways of interpreting it or to particular interpreters of it (Barr 1981:23ff, 341f).  Since he wrote there has been an explosion of interest in hermeneutics, both in general and in theology, and in particular with the growth of ‘reader response’ criticism there is now a widespread recognition and celebration of the fact that all reading is interpretation, that all readers are located in particular contexts, and that all readers bring the wealth and variety of their interests and agendas to their reading of texts.  Diverse readings are therefore to be welcomed as they contribute to the richness of a text.  On this understanding the commitment of fundamentalists to particular reading strategies and even to particular interpreters is not to be regarded as a negative or to be ruled out on principle, as Barr was inclined to do.  There will be, on this basis, the same kind of space in the academy for ‘Fundamentalist Readings’ as there is, for example, for ‘Feminist Readings’ or ‘Political Readings.’  Or rather there would be if fundamentalists chose to offer them.  But they do not.  Putting it like this makes it clear that in fact fundamentalism belongs to modernity rather than to post-modernity, because it will not accept that its readings of Scripture are just that, readings, to be set alongside other readings from other perspectives.  For fundamentalism there is only one reading of Scripture, its own; and only one authentic reading community, itself.

There is no need to rehearse here the familiar arguments against fundamentalism’s use of Scripture.  They are particularly well treated in Barr’s pastoral follow-up to his major book (Barr 1984) and in a more modest way in my own Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding.  It is widely recognised that the key term in fundamentalist claims for Scripture is the word ‘inerrant’ and it is equally widely recognised that the Bible as it is cannot live up to the claims that fundamentalists make for it in this regard.   It is also, however, equally widely recognised that it is a virtually impossible task to convince fundamentalists that their approach to Scripture does not take Scripture as it is seriously enough, but imposes an impossible theory upon it.

Which brings us to fundamentalism’s basic claim, which is to ‘portray itself as neither more nor less than the authority of God’ (Boone 1990:6).  It can do this, it believes, because it alone values the Bible correctly, which is 

‘to believe the Bible is to take it literally, to regard every word of it as inerrant and fully divine, to acknowledge no authority above it or equal to it’ (Boone 1990:5f)   

At the heart of fundamentalism, then, is the conviction that it possesses the truth - definitively, uniquely and plainly; and at the heart of Christian fundamentalism is the conviction that it alone reads the Bible as God’s revealed, inerrant and authoritative Word.  However difficult it may be to produce a sharp definition of the term, the opening sentence on the rear cover of Partridge seems incontrovertible, that ‘the most conspicuous form of religion to emerge during the 20^th century is ‘fundamentalism’.’

The latter quarter of the twentieth century saw the renewal of evangelicalism in the West, and all the mainstream churches of Europe have been and are being profoundly affected by it.  Although it is frequently pointed out that ‘evangelicalism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ are not synonyms and that many evangelicals have traditionally distanced themselves from fundamentalism, that they still do and that they emphatically should (Marshall 2004:31), there seems little doubt that the influence of fundamentalism within Christianity in general and evangelicalism in particular is growing and that given the wealth of its American base such an influence is almost bound to increase.

Methodism in Europe and America rejected the claims of the first wave of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century.  In Britain the repudiation was made, not least, by Peake and is summed up, significantly, in the quotation cited above from Maldwyn Hughes.  The second wave of fundamentalism which began in the latter part of the twentieth century is both more sustained and more strategically resourced.  It is not, however, fundamentally any different in its claims than the first – for how could it be?  Having dismissed such pretensions once, Methodism should not be seduced by them in the very changed culture of the twenty-first century, however attractive fundamentalism might now appear to many to be.

Bibliography

Barr, James (2^nd ed 1981) Fundamentalism, London: SCM

Barr, James (1984) Escaping from Fundamentalism, London: SCM

Boone, Kathleen C (1990) The Bible tells them so: the Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism, London: SCM

Corner, Mark (1990) ‘Fundamentalism’ in Coggins R J and Houlden J L (eds) A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, London: SCM

Dawes, Stephen B (1996) Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding, www.stephendawes.com

Gifford, Paul (2000) ‘Fundamentalism’ in Hastings, Mason and Pyper (eds), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, Oxford: OUP

Harries, Harriet (2001) ‘How helpful is the term ‘Fundamentalist’?’ in Partridge, Christopher H (ed) Fundamentalisms, Carlisle: Paternoster

Lyon, David (2001) ‘Fundamentalisms: Paradoxical Products of Post-modernity’ in Partridge, Christopher H (ed) Fundamentalisms, Carlisle: Paternoster

Marshall, I Howard (2004) Beyond the Bible, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic

Partridge, Christopher H (ed) (2001) Fundamentalisms, Carlisle: Paternoster

Pope, Robert (2001) ‘Battling for God in a secular world: Politics and Fundamentalisms’ in Partridge, Christopher H (ed) Fundamentalisms, Carlisle: Paternoster

15 Twelve Psalms

(Originally published in the Methodist Recorder Sept 1997 to Aug 1998.  Any of these short extracts could be used in a Bible Study)

Psalms 1, 8, 18, 19, 24, 42, 51, 82, 100, 103, 131, 150

1 Psalm 1  A book for all seasons

In 516 BC the Jerusalem Publishing House published the Book of Praises for use in the new Temple, built to celebrate the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon.  We still use it today, though we call it the Book of Psalms.  Like any other hymnbook it contains a variety of hymns, long and short, old and new and, dare I say it, good and bad.  It includes songs of praise and thanksgiving, confessions of sin, anguished cries for help, prayers for the king and the nation and even some violent outbursts against God.  Most of its hymns are for public worship, either in ordinary services or for specials, but some are better suited to private prayer and meditation.  There are also anthems for choirs and words for worship events for which we haven't got the rest of the instructions and so we have to imagine the actions which were taking place.  Some of this worship material was already ancient by the time this new book was published, some was decidedly modern.  It was gathered from various places and for some of the hymns we have the names of authors, arrangers or compilers, while others are anonymous.  Some of it even comes complete with musical directions and the name of the tune to be used.

We can find all human life in the words of these hymns, its good and bad, its beauty and tragedy, its hopes and fears.  Many of the pictures of God and his love in the psalms have been taken up by later hymn writers to become familiar parts of our worship today: but there are also the nasty bits.  In its service book the Church of England puts some verses of some of the psalms in square brackets, so that congregations of a sensitive or squeamish disposition needn't sing them.  Our versions of the psalms in Hymns and Psalms usually miss those sort of verses out altogether.  It is helpful if we remember here that hymns and psalms, as well as prayers and all the language we use in worship, is poetry rather than prose.  It is also helpful if we can accept that feelings of hate, rage, anger and despair are real and that even religious people feel them from time to time or in particular circumstances.  The compilers of the Book of Psalms evidently believed that such feelings could and should be expressed in worship, and that God was big enough to cope with them.  So do I.  

Most hymn books contain some hymns which become classics and others which have a mercifully short life, but both Judaism and Christianity decided early on that the complete Book of Psalms was much more than the hymnbook of the second temple.  So they have handed this anthology of religious poetry down to us as a classic of spirituality and theology which has something to give to the people of God everywhere and for ever.  That is how I hope we can approach the twelve psalms I have selected for us to study, beginning with Psalm 1. 

