(A paper read to the meeting of the European Methodist Theological Commission meeting in Waiern, Austria, in June 2002, as part of its 'Scriptural Holiness' project. This was later published in the Epworth Review, vol 30, no 2, April 2003, pp.51-57, and is reproduced in that form in the articles section of this website)

The word ‘spirituality’ did not feature in John Wesley’s vocabulary and its meaning is prone to vagueness in ours. 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.’ 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. 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’. 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. It is, for most, a journey begun and continued, rather than a destination reached or goal achieved. It is a journey undertaken in company with others, in ‘fellowship’, not one walked alone.

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. 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, 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’.

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. 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.

For Wesley, however, all this was not enough. There remained a fundamental sense of dissonance, a restlessness, a missing element. 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.

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. 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.

Marie McCarthy argues that the ‘restless seeking for meaning, purpose and enduring values is the primary marker of the spiritual quest’. 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. 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’, and on this understanding it could be argued that the charism of Wesley’s spirituality was the ‘doctrine of assurance’. McCarthy then goes on to describe six marks of ‘authentic spirituality’, 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’. 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.

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’’ 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’.

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.

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, 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. 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.’

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, to which proper Wesley scholars could add details and examples at every point.

3 John Wesley and the Bible 

(A paper read to the meeting of the European Methodist Theological Commission meeting in Waiern, Austria, in June 2002, as part of its 'Scriptural Holiness' project. This was later published in the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, vol 54, part 1, February 2003, pp.1-10, and is reproduced in that form in the articles section of this website)

A project exploring John Wesley’s concept of "Scriptural Holiness" should permit a short detour to explore the adjective in that phrase. 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’ – but he has left us no comprehensive treatment of his understanding of the Bible. He did write a number of theological treatises including the Plain Account of Christian Perfection, but his preferred way of writing theology was in the published sermon. As, therefore, 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 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 fact and not 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 this theme 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 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 priviledged the Bible over all other books, and I suspect that few Methodists or Christians of any kind would disagree with doing that. Much more controversial, however, has been 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) 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; not only is it ‘hermeneutically impossible,’ because in any reading whatever primacy there is lies with the reader, but it is also historically anachronistic, because the Bible came on the scene last of the four. 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 reads 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.

4 Fundamentalism - 1

1.1 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 from that, 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.

1.2 Barr went on to describe what many or most Christians perceived of or classified as ‘fundamentalism’:

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

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

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

Harriet Harris adds another three characteristics when she writes about the situation in the USA in the mid-twentieth century that ‘‘Fundamentalism’ became the name-badge for those who did not engage in social action, did not attend mainstream educational institutions, and 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.

1.3 Barr then said that most Christians, himself included, had problems with the three points 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 probably would have been agreed by ‘most’ western Christians and endorsed by their churches, not least the Methodist ones, but even then there would have been a significant sub-culture which would perhaps have had more questions about Barr and his position than about the fundamentalism he was criticising. The Christian scene has 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.

1.4 For all that, however, 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 and varied and ‘Bible-believing,’ ‘Conservative’, ‘Evangelical’ or ‘Born again’ would be among their preferred adjectives, never ‘Fundamentalist’, though their own preferred terms could also be contested. And the same 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).

2.1 The words ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalist’ are derived from a 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-1920’s it was obvious that these fundamentalists … had failed on all fronts’ (Gifford 2000:255).

2.2 Britain and Europe were caught up in the same controversy, and the result was the same on this side of the Atlantic. By the 1930’s 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).

2.3 This situation continued until the early 1970’s 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.

2.4 Since the 1970’s ‘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).

2.5 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:

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

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

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

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

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

Elect membership, viewed often as the faithful remnant

Sharp boundaries, separating the saved from the sinful

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

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

2.6 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).

3.1 In this final section we must 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.

3.2 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.

3.3 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). 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 (Dawes 1996). 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.

3.4 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.

4.1 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’.’

4.2 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.

4.3 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 pretentions 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.

(The Chaplaincy Lecture, Kingston University, October 1^st, 2001)

There are times when I hanker back to the "good old days", those days when Bibles were written in Latin and were chained to pulpits, deliberately inaccessible to the man in the village street or the man on the Clapham ox-cart, and infinitely more so to the woman in either of those places. Those were the good old days when such people were told what they needed to know about the Bible, when they couldn’t read it for themselves and couldn’t go around using that fateful expression, "The Bible says". When in that mood I congratulate the one who lit the brushwood in 1536 in Antwerp and did away with William Tyndale - Bible translator – but regret that they didn’t catch him sooner. By the time of his death the hope he had expressed in an argument with a local Gloucestershire 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. None the less, 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. Why? Because a good case can be made that the Bible is a dangerous book, and that letting anyone who wants to read it is like letting them open Pandora’s box. Or to change the picture and use the title of a 90’s book on the Bible by a Scots Old Testament scholar, it can be a ‘Wolf in the sheepfold’ (R P Carroll). What, in such a mood I ask myself sometimes, has that ploughboy done to his life, his church and his neighbours because he has read and come to know the Scriptures? And the answer I have to give is: Some pretty dreadful things at times.