Whether Psalm 1 is the first psalm by design or accident we will never know.  It is anonymous and has no title, but it provocatively sets the scene for the hymnbook as a whole.  It boldly points out that there are two ways of life, a good one and a bad one, and that those who choose God's way find their lives blessed and those who make the wrong choice find their lives blighted.  I say "provocatively" because some psalms strongly question this idea, voicing the cries of faithful people who are suffering because of their faithfulness and who see the prosperity of the wicked all around.  Other psalms support it, not least Psalm 37 where the writer says that he has never seen the righteous suffering nor their children begging bread, which makes me wonder where has he been all his life.  Psalm 1 boldly and baldly expresses the orthodox theology of the Old Testament, that in this life righteousness is rewarded and wickedness is punished.  This has left a dangerous legacy, seen in the angry or resigned question that every minister has faced at some time in a pastoral tragedy, "What have I done to deserve this?"  So it is popular today to dismiss this idea, just as parts of the Old Testament dismiss it, but maybe we should be cautious.  That goodness is rewarded and wrongdoing is punished is a very rough-and-ready generalisation, but maybe there is enough truth in it to make us stop and think.  And if it only reminds us that there is such a thing as corporate or individual wrongdoing - no matter how hopelessly old-fashioned and moralistic that word sounds - and that wrongdoing does have nasty consequences, not necessarily for the perpetrators but certainly for others, then perhaps it is worthwhile listening to?  That is certainly what Psalm 1 encourages us to do.

The psalm begins with a translation problem.  Are those who make the right choice "happy" (GNB, NRSV, REB) or are they "blessed" (AV, RSV, NIV, NJB)?  I prefer "blessed" because "happy" sounds trivial and "blessed" suggests something deeper.  After all, we can cope with unhappinesses in our lives if we are sustained by a deeper blessing: but if we are unhappy we cannot be happy.  But that leaves the problem that "blessed" isn't contemporary English.  Any suggestions for a modern improvement on "happy"?  We have the same problem in the Beatitudes and a consistent translation will use the same English word in both places - NRSV and REB fail the test. 

The psalmist calls those who make the wrong choice and choose the wrong path "the wicked", "sinners" and "scoffers".  The first two of these are common Bible words, but the third is unusual.  It is almost a technical term in the "wisdom" literature for those who never listen and who talk big and freely, especially about things they know little about.  Other translations call these people "the scornful", "the insolent", "cynics", "mockers" or "those who have no use for God".  They are obviously no new phenomenon.  The psalmist observes that they might make a lot of noise but their lives fail to blossom into usefulness, they make no contribution to society and in the end they are like chaff blown away in the wind. 

By contrast those who are blessed because they have made the right choice  and chosen the right path live useful and fruitful lives, like fruit-trees planted in well-irrigated places.  People acknowledge their real contribution to the wellbeing of the community and God himself looks approvingly on the way they live.  And this blessedness comes from taking proper notice of God's "Torah", his teaching and guidance.  Most translations have his "law" here, and that is a pity because "Law" is a very negative word for Christians.  We contrast "law" with "gospel" and it makes us think of a religion of duty in which we have to keep commandments in order to pass God's test.  In the Old Testament and in Judaism "Torah" means nothing like that at all - read Psalm 119 if you don't believe me.

Psalm 1 may overstate its case.  Maybe it doesn't tell it exactly as it is.  But its faith and assurance/trust gives us a hope in God to sing about.

2 Psalm 8  Second in Command

"O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"

Psalm 8 begins and ends with this shout of praise, but it is not only a psalm in praise of God but also in praise of humanity.  God's majestic splendour is beyond words to express.  It overshadows the midday sun and makes the night sky pale into insignificance: but instead of dwarfing human beings it makes them stand tall and honoured!  Human beings reflect God's majesty.  That is the amazing-but-true theme of Psalm 8.  The psalm is short, profound, contemporary and, with one exception, simple. 

We must pause for a moment at the first line of its opening and closing acclamation, which presents a little teaser for translations.  The New Jerusalem Bible has "Yahweh, our Lord", which is nearly what the Hebrew is, except that it never writes out the divine name in full nor ever pronounces it.  The Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition always substitutes the word "Lord" for the divine name, in both writing and speech, and the fact that NJB breaks with that ancient tradition is its major flaw.  The traditional translation, "O LORD, our Lord", follows the Hebrew practice and is about the best we can do.  So wherever you see "LORD" in capital letters in our Bibles, as here, you know that the Hebrew has God's unpronounceable name at that point.   "LORD, our sovereign" with NRSV and REB would be passable if they translated "Lord" as "sovereign" every time, which they don't, and about the worst is "O LORD, our Governor" which is used in Hymns and Psalms and reminds me of Porridge. 

Verse 2 is obscure.  It is not clear where it starts or where the lines divide, let alone what they mean.  If you want to pursue that further just look at six different translations and you'll see how they all treat it differently.  Speculations and suggestions abound, but because that's all they are and because there is plenty more to think about in the psalm I am going to leave it at that.

Verses 3 and 4 ask a question in good Hebrew poetic style.  English poetry used to have rhyme and metre; Hebrew poetry has "parallelism".  It says things twice.  So the  second part of verse 4 where God's "care" for "mortals" parallels his "being mindful of" the same "human beings" in the first part.  The question is, compared with the sun, moon and stars, where do human beings fit in?  The answer we expect is - nowhere at all, they are too insignificant to count.  Notice how the question re-emphasises God's splendour, the heavens are not the work of God's hands, merely of his "fingers".  The moon and the stars are not eternal and independent powers or "gods", as they were to some of Israel's ancient neighbours, but tools forged by God and set in place by him.  For those who sang this psalm, there was only one God and he was the creator and sustainer of absolutely everything.  And if human beings are nothing compared with the moon and stars, they must be less than nothing compared with the God whose fingers shaped the heavens. 

Wrong! says verse 5.  God has actually made human beings only a "little lower" than either God himself, or a god, or the angels or the heavenly beings which surround God's throne.  Or a little less than divine.  All those translations are possible, for the word used is the one usually translated as God, god or gods and occasionally used of angels or even mighty heroes.  Whichever you prefer the meaning is clear enough, as the following verses spell out.  Humanity has been "crowned with glory and honour" and given "dominion" over everything.  There is a clear link here with the creation story in Genesis 1 where human beings are made "in the image of God", a phrase which means that we are entrusted by God with his authority to continue his creative work.  This position is not one of crude power to exploit the world of nature and impose our will on it, though that is often what we have done, but one of trust, authority and stewardship as God's representatives.  So what about Dolly the Sheep?  We were told, when she first appeared, that it was a dangerous thing when humans started "playing God".  Psalm 8 and Genesis 1 unite in saying that "playing God" is exactly what God wants us to do.  Of course we can get it wrong.  Of course our arrogance, selfishness and greed can foul things up.  Of course we can misuse our power and abuse our stewardship.  But the answer is not to stop being stewards but to be good ones.  We cannot abdicate our responsibility to shape and mould creation.  God has taken the risk in giving that to us and saying, "No, thank you", is not an option. 

And finally to its title.  NRSV has "To the leader; according to The Gittith".  This is probably an instruction to the Director of Music that this psalm is to be sung to the tune, "The Gittith", though it is just possible that a gittith is a musical instrument.  The second part, "A psalm of David", could mean a number of things: that David wrote it ("By David"), or that the psalm was part of the royal collection in David's Temple which the Babylonians had destroyed in 586 BC ("Belonging to the royal Temple") or that it is dedicated to the king ("For David", ie "For the King of David's line").  I'll leave that until next chapter when we look at Psalm 18.

3 Psalm 18  Truly death-defying

Let's start at the beginning of this psalm with its long title which says precisely when David first sang this psalm.  This seems to confirm that the phrase, "a Psalm of David", means that he wrote it, which is how GNB always translates it in Psalms.  But in the first verse of the Song of Songs, where the same expression is used about Solomon, it adds a footnote, "By Solomon; or dedicated to Solomon, or about Solomon".  Why is it so coy in Psalms?  Obviously, you might think, because 14 psalms give a time and place in David's life when he did it!  But then you see that the classic Jewish commentary on Psalms made around 750 AD does that to almost all of the 73 "Psalms of David".  It seems that there was a growing tradition of ascribing psalms to David, with imaginative scholars competing to find the places in his life where each psalm could fit best.  That ought to make us cautious.  In Methodist circles the Davidic authorship of all the psalms attributed to him was questioned as long ago as 1822 by Adam Clarke, thrice President of the Conference, in his widely read Bible Commentary.  Few scholars today think that David wrote many, if any, of the psalms and even fewer think that the question is important.  It might be interesting to read the author's name and date under a hymn in Hymns and Psalms, but what matters is what a hymn says and what it does to us as we sing it.  So with this magnificent psalm.  And that is my last word in this series on who wrote any of the psalms we shall look at.

Psalm 18 is passionate, dramatic and triumphant.  Too much so for modern tastes, some will say.  It is also intensely personal.  Like Wesley's personal hymns it gives me words to celebrate "my" deliverance and to give "my" testimony to the great things God has done for "me".  It is an intense psalm of personal thanksgiving to God who has "saved me from my enemies".  Strong stuff.  Vivid metaphors.  Powerful pictures.  It sees existence and faith as a life and death struggle.  Good versus evil.  Light versus darkness.  Faith versus unbelief.  Humility versus pride.  It may have started life as a Royal Psalm written to celebrate a national victory and to be spoken by the king, but in the Temple hymnbook it becomes a victory song for anyone to use.  It praises God for rescuing me from my enemies, but before we say that it then lets itself down by gloating over these defeated enemies we need to have a closer look at these enemies who appear in verse 2 and keep on cropping up in the psalms.

Think of it like this.  In a world where life was often "nasty, brutal and short" you lived in constant insecurity.  Life was always under threat.  It might be from hunger or sickness, poverty or famine, marauding foreigners or nasty neighbours.  You lived a marginal life in a vulnerable little nation in a big and hostile world.  The great enemy was "Death" whose powers were felt in all sorts of ways.  So the psalmist praises God for saving him from the great enemy, Death, from its underworld waters and the darkness of the kingdom of "Sheol". 

There are two quite different ways of looking at death in the Old Testament.  One is where death comes at its proper time, when someone dies peacefully in old age having lived out their full life.  Here those who die are "gathered to their people", and their relatives though obviously grieving can rejoice over a life "faithfully lived and peacefully died".  So "Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people" (Genesis 25:8).  His sons bury him and life goes on.  This is the "kind and gentle death" of St Francis of Assisi's hymn.  Psalm 18 sees death differently.  It is vicious, terrifying and completely negative.  It leads those forces of evil which are always trying to destroy, hurt and deface what is beautiful, good and healthy.  Death is like a huge octopus living in a pit, who is always trying to reach out and catch passers-by with its tentacles and drag them down into darkness and destruction, drowning them in its watery cavern.  This is Psalm 18's view of death.  Verses 4-5 speak vividly of illness, disaster or suffering of any kind as symptoms of death trying to get its grip on the living. 

But the psalmist can testify that God is stronger still and verses 7-15 are a good example of "theophany" language which speaks of God appearing in a terrifying storm (see also Exodus 19:16-20, Judges 5:4-5, Psalms 68:7-9 and 97:1-5).

What are we to make of this powerful military imagery?  Do we put it behind us as an example of religious ideas whose day is long gone?  Do we take it up as a manifesto for a new militant faith for a new millenium?  Hopefully we will do neither.  The language may be far from anything in our experience but the message is that God's love and goodness is ultimate and real; that we have a sure and certain hope, which is that the final victory is love's and that in the end God's kingdom will come and his will be done.  Here then is an ancient word of reassurance.  Malice, evil and death are nigh, but God is nigher!  He "redeems" us from these things.  He saves, rescues and delivers us from all this shadow side of life.  He is our protector, saviour, deliverer, liberator.  The psalmist recognises the shadow side of life, and sees it as an enemy: but at the same time he knows it to be a defeated enemy.  Every recovery from illness, every problem faced and solved, and every trouble lived through is a victory of life over death.  God is on the side of life, he is supremely the "Lord of Life and Conqueror of Death" and "our help in every time of trouble" as we say in Funeral services.  And in the end, if not in the meantime, we shall know it to be so.  As the hymn puts it so well,

"Sin and death and hell shall never,

O'er us final triumph gain;

God is love, so Love for ever

O'er the universe must reign".

This positive and confident attitude is seen in the popular Jewish toast and greeting, "leChaim", "To Life".  In that word with its hope and defiance of death, there is a whole creed and celebration of the victory of God over death, no matter how strong, terrifying and real the forces of death seem to be.

4 Psalm 19  For a lazy choir

In the Midrash Ma'arabi this short psalm is entitled, "For a Lazy Choir.  Observations".  It divides into three parts.  The first tells of what the psalmist has learned by observing the day and night skies.  The second talks about observing God's "Law".  The third is a simple prayer.

Unlike many of us for much of the time, this psalmist goes around with eyes open.  But he is more than a careful observer of the natural world.  He looks and thinks about what he sees.  From the skies and the canopy of space (the "firmament") he concludes that God is; and that he is "glorious".  The skies at night and by day may be silent, but they are eloquent.  The sun's splendour points beyond itself to its Maker.  So the psalmist gives us a song of praise to the Creator God, and in it invites us too to see God's "glory", his splendour, power and mystery, visible in the world he has made (compare Romans 1:20). 

These ideas are similar to those we saw in Psalm 8 but very different from those of Psalm 18.  In that one the world was a frightening place, stalked by death and inhabited by hostile forces human and otherwise.  That psalmist cried out to God as Saviour from life's terrors.  There is none of that here.  Psalm 19 comes out of the "Wisdom" tradition of ancient Israel, which generally breathes a calm, relaxed and positive attitude to life and faith.  Which speaks of and to the real world?  Perhaps both.  There are times when our world feels like that of Psalm 18, and we cry out to God to save us.  At other times it feels like that of Psalm 19, and we praise God for the life he has given.

Part two, verses 7-13, is about observing the "Law" and gives us a song in praise of God who makes himself known in his Torah.  As the sun gives light and life to the earth, so Torah gives light and life to humanity.  This key Old Testament word can be translated in various ways - "teaching", "guidance" or "law", for example - and this psalm shows what a warm word it is.  There is nothing of cold or calculating legalism in the word at all.  It speaks, first and foremost, of God's grace, gift and guidance.  So lazy choirs can sing gratefully of this gift of God in a mere seven verses while more conscientious ones can tackle Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the hymnbook, which is entirely devoted to a celebration of Torah.   

Verses 7-9 are a good example of "parallelism" with each half verse saying the same thing in different words but each repetition adding something more to the meaning of the whole.  Try setting them out in three columns.  The first set of parallels is a list of different terms for God's instructions: torah, decrees, precepts, commandments, fear, ordinances.  The fifth one stands out as a bit odd and it can only mean taking respectful notice of what God has said.  Elsewhere in the wisdom literature the motto phrase "the fear of the Lord" is best translated into English by the word "religion" - though no translations ever do.  The second set of parallels are the adjectives which describe those instructions: perfect, sure, right, clear, pure and true.  The third set shows what those instructions do: they revive the soul, make wise the simple, rejoice the heart, enlighten the eyes, endure for ever and are entirely effective. 

This life-enhancing purpose of God's teaching is clear in the Ten Commandments.  The story is about God rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt, guiding them through the desert and preparing them to enter the Promised Land.  God gives them these Commandments after they have been rescued.  So it is not a matter of, "If you keep these commandments I will rescue you".  Instead, as the introduction in Exodus 20:2 shows, it is "I have rescued you, and here's the way to enjoy your new life to the full".  Encouraged by God's love which they have experienced in what he has done and equipped by his advice his people can enter the Promised Land.  Torah is therefore not just good advice.  It is good news.  It is gospel. 