On the other hand - and of course there is another hand – that ploughboy’s Christian descendents see it differently. If we use another 90’s text, in the mostly excellent Rejoice and Sing, the URC hymnbook which with a bit of proper Methodist editing would have stood even higher than it does above all other recent hymnbooks, we have an official sample of how Christians today speak of the Bible in their worship. There we find nine hymns in a section headed "The Word and the Spirit". They speak of the Bible as a "sacred book" (Charles Wesley, 18^th century) with "sacred page" (twice: Mary Lathbury, Victorian and R T Brooks, 20^th century), "the blest volume God has writ" (Isaac Watts, 1674-1748), "the written word which is by inspiration given" to "the secret mind of God make plain" (Charles Wesley again); God’s "word (which) abideth and our footsteps guideth" (H W Baker, 19^th century); even more "God’s words" which are "life and health … light and truth … and full of joy" (G Currie Martin, who died in 1937). It is the very "bread of life" (Mary Lathbury again) and here we see how a phrase which is used of Christ in the Gospel of John is not so subtly transferred to the Bible; just as in that most idolatrous of all hymns, "O Word of God incarnate", which, to its great credit, Rejoice and Sing omits. The only other 20^th century hymn among them is by the Biblical scholar G B Caird, and even here the second verse waxes sentimental,

Fortunately the first verse quotes those famous words of John Robinson, the Pilgrim Father, that "the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word" – which at least shows that we need to study the Bible and not simply read its texts off its pages – and its last verse quotes those words of St Paul that "our vision now is dark", even with all the help the Bible can give us!

Most of the time, I think you might be glad to know, I share the feelings of most of those hymns, but for the sake of the Bible itself I have to stop short of that adulation which borders on idolatry. So maybe before we go any further, I ought to come clean with my view on the Bible and its authority.

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 1995 Conference approved the membership of that working party which included me. We finished our work in the autumn of 1996 and the report was subsequently published as ’A Lamp to my Feet and a Light to my Path’ – and a pretty tame report it is too, but that’s another story. For the first meeting of the Working Party each of us was asked to prepare a two-hundred word personal statement on our view of the authority of the Bible. For what it's worth this was mine:

All of this shows you, I hope, why in the title of tonight’s lecture we find the question asked of the Bible and its use, "Vision or Nightmare?" Some readers of the Bible find in it a vision of justice, peace and the integrity of creation; others make of the same texts a nightmare of hard-line, world-rejecting pietism. Some individuals read it and their lives are transformed with goodness; others and their lives are transformed in a different way. Likewise Christian communities who read the same Bible can emerge looking and feeling rather different: contrast, for example, the Quakers and the Exclusive Brethren. There is no doubt about it, 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 – though of course it’s also the case that one person’s vision might be someone else’s nightmare – but for the purpose of this lecture I want to assume that we are not talking about the same viewpoint but about two opposed ones. I want to assume that you know the difference between a vision and a nightmare and that we share a common view on what might constitute a vision and what might constitute a nightmare. I couldn’t make that assumption with every audience, but I shall with you, and no doubt it will become obvious in the questions and discussion at the end if I have got it wrong. I must also, in this post-modern age, be quite upfront with you about my point of view, my presuppositions and my assumptions, and tell you that what you are going to get from now on is my perspective, my story, my testimony. I can make no claims to objectivity or to ‘truth’, but I can tell you how I see it.

So here are three ‘stories’, two of them from the late 20^th century and the middle one is from this last summer. They are, all three, ‘churchy’ stories, for which fact I do not apologise in this lecture, for the sphere of the Church remains the one in which the Bible is most commonly used, and is the one where its potential to be nightmare or vision is arguably at its greatest. I hope you’ll forgive the 20^th century stories on the grounds that if there are discernible trends towards the end of the last century the chances are that they will continue into at least the beginnings of this one.

First, a story from the Expository Times. In January 2000 I received a letter from the Editor asking me to contribute an article to a new series he wanted to run. It was to be called ‘In honesty of preaching’, that superb phrase coming from a hymn by the recently deceased Fred Pratt Green. The Editor wanted this series because of a letter he had received from Dr Mark Chapman, the New Testament tutor at Cuddesdon Theological College, Oxford. Mark had been invited to preach on Bible Sunday 1999 at Dorchester Abbey in Oxfordshire and had preached a sermon on Bishop Colenso – whose something or another anniversary it was around that time. Bishop Colenso – a Cornishman - had been a controversial bishop in South Africa who had been instrumental in the 19^th century in promoting the new approaches to the Bible which blossomed in Peake’s Commentary, of which more later. The next week Dr Chapman received a letter from the Rector, telling him of the upset and disquiet his sermon about not taking the Bible literally had caused. They met, talked it through and set up a discussion group session on it which proved helpful and positive to those who came. Dr Chapman put it like this,

I prepared a short talk where I went through some of the basics of Biblical interpretation. The mood was constructive and positive, and it turned out that my ‘honesty of preaching’ had allowed almost all of the people there to voice their own doubts and to discover what was really important about the Bible. Some people turned out to have very radical opinions indeed. And it also turned out that the lady who ran the Amnesty International stall which had been set up at the back of the church, was impressed to hear a sermon with which she could agree. Faith was deepened and the Gospel was heard with integrity.

But other worshippers had been lost. Genteel, intelligent, articulate Oxfordshire Anglicans – or at least those are the sort of people I think one might expect to find in the Parish Church of a small dormitory village ten miles south of Oxford - had gone elsewhere looking for "true teaching". Saying in 1999 that you couldn’t take the Flood and Noah’s Ark literally had shaken their faith too much.

My second story comes from the correspondence columns of the Church Times over the last couple of months. On July 27^th the paper reported that a pulpit ban had been imposed on Canon David Stainsby by the Bishop of Peterborough for criticising the formula "This is the Word of the Lord / Thanks be to God". Common Worship, the new authorised Anglican service book, says the reader and congregation ‘may say’ this as the ending of all Bible readings other than those from the Gospels: but as it gives no alternatives it looks as if this is one of those ‘mays’ which is only a whisker away from a ‘should’. Anyway, Canon Stainsby had obviously questioned this liturgical formula, as Mark Chapman had done in his article in the Expository Times of May 2000 and as I did in mine of June 2000. Such criticism is one I and others have made in all kinds of ways and places since this verse and response first appeared from America in the Anglican Alternative Service Book of 1980. And at this point I can’t resist telling you a story within a story.

When I taught Old Testament at the Queen’s College in Birmingham in the late 1980’s we had a delightful American nun training for the Anglican diaconate. She was sweet, quiet and gentle. One morning she found herself at Morning Prayer reading some 40 verses from one of the bloodier chapters of Judges. At the end she paused and said - I won’t attempt the accent - "This (!?) is the word of the Lord (!!???)". I thought, and so did others on the way out, that Vicky had got it exactly and precisely right. However, when we got to staff coffee that morning, we learned that the Principal had felt it necessary to call her into his study and reprimand her. When he appeared for coffee he experienced an almost unheard of thing, a Queen’s College staff united, and united in support of Vicky.

Anyway, back to the Church Times. A letter appeared in the next issue, August 3^rd, supporting the canon and quoting the same disquiet expressed in 1971 by no less than Archbishop Michael Ramsey, though on balance the Archbishop thought the thing could stand as the producers of the ASB were not suggesting that the text of the Bible was the Word of God and, he seemed to imply, the average member of the C of E would be aware of the real meaning of the verse and response and would appreciate that distinction. There was another letter the week after supporting that one. In that issue, however, David Holloway, Rector of Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, and one of the recognised leaders of the evangelicals in the Church of England, wrote pointing out that the Bishop of Peterborough in banning Canon Stainsby was only expressing the age-old position of the Church of England – that the text of the Bible was the Word of God. He added that this entirely true and trustworthy formula was not rejected in those parishes which were the only growing ones in the C of E, namely the evangelical ones. The writing was on the wall for the rest, he implied, because they no longer believed the Bible. Next week two letters took David Holloway to task for misquoting Hooker but the debate was capped by the New Testament tutor from the evangelical Anglican college at Bristol, who said simply that as Jesus put his imprimatur on the Old Testament and invested his apostles with his authority through the Holy Spirit, the Bishop of Peterborough was quite right to do as he had. So there it is, the Bible, in any and every part is ‘the word of the Lord’, even the writings of Paul when he says he’s only offering his own opinion on a particular issue because he hasn’t a word of the Lord on it (1 Cor 7:12), even those agonised cries to a seemingly deaf God from a psalmist in deep personal distress and even the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs. Sadly, now that that formula is enshrined in a service book, it cannot fail but to support the rise of fundamentalism, of which more later. And for me personally, it does not help me to worship when mindless readers of Lessons and congregations parrot nonsense, to the detriment of both common sense and the truth.

My third story is a kind of preparation for your next lecture. Most of the mainline churches in Britain had discussions about ‘Human Sexuality’ sometime in the 90’s; and most of those debates actually focused on homosexuality. "The Bible says," we were told repeatedly, that homosexual acts are wrong and forbidden. And that’s correct. It does. Some supporters and friends of the gay lobby in the church – and I would call myself one of those – argue that it doesn’t, that the texts quoted don’t mean what they seem to say: but I have to say that they are wrong, and that what they are doing is special pleading. Those who take a tough line against practising gays in the church are correct, quite correct, when they say that the Bible says that homosexual acts are wrong and forbidden. But – and I hope you were anticipating a ‘but’ – but what was rarely said or heard in response to that was that saying that actually proves or establishes nothing, because the Bible says a lot of things that most of us ignore. It forbids the remarriage of certain kinds of divorced women, for example, but Methodism has gone ahead with that since 1945. It is passionately opposed to investing capital at interest, but I don’t see Bible-believing Christians taking any more notice of that than any other kind of Christian. It would rather we didn’t swear oaths in court, and that women wore hats in church, didn’t hold office and kept their mouths shut, a recipe for closing 99% of the Methodist chapels in Cornwall if ever there was one. It also forbids the eating of Black Pudding and of any meat not killed in the kosher fashion, and makes that a very serious, priority obligation on all Christians, one which no Christian I know personally of any persuasion actually accepts.

Do you want that one spelled out? Okay. A crucial issue facing the Church in its early mission days was the question of what requirements of the old Jewish Law needed to be observed by gentiles who become Christians. The answer, agreed at the first Ecumenical Council held in Jerusalem, was that gentile Christians should refrain from idolatry and immorality – well, you’d expect that – and from ‘things strangled’ and from ‘blood’. That was all, they needn’t worry about the rest, but those four things were essential. We find the story of that Council in Acts 15, and this decision is found in verses 20 and 29. Gentiles – that’s almost everybody in the Church of course – must therefore not eat Black Pudding. Now I know many Christians who don’t eat Black Pudding because they can’t stand the thought of it, or because they are vegetarians (another entirely unbiblical idea that one, though there’s a way round it) but because of Acts 15:20 and 29? No way.