Verses 10-13 need to be printed together without the line which appears between verses 10 and 11 in my NRSV.  They speak of the value of this advice in four different ways.  It is worth more than gold.  It is as sweet as honey.  It is a necessary warning.  It is advice which, if followed, does lead to a happy life.  Verses 12-13 point out just how much we need such advice, for we are all very good at deceiving ourselves and need all the help we can get from either being led astray by the clever talk of the arrogant opinion-formers ("the proud" - remember Psalm 1) or by the nastier side of our own selves (our "wilful sins").  The first is the better translation.     

The psalm ends with the prayer often used before Anglican sermons, a practice Methodists would do well to copy.  It asks that by the strength of God, the rock foundation of the universe, our lives might match our praises.  That by the help of God, who shows us the way and helps us to walk in it, we might live in the light of the truths we believe.

Psalm 19 speaks of God as our Creator and our Redeemer - both/and not either/or and that's a lesson in itself.  Not for nothing did C S Lewis call it the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.

5 Psalm 24  Procession of worshippers

Verse 1 boldly declares that "The earth is the LORD's" and makes a splendid call to worship for a Harvest Festival or Social Responsibility service.  God is.  There is no other.  He alone is the life-giver.  He is the world's creator and its owner.  We are invited at the same time to marvel at his generosity and abundant creativity and to recognise our accountability.  Verse 2 is a picture we can't use as it stands.  Thanks to satellites and all that we picture our world as a beautiful blue ball floating in the vast darkness of space.  They pictured the world as a flat plate standing on pillars set in a huge sea and covered with a pyrex pudding bowl which kept the waters above the earth from deluging it.  For them that picture conveyed a wealth of meaning.  The waters and sea spoke of sheer power and surging danger and symbolised the reality and force of that great and life-threatening negative - chaos, with its minions of death, evil and sin.  Hence the significance of "no more sea" in John's vision of the coming of God's kingdom on earth in Revelation 21:1.  This also means that the story of the stilling of the storm is not just about disciples being saved from drowning and that those stories about crossing rivers are not just about getting to the other side.

The Old Testament contains at least four creation pictures: the familiar one following an ordered seven-day plan in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, an agricultural one exposing the ambiguities of life in the real world in Genesis 2:4b-3:24, a God versus the chaos monster one in Psalms 74:12-17 and 89:5-18 and Isaiah 51:9-11 (also Job 7:12, 26:12, 38:8-11) and a Wisdom one in Proverbs 8:22-31 and Job 28:20-28; all of which are brought into play in the Creation Hymn, Psalm 104.  Verse 2 is another glimpse of the third of these.  God is the King of Creation.  He has defeated chaos and established order.  He now rules the world.

Verses 3-6 contain a question, an answer, a promise and a declaration.  The answer most Methodists would give to the question in verse 3 is "All who want to", for we belong to a tradition which believes that God's love is for all and his welcome is to all.  The psalm seems to give a different answer, that only those who meet certain standards can join the celebration.  The difference is more apparent than real, for we too believe that God's love changes things, or at least changes us.  We belong to a tradition which recognises that belief and behaviour go together.  We expect those who come to worship to be changed by coming.  There is no doubt that God accepts us as we are.  There is equally no doubt that that is not how he wants us to stay.  Verses 4-6 speak plainly of what God expects of us and of what his love can make of us.

The mysterious little word Selah may originally have referred to some sort of liturgical action, maybe a festal shout or a pause for everyone to prostrate themselves on the ground.  We don't know.  An untranslated Hebrew word like this simply indicates that the translators haven't a clue what it means. 

The procession arrives at the Temple and the leader demands that the gates be opened (verse 7).  The gatekeeper demands to know who wants to be let in.  He is told that it is the LORD, the "glorious king".  This is the God who has proved his power in saving his people in the past.  This "Lord of battles, God of armies" picture is not really to our taste, but this psalm comes from a culture where the battle between good and evil, light and dark, life and death was real enough to make this a living metaphor.  The leader repeats his demand and the gatekeeper repeats his question.  The leader's answer rounds off the psalm with a shout of praise.

The title "LORD of Hosts" is an ancient one.  NJB has "Yahweh Sabaoth" which reminds us of the "Lord God of Sabaoth" in the old version of the Te Deum.  The hosts in question are probably the heavenly host of sun, moon and stars though the armies of Israel is a possibility.  NIV follows the Septuagint and translates the phrase by "the LORD Almighty".  Although "Almighty God" was probably until recently the commonest term we used in addressing God, it has no direct literal equivalent in the Bible at all and taken literally is a dangerous idea indeed. 

So the procession with the Ark enters the Temple.  There God's kingly rule is proclaimed and celebrated.  There they worship the "King all glorious above".  There his people are equipped, encouraged and enabled to go out and live and work to his praise and glory, so that his kingdom may come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

6 Psalm 42  Remembering God

Number three in my Desert Island list of books about the Old Testament is The Courage to Doubt by Robert Davidson, published by SCM in 1983 and still available.  It looks at those parts of the Old Testament which cry out to God in anguish, asking Why? or How long? or Where are you? as well as those which voice doubts about his existence, his love or his ability to do anything about anything.  It is a profound and pastoral book.  Its first chapter is called Worship and Questioning and among other things deals with the Psalms of Lament. 

Roughly speaking there are two sorts of psalms - Praises and Laments.  In the Laments either individuals or whole communities cry out to God for help.  The circumstances in which they were composed vary and many are no doubt stylised, but all share a sense of urgency and desperation.  They are not afraid to ask the question - Where is God? 

Psalm 42 is a Psalm of Lament, one of the individual ones, written in the first person singular so that each worshipper can use it to speak of their personal need.  It divides into two parts and has a chorus (verses 5 and 11).  Psalm 43 might originally have been its third part for it has the same chorus. 

In the first part (verses 1-4) the psalm voices a double crisis.  The first is that God is not there any more.  Like a deer in a desert desperate for water the Psalmist thirsts for God - but to no avail.  His tears are his only drink.  And it has been like this for a long time.  The second is that this is public knowledge.  Others know about his despair.  His friends are worried about him and keep asking how this can be.  They know how important his faith is to him.  And he himself doesn't need reminding about how active he was in the life of the church.

The second part (verses 6-10) is much more complicated.  It is a mixture of hope and despair.  It begins by restating the problem.  "My soul is cast down within me".  This is immediately followed by "therefore", which suggests that the way through this valley of shadow is to "remember" God.  Unfortunately there are two problems here.  The one is that in verse 6 we can't be sure what the allusions to "the land of Jordan" and Hermon mean and we know nothing about Mt Mizar at all.  The other is that verse 8 is extremely hard to understand and may have got corrupted somewhere along the line.  None the less, the psalm suggests that the way of coping with despondency is to "remember" God.  This doesn't mean redoubling our efforts to pray in an attempt to feel the presence of God again, and I suspect that our sort of Christianity has dangerously over-emphasised that kind of religious experience.  It does mean calling to mind what we believe about God; reminding ourselves of the old, old story. 

So the psalm gives those reminders.  Remember Mt Hermon and how it speaks of the grandeur of creation!  Remember the Jordan river and how the People of Israel crossed it to enter the Promised Land!  Verses 6-8 suggest that all who know this experience of God's absence should call to mind those two pillars of Old Testament religion - creation and redemption.  The pictures of waves and floods in verse 7 remind us of how God subdued the waters of chaos to create order and life (Psalms 74:12-17 and 89:8-12) and how he brought his people safely through the waters of the Reed Sea and the Jordan to new life in a new land (Isaiah 51:9-11).  Day and night are creation reminders too.  This leads to the key word - "steadfast love" - God's utterly reliable, consistent and ultimately victorious kindness.   