Now the interesting thing is that when I say to one of those Christians who believe that gay sexual practices are wrong because the Bible says so that presumably they don’t eat Black Pudding or rare steaks for the same reason, they look at me sort of funny. If I’m lucky they ask me what I’m on about. And when I explain about the Council and Acts 15:20 and 29, then it gets really interesting to listen to all the reasons they give why this particular text is not to be taken literally, etc etc. The plain fact is that all of us interpret the Bible – there is no reading of the Bible (or of anything else) without interpreting – all readers do it, fundamentalists included. It’s just that non-fundamentalists are usually more upfront about it and so get the flak. It was to counteract this simplistic use of "The Bible says" – heard repeatedly in the sexuality debates in every denomination - that I wrote my Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding, and although it’s now out of print it is available as a free download off the internet or there are hard copies of the download for sale with other stuff of mine over there. A very serious book, despite its silly title, written to oppose and expose a growing tendency to support arguments really based elsewhere by wheeling in "The Bible says". End of advert and end of the third story.

Three stories, and they raise one huge issue, the issue of ‘Gap’.

The 20^th century began with no gap, officially, between the Bible in the Church and the Bible in the University, or in the ‘Academy’, as I shall call it from now on in line with current jargon. That is not to say that every Bible reading church member would have agreed with the accepted results of Biblical studies even had they known what they were, for many of them wouldn’t and too many of them didn’t. Nor is it to say that the Christian Herald and Sunday Companion, on the one wing, published book reviews by Professors of New Testament; or that the Roman Catholic Church, on the other, had as yet given permission for its Bible scholars to get involved in the Academy’s agenda, that would only come mid-century. But it would be true to say that the Church of England and the mainstream Free Churches, which between them had a huge monopoly on the religious life of the UK, had to all official intents and purposes taken ‘Biblical Criticism’ on board. Led by the Scots, and greatly helped by the prolific energy and entrepreneurial industry of James Hastings with his various Dictionaries and the Expository Times, ‘Biblical Criticism’ was on the official agendas and was the official line of the churches. In the Academy, biblical criticism in the UK was almost entirely the work of Christian scholars, the vast majority of them ordained ministers. It was the churches which supplied the university teachers, and in many instances the Departments of Theology (which in many cases were dominated by Biblical Studies) grew out of the local denominational theological colleges and continued to rely heavily on their staff. The jewel in this crown was Peake’s Commentary, published from Scotland in May 1919 after being delayed by the war – 61 contributors, all male, and only 8 were lay people. Its aim was simple, to present to the reading membership of the mainstream churches the up-to-date results of university, critical, Biblical scholarship – "to put before the reader in a simple form, without technicalities, the generally accepted results of Biblical Criticism, Interpretation, History and Theology" (Preface p xi). The result of that publication was, it is commonly and rightly said, to save Britain from "Fundamentalism", a very different approach to the Bible which was coming out of the USA at the same time. There might in 1919 have been the sort of gap between a minister’s pulpit and a worshipper’s pew that was evident at the end of the century in Dorchester Abbey, but there was no gap between Church and Academy.

Peake’s Commentary represented the aims and methods of most university Biblical studies until the 1970’s, and to the commitment of the Anglican and Free Churches to it was added that of the Roman Catholics in 1943 when Pope Pius XII issued the decree Divino Afflante Spiritu, in which he encouraged his Church to take those aims, methods and results on board. As far as my own denomination is concerned, the Methodist Church in the UK re-expressed its commitment to this stance in the report I mentioned a while ago, A Lamp to my Feet and a Light to my Path, in our Conferences of 1998 and 2001. At the heart of this academic approach is what is known as the ‘Historical-Critical Method’ or the ‘Traditio-Historical Criticism’ both mouthfuls to say, but at heart a very straightforward method. A Bible passage means what its original author intended it to mean and its original hearers heard it to say – that in a nutshell is what Peake’s Commentary and the ‘Historical-Critical Method’ is about. So scholars ask, Who wrote this passage? When? Where? and Why? on the way to answering the question, What does it mean? Of course, with some passages some of those questions are easier to ask than others, and with some they are almost impossible – we recognise that now in a way that Peake and company did not. We also recognise that at times this approach would write off certain passages, for example when it became apparent that the happy ending of the book of Amos was not ‘original’ then it was dismissed as only of secondary value, even if that. And how on earth do you get into an author’s mind to know what their intentions were anyway? But the attempt was to be made, and having established as far as possible what the original author intended and the original hearers understood, then and only then, could you go on to ask what this might mean in our very different circumstances. And in asking that question, your first answer provided essential control and a measure of objectivity: a passage did not mean just whatever you wanted it to mean, and you could not take a passage "out of context" and use it for different purposes. That act of interpretation too, of course, was a difficult one but there were all the scholarly conventions and checks and balances related to its ‘original meaning’.

But, sadly, all this could and did get so nit-picking, so fragmentedly detailed and just so ‘boring’ that you could hardly see the wood for the trees. The end result was that in the 1970’s a general dissatisfaction with this approach was beginning to set in to university Biblical studies worldwide. Students of literature began to tell us to move on to their new ways, to read the Bible in a literary way, to accept its final form, to read it as narrative, to ask about plot and character and point of view. Third World scholars into Liberation Theology began to remind us that the Bible is about the big issues of politics and justice and that Biblical Studies should be addressing them – who cares what sources lie behind the Exodus narratives? Read the narratives, change and change the world! Feminist scholars began to point out how the whole Bible story marginalises women, writes them out of the story and promotes patriarchy and to say that these were much bigger issues about the Bible to explore than the traditional ones. Social historians added their questions about finding out the sorts of communities which produced these texts: but that was a bit too much like a variant on the older ways and didn’t quite catch the mood. Post-moderns arrived, writing about what this passage or that meant to them, with no interest at all in what any hypothetical author might have meant, playing with images or poems or stories which enhanced their imaginations and fulfilled their lives. So from a focus on authors we have moved in thirty years or so through a focus on the text itself to the reader as the one who gives a text meaning; though hopefully there are signs of a return to some sort of common sense that authors do matter somehow too. It’s all been very exciting, as well as confusing, but the common factor in all these developments is that the ‘authority’ of the Bible has almost disappeared. It is valued as a classic text, immensely rich literature with complex associations and influence, it is a tremendously exciting playground in which to find images with which to play, or it is a dangerous and baleful text whose ideologies have largely been damaging to human good, it is a source of data for studies of ancient worlds providing you use it with considerable care. By the end of the 20^th century the Bible had become many things to many scholars: but in the Academy it was no longer the or even a ‘sacred’ text, the authoritative guide to the meaning of life, the universe and everything, which it was the job of scholarship to explore and then expound. Many other things, but no longer that. All, actually, very exciting but done increasingly without much interest in what this might mean to the Churches or to the faith of individuals.

But recently, and to me worryingly, there has been a call to recognise and legitimise the perceived growing gap between the Academy and the Church; and in the Academy to study "Bible" and in the Church to study "Scripture", to make a distinction between secular and sacred approaches and methods and to clearly differentiate between these two forms of Biblical scholarship. It has come in different ways from a kind of unholy alliance; from the Academy in a powerful book by one of England’s leading Old Testament scholars [Philip R Davies, Whose Bible is it anyway? (Sheffield 1995)] and from the other end from some almost hysterical Americans [Reclaiming the Bible for the Church ed C A Braaten and R W Jenson (T and T Clark 1996)]. But that, it seems to me, is the way to nightmare. Nightmare not least for Departments of Theology and Religious Studies in many of our universities, I have to say, given that a significant number of their students are still sponsored by churches who would probably remove that sponsorship if such a break were made and find other ways of training its not inconsiderable numbers of student ministers in Biblical things. What kudos, career potential, job possibilities would remain then, I wonder, in Departments of Biblical Studies with the same level of student interest as currently shown in Departments of Ancient Near Eastern Studies or Ancient Near Eastern literature, in a university culture where the financial bottom line is what really counts? What indeed. But nightmare too, for the Churches, which would no longer have to face up to the awkward questions asked of the Bible by those with the intellectual rigour, academic discipline and freedom from ecclesiastical censure to ask them. Or which would rapidly divide into different schools each reading the Bible in the ways that suited them, accountable to none other than those who policed the boundaries of acceptable thought determined by each particular school. Or which would impose ways of reading on the Bible and give answers to the Bible’s questions determined largely outside of it. Imagine, not only having your Bible passages chosen for you – like the Lectionary already does – but also the official explanation of the passages handed down to be uncritically accepted, just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses receive their package of official teaching each week from the Leaders in the States. Opening a gap between Academy and Church would be nightmarish for both, I would argue, for without real dialogue both of those institutions and the Bible itself would inevitably be the poorer.

But what of the Bible in the Church in the 20^th century? The Bible continues to be highly regarded officially by the churches, though the evangelicals in some churches, not least my own, would dispute that that is the case. Most church reports, though, seem to feel obliged to have strong sections on what the Bible has to say about the issue in question, and the launch of the Revised Common Lectionary a couple of years ago ensures that most of us are reading most of the same passages in our worship Sunday by Sunday. But if there is one word to describe how the Bible is really faring in the churches at grassroots level I suggest that that word is ‘neglect’, or so every report on Bible reading in the churches in the 90’s by the Bible Society has argued. Lip-service may be paid by and in all the churches to the importance etc of the Bible, but fewer and fewer Christians seem to be actually reading it much. The growing number of ‘fundamentalists’ – more of them in a moment – would have us believe that there are more and more ‘Bible-believing Christians’ about (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, statistically, much less Bible-reading around than there was, so it seems. That, however, 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.