But then despair floods back in, the same old despair of the first part.  You talk about remembering God, the psalmist says, but God has forgotten me!  And to make things worse, his enemies add to his suffering by pouring scorn on him and his God.  What is new here is that he mentions his actual suffering, possibly illness or persecution.  The "enemy", death, is oppressing him.  And still the question, Why?, goes unanswered.

Finally the chorus.  It might signal the beginning of a return of confidence, the first streaks of a new dawn of faith.  It might be a stoic refusal to give in to despair.  It might be a commonsense recognition that these things happen, that these times come and so they will also go.  It might be a recognition that the psalmist's feelings are not the last word.  All that and more.  But is it a challenge to the psalmist to "lighten-up", snap out of it and get a grip?  Some Christians say that sort of thing to people who feel like the psalmist.  I think not.  I see the first two lines as a powerful restatement of his predicament: Why, O why, am I like this: empty, confused, in such a mess?  And then, when that is faced up to and accepted, the psalmist is in a position to glimpse a "hope", a possibility of a future - notice that little word "again" sneaking in - in which the words "help" and "God" can be used in the same sentence.

And what is it that opens up this possibility of hope?  Is it partly that the Psalmist has dared, even in worship, to speak what he feels, to admit that he is angry at God?  And is it partly that the Psalmist is, even as he voices his despair of God, beginning to "remember" God?

7 Psalm 51  Repentance and renewal

Psalm 51 is the best known of the seven Penitential Psalms in the Psalter.  We know nothing of its author or date of composition.  The editor of the hymn book puts it on the lips of David "when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba".  That sordid episode can be read in 2 Samuel 11:1-12:13.  We tend to think of it as David's adultery with Bathsheba, but Nathan's main complaint against his king was over his murder of Uriah.  Incidentally, those who get anxious over the "establishment" of the Church of England might reflect on the fact that Nathan was the court prophet of the established church, which gave him a platform to address the king and the nation and to be heard. 

According to the editor, Psalm 51 is a serious psalm of repentance and renewal after serious sin and crime.  It begins by voicing a direct appeal to God - "Have mercy" in most translations but "Help me" is better.  It can voice this appeal because the psalmist knows that God's name and nature is love - eternally reliable and abundantly generous kindness (verse 1).  See the motto verse Exodus 34:6-7 which re-echoes throughout the Old Testament.

The psalm continues by acknowledging the past, verses 3-5.  We should not be misled here.  This is urgent and vivid language expressing the sinner's abhorrence of what he has done.  It is the language of remorse rather than repentance (that comes later) and it is dramatically over-stated in the way the Bible does.  It should not be used to create doctrines of "original sin", "total depravity" or the evil of sex.  That is making the mistake of taking metaphorical language literally and hardening poetry into prose.        

Next, in metaphor piled on metaphor, comes a plea for a new start.  The sinner asks to be "washed" (verse 7, picking up from verse 2), made new (verse 10) and "delivered" (verse 14).  He wants the past put behind him (verse 9).  He wants to learn better ways (verses 6 and 12).  He wants to "make a life of praise" (verses 14-15) to use that lovely phrase from Hymns and Psalms 474.  The plea climaxes in verse 17.  All that is necessary to receive God's forgiveness and its renewing and transforming vitality is repentance - "a broken and contrite heart".  This is not about feelings or emotions, about crying and despairing.  What Hebrew means by "a broken and contrite heart" is what we mean in English by an admission that wrong has been done and a serious intention made to turn away from it and set off in a new direction.  Sacrifice is a difficult area for us - we'll look at it in our study of Psalm 103.  Psalm 51 insists that repentance is only possible with God's help.  It insists even more insistently that his help is readily given.

The psalm ends very oddly.  Up to verse 17 it has been an individual penitential psalm but the last two verses go off at a tangent into an appeal for the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.  Is this just bad editing?  No.  The editor knows that wrongdoing has consequences and that these consequences can go way beyond the original wrongdoer.  He saw that in the story of David.  There was, however, a bigger example.  Half of the Old Testament was written to explain the catastrophe of the destruction of Jerusalem in 597 and 586 BC.  The explanation was a simple one, that the destruction and exile was a consequence of their wrongdoing.  By adding these last two verses the editor makes the same point.  Then he goes on to offer hope for the future.  Once wrongdoing is admitted a new start can be made.

Psalm 51 is a serious psalm of repentance and renewal after serious sin and crime.  It can be used both by individuals and by communities.  But how and when should it be used?  It is not for everyday use.  More than that, I submit that most prayers of confession are not for everyday use either.  Our official line is that there must be a prayer of confession in every service.  And I question that.  I remember one of my ministerial students in Ghana asking why we had prayers of confession in college prayers every morning and evening when they were so busy with college work in between that they didn't have time to sin!  That's a good question.

Look at verses 10-12.  They assume that normally your average Israelite had a clean heart, a right, holy and willing spirit and lived in God's presence enjoying the joy of God's salvation.  I'm sure the psalmist didn't mean that they were wonderfully godly and terribly good or anything like that, but that they were human and that their ordinary everyday humanity was not "sinful".  It might not be perfect, but it wasn't bad.  I wonder what he would have thought about using his psalm for everyday or every week occasions?  Might he have thought that confessing our sin every day in every prayer and every week in every service was a bit over the top?  Might he also have thought that it devalued our God-given humanity and cast doubt on the grace of God at work in those who believe, to say nothing of the fact that it also trivialised sin?  I suspect he would. 

He did know, however, that serious wrongdoing was seriously wrong, and that it could and did destroy life's normal equilibrium.  He knew that when that happened it needed to be put right, and by God's grace it could be.  He had written Psalm 51 for just such occasions.

8 Psalm 82  A challenge to get the priorities right

Psalm 82 is one of those psalms which doesn't appear for use in worship in Hymns and Psalms.  It's easy to see why not.  It pictures a meeting of the Board of Directors of Earth plc.  There is serious business on the agenda.  The God who is chairing the meeting has to take the junior partners to task for failing in their duties.  There are sackings ahead.

There are glimpses of a Heavenly Court in the Old Testament (Isaiah 6, 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6 and 2:1 and teasingly in Genesis 1:26) and there are those wonderful pictures of angels, archangels and all the company of heaven in the New: but despite Psalm 58:1 there is nothing like Psalm 82.

In Psalm 82 each nation has its own god or gods (you can see a fascinating trace of that idea in Deuteronomy 4:19, 29:26 and 32:8) and the Most High is supreme over them all.  All the nations belong to him (verse 8).  He delegates responsibility for their care and maintenance to his "sons".  In this psalm the Most High is simply called "God" and in most of our translations his divine underlings are called "gods".  NIV is unique in putting that word in inverted commas and there is no justification for doing it at all.  You can see how it was interpreted at the time of Jesus by looking at John 10:34-35, and that too is a long way from its original and literal sense.  There is no mention in this psalm of the LORD (Yahweh), the God of Israel, and no claim that he is the supreme God, let alone the Only One - all that was a late development in Israel's history.  Many commentators say that originally the psalm began by saying, "The LORD (Yahweh) has taken his seat ..." and that an editor changed it to the more general, "God", but changing it that way round is hard to credit and there is not a shred of evidence to support it.  Why don't commentators comment on what is there, rather than on what they would like to be there?   

What have these gods done wrong that makes God threaten to banish and destroy them?  Quite simply, they have failed to be proper gods.  The job of a proper god is to maintain justice; and they have not done that.  The result is that the whole creation is hovering on the verge of chaos, its very foundations shaking (verse 5).  It is the responsibility of gods to promote justice and to be defenders of the weak.  And that is what they have failed to do.  Does this lie behind the comment by Eliphaz in Job 4:18?  Defending the weak is also the responsibility of kings and rulers, the representatives of the gods on earth, as Psalm 72 and Isaiah 11:3-4 make equally clear.  This is radical stuff.  The mark of a true god or a true king is not power and authority, but power used in care for the weak and needy.  Failure to do that means that these gods should suffer the death penalty.  The idea of gods dying is absurd, but what a powerful way of jerking everyone awake and getting them to grasp the enormity of the issue!   

You will find no clearer picture of what the Old Testament means by justice than in verses 3-4.  It is rather different from our idea of justice as an ideal and an abstraction, which judges serve by acting with total impartiality to ensure that its scales are always perfectly balanced.  It is to do with actively promoting the interests of the marginal and displaced so that everyone has a stake in society and a life worth living.  A judge must put things right, sort everything out and remake the wholeness and harmony that there should be.  A judge must right wrongs, lift up the fallen and stop those who knocked them down from doing it again.  That, the Most High says in accusation of these gods, is what they have failed to do.  The psalmist - or should we call him a political commentator or a prophet? - sees that these failed gods are condemned and shouts out that the Most High himself must now set about doing what they had failed to do (verse 8).  He prays that God will "save" the world, which gets the sense of the Hebrew over much better than "judge", a word which has so many negative overtones for Christian readers. 

I cannot imagine the sort of Temple liturgy in which this psalm would have been used.  Nor have I ever been in any service anywhere where this psalm has featured.  Is it evidence for the existence of an Inter-Faith, Anti-Poverty, One-World service on Politics Sabbath in ancient Israel?  There's a thought.

This odd psalm presents a challenge to our multi-faith, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic world.  It presents one to churches and Christians who major on disputes over theological and ethical minutiae or detailed questions of liturgical correctness.  Much like the saying in Matthew 23:23 or Micah 6:8 it is a call to get things in perspective and to get priorities right.  What about adopting it as our Ecumenical Agenda for the Millennium?  And I don't mean "ecumenical" in its narrow sense of Christians together but in its richer one of the togetherness of the whole inhabited earth?  If we did that Jubilee 2000 would be the first thing on our agenda and the very least we could do. 

Psalm 82 suggests that the God of all faiths has made his will and purpose plain for all faiths, cultures and ethnicities to see and to do.  Have we the ears to hear?

9 Psalm 100  Simple celebration of the shepherd

The Jubilate is a skylark song in spring.  It's as bright and upbeat as it is short and simple.

The first two verses are a threefold call to all the earth to worship the LORD with a joyful noise, gladness and singing.  There is a place in worship for quietness, more space than Methodists usually give it.  There is a place for sadness and sorrow, the state of the world often demands it.  But there is also a place for singing "happy songs" as the Good News Bible puts it.  This example shows that happy songs don't need to be trite.

Verse 3 reminds us about how and where worship begins.  It begins in knowing that the LORD is God.  It begins when we acknowledge that God is.  I will use that word, acknowledge, again and again because it is key to this psalm.  In this verse we are invited to acknowledge that we owe our existence in every way to God.  We are made by him and looked after by him.  I know this rural picture is one that townies complain about.  I also know that country folk are very aware of the fact that most sheep exist to be turned into lamb chops.  So any offers to improve on this metaphor will be gratefully received, though I don't think you'll succeed.

If worship begins when we acknowledge that God is and that he matters, it continues as we experience his presence.  You can't improve on Archbishop William Temple,

"Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. 

It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness;

the nourishment of mind with his truth;

the purifying of the imagination by his beauty;

the opening of the heart to his love;

the surrender of will to his purpose -

and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy of that self-centredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin".

There is an ancient translation problem in the second line of this verse.  In the text of the Hebrew Bible it has "It is he that made us, not we ourselves" as in the AV.  All the modern translations follow an ancient alternative from the margin of the Hebrew Bible - "and we are his."  They are almost certainly right to do this, but the wrong reading is a good one for putting us in our place when we get too uppity and over-confident.   

We know that God can be found always and everywhere.  The Old Testament, however, is reluctant to say that he can be worshipped at any time and in any place.  That reluctance is wise.  "Always", "anytime", "anywhere" and "everywhere" are slippery words.  Remember that Church Council which decided that something or another was everybody's job?  Did it get done?  Of course not.  If it's everybody's job then nobody does it.  Humans are like that.  That's why we need special times and special places.  So in verse we enter the Temple, the special place, for a service.

But this psalm does not talk about worshipping God.  It talks about worshipping the LORD.  It is a psalm which acknowledges that the LORD is God.  There were other gods on offer, other names to honour, others who might be worshipped in the Temple.  This psalm insists that it is important to get your god right.  That is what the phrase "Bless his name" means.  Some modern translations seem to think that "bless the LORD", "praise the LORD" and "thank the LORD" all mean the same.  They don't.  To bless the LORD, or bless his name, is to acknowledge that the LORD is the only God for Israel.  It is to acknowledge that he is the one who is the shepherd of Israel, who rescued his flock from Egypt, guided them through the desert, brought them into the rich pasture of the promised land and who looks after them now.  Of course Israel is thankful to him for that and much else besides.  Of course Israel praises him for it, declaring what he has done.  But above all Israel names him as the one who has done it and commits herself to honour him alone.  She "acknowledges that the LORD is God".  That is what it means to "bless the LORD".  It is to say, as the crowds did to Elijah on Mt Carmel, "The LORD, he is God!  The LORD, he is God!" (1 Kings 18:39).  So to respond to the invitation, "Let us bless the Lord" with "Thanks be to God" is too feeble by half.  Sadly we are centuries too late to change it now.

In verse 5 we come to the heart of the psalm.  It is a snatch from a mini-creed which crops up throughout the Old Testament.  Exodus 34:6-7 is the key passage.  Among its echoes are Numbers 14:18, Psalms 86:15, 103:8, 111:4 and 145:8, Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2, Nahum 1:3, Lamentations 3:21-24, Nehemiah 9:17 and 2 Chronicles 30:9.  These verses come from different strands of Old Testament literature and thought, and from writings which are, as far as we can tell, from very different periods and ages.  If you asked an ancient Israelite, What is your God like? then she would have pointed to the exodus and said, "That is what he is like, a God who sets us free."  If she was pressed further it looks as if she would go on to say, "The LORD is good: his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations."  We will explore this more fully when we read the magnificent Psalm 103. 

10 Psalm 103  Ancient hymn for a desert island

Psalm 103 is my desert-island psalm.  If I was allowed only one chapter from the Old Testament this would be it.  If I was allowed only two chapters from the whole Bible this would be one of them.  This ancient hymn is, to this reader at least, a summary of everything that is best in the whole Bible, not just the Old Testament.  Almost everything that needs to be said about God is here.  The only bit missing is that everything said here is lived out in Jesus of Nazareth.

The psalm begins and ends on that note of "blessing the LORD" which we saw in Psalm 100.  It begins with the acknowledgement that of all the gods on offer it is the LORD alone who is God and who is the source of life and blessing (verses 1-4).  It ends with a call to the whole universe to give the LORD the acknowledgement which is his due.  In fact, the psalm begins and ends in much the same way that the Lord's Prayer begins and ends.  The only difference is that in the first and last words of the psalm everyone who sings or prays the psalm is invited to make that acknowledgement their own - "Bless the LORD, my soul". 