And here we arrive at the fundamentalists, whose growth to power and respectability in the mainstream churches of the UK is one of the distinguishing features of the life of the British churches in the last quarter of the 20^th century. Some of you, like me, might bemoan that fact; others of you might applaud it, but fact it is. Calling themselves by a variety of names – "Bible-believing", "Born-again", "Conservative Evangelical" or just plain "Evangelical", to name only four – the biblical Fundamentalists have arrived and have become a force to be reckoned with. And even though they do not promote the full-scale version of the parent American fundamentalism – they are British after all – they are still promoting something quite significantly different from both the Biblical stance of Peake and that of, if I may use the phrase, the traditional British churchgoer’s approach to the Bible which I would describe 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, yes, but inspired in its total accuracy by God as the supreme authority for all Christian doctrine and practice. There is, to put it bluntly, a battle going on for the soul of the 21^st century Church, and Fundamentalism, mild or strong, is to my mind a very dangerous enemy. It’s message is alarming simple – stand by the truth of the Bible as it has been taught from the beginning (though of course there is nothing simple about the truth of the Bible and its message has been constantly debated and interpreted from day one). Its message is extremely seductive – come to the light, walk in the light, leave the darkness of doubts and shades of grey behind, come to the light of the truth (though that of course doesn’t stop fundamentalists disagreeing and falling out among themselves about what that truth is, there’s nothing more fissiparous than evangelical Christianity). Its message is highly attractive – in a frightening and frightened world here is firm ground, here is the truth, just believe, obey and be saved, it’s all you need (hence the current popularity and spread of fundamentalisms in every faith and every political philosophy). A victory for the fundamentalists would be nightmare: just go back to my three stories and reflect on the kind of Church and the kind of understanding which would be the result of such a victory, or reflect on the implications of such a victory for a chaplaincy such as this.

Bishop Colenso died in 1883. Peake produced his Commentary in 1919, every minister trained in almost every British Theological College or certainly every university Department of Theology since then has been taught according to the accepted canons of both Church and Academy represented by Peake. Why then did it come as such a shock to that Oxfordshire congregation when from the pulpit someone denied the literal facticity of Flood and Ark? What then can be done about this gap, between pulpit and pew, or dare I say it between the minister’s sudy desk and her pulpit? Obviously nothing much had been done to bridge the gap between where those Oxfordshire folks are and where Peake and company were a century ago? Here is, for the 21^st century, a gap to be bridged. So let me urge the need for bridging that gap and give you just one example, and I confess that it is a very personal, particular and local one – but post-modernity welcomes such things, does it not?) of how it can be easily done.

Come with me to Ponsongath, a remote Methodist country chapel on the Lizard in Cornwall. It is Harvest Festival and they have invited the Chairman of the District to conduct the two services that day. I have decided to use the two creation pictures in Genesis 1-3 as the basis for the day's reflections and Genesis 1:26-27 and 2:7 as the texts for the two sermons. But how shall I introduce the readings? There are some Creationists in Cornwall, though mercifully not a lot in the Methodist churches. There are also some fundamentalists. But in my observation, there are actually two kinds of Christian fundamentalists: the new ‘Idealogical Fundamentalists’ (capital ‘f’s) – certainly few in number in the Methodist church in Cornwall and the old ‘folk fundamentalists’ (small ‘f’s) – much more numerous. There are many more who are unhappy with fundamentalists of any sort. I find that distinction between two types of fundamentalists a helpful one. By "Ideological Fundamentalists" I mean those who are aware of the questions addressed by traditional academic Biblical scholarship and who reject them. By "folk fundamentalists" I mean those who are oblivious to such questions - because of preachers who have not bridged those gaps? My observation is that most British Methodists, if not most British Christians, come from this stock. My experience with such "folk fundamentalists" is that, in the main, they respond positively - and often with relief - when they are introduced to those questions. That, you will remember, was precisely the reaction Mark Chapman had in the discussion group! Given that my congregation at Ponsongath probably contains such a mixture, and knowing that these two creation pictures in Genesis 1-3 are only two of the four different Old Testament creation pictures, how do I introduce the Bible readings? By explaining that I am going to read the two creation "Parables" with which the Bible begins. I know that neither Genesis 1-2:4a or 2:4b-3:22 is a "parable" in the strict sense of that word, but what else am I to call them? To call them creation "accounts" is even more misleading. "Stories" is a word I prefer to use for other Bible passages and "myths" is obviously out of the question, so "parables" it must be. At least my hearers know how to listen to parables. Then in the addresses I referred to them in much the same way, stressing that they were neither ‘history’ nor ‘science’ but theology. The response of several people at the door was to thank me for putting it like that. Later in the week I met a local who hadn’t been there but had heard about both services. He told me how effective the "parable" word had been and that it hadn't offended anybody, which had rather surprised him. And how do I end the readings? Not by saying, "This is the word of the Lord", though I am very well aware that the Lord has much to teach us from these ancient passages. Nor by simply saying, "Here ends the lesson" – no to that old one too, that’s not strong enough. But by saying, "Thanks be to God for this ancient Parable of Creation" and then adding, "May God help us to understand it and learn from it." Reading the Bible like that, and speaking of it in those terms, I suggest is to see a future for the Bible in the Church in the 21^st century as a vision and not a nightmare.