The kernel of the psalm, verses 6-18, is an expanded commentary on that mini-creed which cropped up in Psalm 100:5 and of which Exodus 34:6-7 is the key passage.  The great words are steadfast love (verses 4, 8, 11 and 17) and mercy (verses 4, 8 and twice in 13) with righteousness (verses 6 and 17) and justice (verse 6) not far behind.  These are lovely, warm words.  They speak of a love which will not let us go but which seeks us out with kindness and embraces us with generosity.  They speak of a new-every-morning sort of love, which takes our sins, our mistakes and all the sad and sorry failures of our lives and puts them behind us.  Righteousness, in this psalm and in the Old Testament generally, means a love which yearns and works to put things right.  Justice, likewise, is love in action to restore things to how they ought to be.  So, crucially, when the Old Testament describes God as our judge it doesn't picture him as the impartial and unbending judge of a Roman court but as the one who springs to our aid to sort everything out and make it right again.  Confuse the meaning of the Hebrew word with the meaning of the Latin one, as much theology does, and you get things seriously wrong.  Stay with these verses in this psalm and you'll avoid that pitfall.

Distinctions between these words can't be drawn too rigidly.  We see that from the way the different terms are used in parallel to each other (eg righteousness and justice in verse 6 and righteousness and steadfast love in verse 17).  Added together, they paint a picture of a God who is generously kind and utterly reliable.  They point to our "Covenant God" who wants to be involved with us and who stays by us despite our failings.  Anyone wanting an alternative Old Testament reading for the Covenant Service can find one here.  Another is Exodus 34:6-7 in the NRSV.  This translation follows ancient Jewish tradition in reading "thousands of generations" rather than simply "thousands", and in so doing opens up the meaning of the passage much better.  It emphasises God's amazing generosity in a typically Jewish and over the top way: his love lasts for thousands of generations, his anger for a mere three or four.    

Those who have problems with the picture of God getting angry at all need to stop for a moment and think about it.  The clue to understanding God's anger is found in verse 13 which pictures God as a father.  We wouldn't think much of a parent who didn't get angry when their children fouled up their own lives or the lives of other people, would we?  We might even say that anger, frustration and the tears in which they show themselves are a mark of love.  In the Old Testament, God's anger is a sign that he actually cares.  And we wouldn't think much of a parent who didn't get angry when someone else was hurting their child, would we?  In the Old Testament, God's anger is sometimes the only defence the weak and helpless have against the strong and vicious.    

Some Christian theology, on the other hand, has taught us that God's anger is his normal emotion towards us.  We are sinners and we deserve it.  We have offended against God's justice and so he has no alternative but to be angry and punish us.  This is becoming the standard presentation of the death of Christ in much modern preaching and evangelism.  Jesus had to die to pay the price for our sins and he died as a substitute for us to satisfy the demands of God's justice.  Am I wrong to think that verses 10-14 of this psalm show that all of that theory is at best unnecessary and at worst misguided or even pernicious?  These verses must not be read as if they minimise sin or deny its horrible effects.  They take sin seriously.  But they also show how God deals with it.  How?  He forgives it.  Why?  Because he's like that.  And if that's what normal and loving parents do, can you really expect God to do or to be anything less (see Matthew 7:9-11)?   

This is my Old Testament in a nutshell, desert island, psalm.  It is simple, sane and humane.  Thanks be to God for it.

11 Psalm 131  Humility is healthy

From the beginning Christianity has insisted that humility is a virtue.  St Paul frequently taught his church members that they should be humble.  In the gospels we see Jesus not only teaching about humility but also practicing what he taught.  All of this was contrary to what was being taught in the Greek culture of the day.  There humility was seen as a vice rather than a virtue.  It was a sign of weakness.  In their macho society you were expected to stand on your own feet, claim your rights and assert yourself.  Jesus lived and taught a different message - that it was a gift to be humble.  And if Jesus is a model of humility for us, then we also see that being humble is not about being Uriah Heapish nor about allowing yourself to be used as a doormat. 

Where did Jesus get this radical idea from?  An answer you still find in some Christian circles is that Jesus invented it and then Christianity promoted it.  Not so.  The right answer is that here, as in so many ways, Jesus was a good son of Abraham.  He taught and lived out what he had learned from his Jewish faith.  The roots of this idea of humility are found in the Old Testament (eg Numbers 12:3, Isaiah 66:2, Micah 6:8) and Psalm 131 is a little gem of a psalm where some of them are made beautifully clear.

In the first two verses the psalmist addresses God.  He admits that once he was proud. Now, however, he has recognised that pride to be a sin and has found another way to be.  His heart is no longer lifted up.  For us heart is a metaphor for emotions and feelings; for the Old Testament it is a metaphor for the will.  People whose hearts are lifted up have a driving ambition.  They know where they are going and intend to get there.  They set their own agenda and are ruthless in achieving it.  Even their best friends would admit that they were pushy.  Others would call them arrogant.  The psalmist has turned away from all of that.  He has come to the Gethsemane point where he can say, "Your will, not mine, be done".  His eyes are not raised too high.  The key to this is Isaiah 37:23.  The Assyrians were notorious as a vicious and tyrannical enemy, marked by arrogance and pride (see Isaiah 10:12-15 and 37:21-29).  The psalmist says that he no longer behaves like an Assyrian.  Finally he admits that he has come to accept his limitations.  There are things too great and too marvellous for him to understand.  There was a time when he had talked freely and readily about such things: but now he knows when to speak and when to be silent.  He has learned intellectual humility too.

The second verse paints a picture of this.  He is like a three-year-old sitting contentedly on its mother's lap.  He used to be like a two-year-old, demanding to be fed (they breast fed children much longer in those days) and throwing a tantrum if it didn't get enough attention.  It has not been easy for the psalmist to reach this point.  He has had to work on his soul - his passions, drives and needs - as hard as a farmer has to work to prepare the hard ground for sowing.  That is the sense of the Hebrew word translated "calmed".   

In the third verse the psalmist turns to address Israel.  We know nothing of who wrote this psalm, when, where or why: but it certainly ends on a wider note than the personal with this appeal to Israel to hope in the LORD.  Just as he had learned to do that rather than trusting in his own ability or enterprise or whatever, so he appeals to the nation to put their ambitions and grandiose plans aside.  That is not what being the People of God is about.  We can imagine particular circumstances in which little Israel was tempted to play the superpower game, though never with the remotest possibility of succeeding.  We can also read elsewhere in the Old Testament about the ways in which the Chosen People celebrated their superiority.  The psalmist will have none of that.  Israel must, at the very least, put away aggressive, military and nationalist ambitions.  The future does not lie that way.

Finally to the title.  A Song of Ascents probably means a pilgrim song.  Pilgrims can get carried away and their religion can get very triumphalistic.  Of David shows a link with the monarchy.  Rulers can get delusions of grandeur.  Does this double title invite us to see this little psalm as an antidote to both sins?

Humility, in the Old Testament, is the opposite of pride.  Pride puts self at the centre.  Humility, in contrast, accepts that God is in the centre and challenges us to admit that we depend on him and to be willing to subject ourselves to him.  Humility, secondly, recognises the value of other people and encourages us to pay them due regard and to be willing to give ourselves away in service to them.  Thirdly, humility recognises our individuality, value and worth but invites us to make a realistic assessment of ourselves, our place and our potential.  It is an ethic for individuals and for communities.  You can see why it wasn't very popular with the ancient Greeks and why it isn't all that popular today either.  Some even say that it is "unhealthy" and want to leave it out of our modern Christian ethic, much like Hymns and Psalms 538 has dropped out of our modern repertoire.  That would be a mistake too.