Finally, to come back to the Bible in the Academy, is its future there vision or nightmare? Well, the Bible is still there, and looks like being so for some time yet, and that is very encouraging in itself. In fact, it’s spreading a little bit. One of the side-effects of the growing ignorance of the Bible in ordinary culture – witness listening to contestants in any TV quiz programme reveal their ignorance – is that university departments of English literature who value the Bible as a literary text and recognise its crucial role in the development of English literature generally, now have to introduce students to it. So there are now, for instance, dictionaries of Biblical quotes in works of literature to help such students find their way around [eg]. Meanwhile the Bible continues to be taught in Departments of Theology and Religious Studies, though from a very wide range of angles. There is much reading of the Bible as literature, and much reflecting on the different ways different readers create meanings for themselves in dialogue with the Bible: but, I am personally pleased to say, there is a growing recognition that what original authors intended and original hearers heard is also an important question to pursue. Without a doubt, hermeneutics, interpretation, is alive and well as a discipline in the Academy [see John Barton, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, CUP, 1998]. Traditional questions are still pursued, of course, one of the hottest potatoes at the moment being how much of the history of ancient Israel can be reconstructed from the Bible stories about Israel: much, little or next to none? Commentaries continue to be written, and more and more interest is being taken in narratives, stories, on the one hand and the much neglected Wisdom Literature on the other. Scholars of the Supplement plug away fascinatingly at still attempting to recover the Jesus of History and explain the phenomenal growth of the early Church [N T Wright], and even Paul is staging a bit of a comeback as scholars try to get down to the real Paul hidden from us for so long under layers of Lutheran makeup. Even the subject of Biblical Theology – what the Bible can say to us about God – is making a comeback after an absence of 40 years. I think it’s fair to say that the Bible is alive and well in the Academy.

And it is that life that the Church needs for the 21^st century. With it the Bible can be Vision for Church and World; without it, it will be Nightmare for both. My warning to you tonight is that this is exactly what Peake and company thought in 1919, but the 20^th century, and not only in Dorchester but in many other places in the UK too, ended further away from that thinking than it had started! My vision for the Bible in the 21^st century is that Peake’s agenda will be successfully renewed and that it will bridge the gaps – between Academy and Church, pulpit and pew, study and pulpit. My nightmare is that it won’t and those gaps will remain and widen.

Thank You.

(The Chaplaincy Lecture, Combined Universities in Cornwall, Tremough, March 6^th, 2008)

1.1 First let me thank the Chaplain for the invitation to deliver this Chaplaincy Lecture, and in so doing present an introduction to Christianity to complement the introductions to Judaism and to Islam in this Chaplaincy Lecture series.

1.2 My title – Christianity: the ways, the truths and the lives? – is, as I’m sure many of you will recognise, based on that hugely troublesome and increasingly abused saying which the writer of the Fourth Gospel puts on the lips of Jesus, but instead of going into that I simply want to borrow the phrase and change it by adding three ‘s’s’ and a question mark. Why the plurals? Simply because it is misleading and virtually impossible to talk about ‘Christianity’ in the singular. Not that this is a problem only for Christianity, I would add, for I don’t think you can talk about Judaism either, only about Judaisms; nor about Islam but only about Islams and so on with almost any other world Faith or ideology you can think of. That is not to say, and we shall explore this as we go on, that there isn’t a ‘broad family resemblance’ among Christian groups or something held in common in Christianity or the others, but the place to begin is by recognising that the term ‘Christianity’ is an umbrella term that covers a huge diversity:

a diversity of practice in the sense of organisation, structure and institutional life, and practice in terms of the expression of faith in and through worship – a diversity of ‘ways’,

a diversity of belief, doctrine, understanding and theology - a diversity of ‘truths’,

a diversity of ethics and moralities, of lifestyles and attitudes and values – a diversity of ‘ways’.

Here are differences of Belonging, Believing and Behaving, and I am not talking about cosmetic or trivial differences here, but differences for which Christians have both died, and killed.

1.3 So any introduction to Christianity must recognise that you can’t avoid the sheer diversity of it. A major source of this diversity is, of course, historic. Christianity has been around for two thousand years, and things change, even though it is a particular temptation of some forms of Christianity to deny it and of most to resist it. We could see that change by looking at how Christianity has been organised in this locality down the centuries, what has been believed and how Christians have lived – but we won’t as I am not a Church Historian. Another source of the changes, of course, is cultural. Christianity is a worldwide phenomenon, and how we do our Christianities hereabouts is not how they do their Christianities in Southern Africa or South East Asia or Greece or the United States. Our diversities go downwards through history and horizontally across the contemporary world. Some might not like those s’s but anybody who wants to say that there is a single, clear, definite, always and everywhere, universal, ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’ or ‘once and for all delivered to the saints’ Church or way of being Christian or of doing Christianity has really got an impossibly uphill task to demonstrate it. Christianity takes diverse and multiple forms, and always has. That’s my first point.

2.1 The second thing I want to do, therefore, is to look at these diversities in those three areas of Belonging, Believing and Behaving – or the ways, the truths and the lives there are in Christianity.

2.2 So, first, Christianity - the ways; the organisational and institutional ways first, then the liturgical ones. You might think this is a rather mundane and strange place to begin, but Christianity is a movement with forms and structures, buildings, financial accounts, professional bodies, policies, committees and plant – and always has been. And these things are not incidentals, matters of accident or chance, mere pragmatics necessary to achieve higher and more spiritual ends; for these things themselves have been the occasion of schisms and divisions, of martyrdoms and burnings, of high feelings and drama. Such an innocuous title as ‘bishop’ would be resisted as devilish vocabulary in some quarters; the authority structure of the Vatican and its worldwide church radically questioned by the majority of Christians worldwide today, the independent and local gathering of Christians in someone’s front room to break bread and take wine without priest or clergy as heresy and an invalid act by many mainstream denominations and so on. Are buildings central or ephemeral? Are clergy an asset or a liability? Is the church essentially local and independent, or national or international and united in clearly demarcated ways? All of these are real questions which are answered differently; and they arise because Christianity is fundamentally, as was its parent body Judaism, a corporate enterprise. It is not primarily about solitary individuals and their personal spiritualities; it is about a community of believers seeking to be the ‘people of God together’. And it’s because of that that differences of organisation and structure, which are many and varied, are freighted with both theology and aggro. Add that to the fact that at heart differences of organisation are usually to do with power, who has it, who wants it, and how it is exercised, and you can see how the many different institutional shapes of Christianity, visible across Cornwall for example, have emerged.