12 Psalm 150  Praise the Lord

Psalm 150 is the last psalm in the Book of Praises of the old Jerusalem Temple and the last entry in Hymns and Psalms.  Every verse in it begins with "Hallelu-" and ends with an exclamation mark.  In its six short verses it has thirteen imperatives calling us to "Hallelujah!"  It is, as my NRSV calls it, the Doxology marking the end of the Psalter and a fitting climax and conclusion to the book of Psalms.

Hallelujah became a full-throated Hebrew shout of praise, and it's much easier to say with the oomph it deserves than its anaemic Greek cousin Alleluia.  Hallelujah was a shout of praise which became a popular and enthusiastic congregational response in Jewish worship when their new service book and new hymn book were introduced in the new Temple built after the Exile.  The first Christians used it too.  We see it in the great hymn sung by the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven in Revelation 19:1-8 and it has featured in Christian liturgies ever since.  "Praise the LORD" is our usual English translation and to shout Hallelujah or to "praise the LORD" is to express, joyfully and thankfully, our appreciation to God for what he is and what he has done.  That is what Psalm 150 invites us to do.   

If we ask, Where is God to be praised? verse 1 gives us two answers.  The first and obvious one says "in his sanctuary".  It speaks of the worship offered by God's people at those special times and in those special places which he has given to us.  It points to worship as the first priority of church life and reminds us that the heart of worship is the praise of God.  We know it's not always like that of course, but this verse reminds us that it should be.  The second answer is even more challenging - "in his mighty firmament", that is, under his great pudding bowl of the sky.  God is to be praised always and everywhere, by lives as well as lips, in the world as well as in the church and seven whole days not one in seven.

If we ask, What is God to be praised for? verse 2 gives us two answers: for what he does and for what he is.  Some of us have problems with "for his mighty deeds" and what God does.  It was popular in theological circles to talk about "a God who acts" until Auschwitz put an end to such talk.  Some today talk about "signs and wonders" but most of us are uneasy because we can't help thinking about when good things don't happen.  No doubt the psalmist would point to mighty deeds like the defeat of national enemies, but do we really believe that God fights battles and ensures that the right side wins?  And when God's intervention in our lives is reduced to finding us parking spaces in busy streets then the whole idea seems inadequate let alone unworthy.  Life and God don't seem to work like that.  I think God's "mighty deeds" are something else, that he has the last word.  After all, we are still here.  Goodness, truth and justice have not been destroyed by evil, death and sin.  Is not God's really mighty deed the continuing victory of life over death, good over evil and light over darkness?  The second answer - "for his surpassing greatness" takes me straight back to the greatness of his love as in Psalm 103 and those key words in Exodus 34:6-7.

If we ask, How is God to be praised? verses 3-5 give us part of an answer.  They invite us to praise God in our worship with music and dance.  I make no comment here about old versus new except that whatever style of music we use in worship it has got to be good.  Hymns and Psalms 377 says it all for me: but please excuse me from the dance bit.

If we ask, Who is to praise God? the answer in verse 6 is stunning.  "Everything that breathes".  Not just Jews but all humanity.  Not just humanity but all that breathes.  What a wonderful choir to be part of.  This last psalm in the book invites the whole of creation to join in the praise of God. 

So what is Psalm 150 asking of us?  One or both of two things.

The word, Hallelujah, was probably first used as a call to worship said by a worship leader to a congregation.  He would say, "Praise the LORD", and they would respond by saying or doing something.  We can therefore hear this whole psalm as a call to "make a life of praise", to use that splendid phrase from Hymns and Psalms 474, and respond to that call by asking God to make it possible, as in that best of all hymns, 792.

Later on the word Hallelujah itself became a congregational response and a cultic shout, a one-word act of praise.  We can say this psalm in that way, making it our act of praise.  In these studies we have dipped into the Psalter and sung those hymns which speak of God's grace and glory and of his presence and his power.  We have also sung those which plead for his help, urge his action and anguish over his absence.  The Psalter ends all of this by giving us this psalm to sing, inviting us to say,

"Through all the changing scenes of life,

in trouble and in joy,

the praises of my God shall still

my heart and tongue employ."              

Either way.  Let it be so.  Amen.

16 The Importance of Christmas

(Western Morning News, 23^rd December, 2000.  This short article could be used in a Bible Study or Discussion Group)

Hard facts about the first Christmas are few.  Jesus was born.  His mother was Mary.  That’s about it.  We don’t know when, where or anything about the circumstances surrounding the birth.  That might worry some people, but it needn’t.  It obviously didn’t worry the first Christian thinker, Paul; or the first Gospel writer, Mark, for that’s all they said on the subject.  Twenty years later it was different.  Then, Matthew and Luke began their biographies of Jesus with stories about his birth.  Later still, John began his meditation on the life and meaning of Jesus with some popular philosophy.

Christmas in Christian churches today tends to major on the two stories in Matthew and Luke.  Occasionally we then get hung up on the “Is it true?” and the “Did it really happen?” sort of questions, even though asking those kinds of questions about much in the Bible never actually gets us very far.  More often, sadly, we don’t ask any questions at all.  I want to look at two much better questions: ‘Why did they tell such stories in the first place?’ and ‘What do these stories mean?’ 

The answer to the first question is that the Christmas stories were a celebration.  In story, drama, poetry and song the first Christians celebrated the impact Jesus of Nazareth had on them, on how they thought, on their values and attitudes and on their lifestyles.  They didn’t at that stage produce creeds or work out definitions.  Instead they sang songs and told stories because that was the way their Jewish culture traditionally expressed its deepest convictions about the meaning of life.  Today, Christians still use those old stories and sing those old songs in nativity plays, carol services and on Christmas cards to celebrate what Jesus means to them.

The answer to the second question is harder, because something has happened to the two stories.  They have been merged into one and additions made.  If you disentangle them you find that Matthew and Luke tell different stories and the differences between them cannot be reconciled.  Both are giving their testimony to Jesus.  For Matthew he is the great New Teacher, whose teaching is for all people everywhere.  For Luke he is the humane and compassionate ‘Friend of Sinners’, companion of ordinary people and outcasts, the great humanitarian.

Matthew tells a dark and tragic story.  Jesus is the Messiah God has promised.  But it all goes wrong.  The baby is born at home in Bethlehem.  Wise men arrive, having asked Herod the way.  He attempts to kill the baby.  Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt as refugees.  Thus the Messiah is born but his own people do not accept him.  Foreign wise men worship him but Herod and the wise men of Jerusalem reject him.

Luke's birth story is homely.  Jesus' cousin, John the Baptist, is born to an infertile couple, a sure sign that God is at work.  The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, who lives in Nazareth, announces her own pregnancy.  Mary and Joseph journey to Bethlehem for a Roman census and Jesus is born in a stable there.  Shepherds visit.  All the people in Luke's story are ordinary; none are rich, powerful or important. 

One of these stories will probably appeal more than the other, for each Christian sees Jesus in their own way, but neither will displace the Combined Version celebrated annually in churches.  Bethlehem.  A stable.  The baby in a manger.  Mary sits.  Joseph stands.  Shepherds kneel.  Three kings offer gifts.  Ox and ass look on.  A star.  Angels.  Most of that picture comes from Matthew and Luke.  Now add the music, and more appears each year.  Winter’s snow.  Three ships.  Merry gentlemen.  None of this comes from the Bible and none of these things ever happened, of course, but we sing old carols and write new ones because in imagination, fantasy and poetry they speak to us of things that really matter.

The poets and singers who give us these gifts continue what Matthew and Luke began.  They give us stories, images, pictures, songs and words with which to make sense of life.  Then, if we choose to do so we can decide to live out these particular stories, and to sing these particular songs which celebrate Jesus of Nazareth as God’s greatest gift to humanity.

17 The Importance of Easter