My second example of the diverse ways and shapes Christianity takes is the equally fraught area of diversity in worship. Most religions, Christianity being no exception, make provision for their adherents to gather together for worship. For most Christians those gatherings are weekly and scheduled for Sunday – the day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus – though some do it on Saturdays. What goes on in worship time varies incredibly, from the gathered corporate silence of the Quaker meeting, to the bells and smells and colour and drama of a High Mass, to the rather somnolent sitting in rows, singing hymns, listening to a preacher for fourteen and a half minutes in my own Methodist chapel to the ‘hands down for coffee’, happy-clappy, powerpoint-focussed two hours of not quite as informal as it looks charismatic service. Different churches do it differently. For some the Eucharist, Holy Communion, the taking of bread and wine in a solemn service that claims to go back to the very beginning is absolutely what this worship is all about; for others this is hardly on their radar. There is usually music, though not everywhere, but the music varies, as does who sings and who doesn’t sing, but that’s all a recent invention really, hymns as we know them were only introduced into English Christianity in the 17^th century. Half a dozen people gathering in a front room, that’s worship. 250 people meeting in the cathedral, that’s worship. What they do, what is allowed and encouraged or not allowed and discouraged varies considerably, as does who leads it and who is authorised to lead it and that takes you back into all that stuff about power and authority and system again.

So there is no one form of either Christian organisation or Christian worship. There is no one way of organising the church or being the church or worshipping. There just isn’t. There are, of course, quite a few people around who don’t understand that and who say that the only true way of Christian worship is doing this, this and this – but that is, if I dare say it, at heart only personal opinion and personal preference dressed up a bit. There are huge diversities in these areas now, and historically there always have been. Across different cultures, in different times and in different places you will not find any ‘as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be’, other than that of diversity. So in terms of the organisation of Christian churches and structures and the shape, form and content of Christian worship you have got to talk about ‘ways’ rather than ‘way’.

2.2 Now let’s come to the second of the great diversities - the ‘truths’.

‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ are terms that have bugged Christianity from the beginning. The first big controversy in the early church after the death of Jesus was essentially a theological one, a question of the mission of the church and a question to do with people – could non-Jews come in? If so, on what terms? And if they did, what would that do to us and our small Jewish sect of those who called themselves ‘Christians’? Or to put it another way, was Paul and his missionary zeal a liability or an asset, a prophet or an apostate? In a way, that’s always been the biggest and most divisive question: Who belongs? And how?

And here, I think, is the place to mention ‘denominations’, which are the most visible of Christianity’s multiple diversities. The first really big split in the Christian church which gave us the two denominations called ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Catholicism’ – interesting to notice how each of those titles makes a claim to be the one true expression of Christianity, isn’t it? – arose for many reasons. There had been tensions between the church in the Greek East with its Patriarchate of Constantinople and the church in the Latin West with its Papacy in Rome for centuries, but it all came to a head over a Latin word which caused a theological furore which exists to this day. Do we add the word filioque in the Creed, as the Romans insisted we should, or continue to leave it out, as the Orthodox insisted we should? As a Biblical specialist I am not qualified to say what difference it makes if ‘the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son’ or just from the Father, and as someone who thinks that the Doctrine of the Trinity is a 3^rd century illustration which has had its day I fail to be able to work up even a modicum of interest in the debate: but, make no mistake, the schism of 1054 on this topic is very much still with us. Any questions on filioque I will redirect to my colleagues in the Department of Theology, but that division was a theological one to do with the nature of God and was felt to represent a fundamental theological distinction.

500 years later the European Reformation was splitting the western Church, and whilst it was a potent mixture of emerging nationalisms and changing economies, to say nothing of personal agendas, the focus was often on different theologies. What does it to mean to be Christian? Is being Christian something you do - like obey the Church, take the sacraments, live a good life? Or is it something more inward – about a personal life reorientation, a transformed personal autonomy and fulfilment? Is salvation by faith or by works? was the kind of slogan that was batted around, despite the fact that the New Testament says it’s by both. But then there were the theological divisions in the emerging Protestant reformers themselves, where Luther, Calvin and Zwingli were as ready to be rude to each other as they were to the Pope and his bishops.

500 years after that came the Azusa Street Revival and the last great doctrinal division, giving rise to the fourth great bloc in Christianity, the Pentecostalists and the charismatics. And I call this a theological division because at heart it is all to do with the experience of the Holy Spirit and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

So today we have the four big denominational blocs: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Pentecostalism, with three of them breaking down into sub-groups, and sometimes fiercely competitive and mutually incompatible sub-groups at that. Now throw into the pot the divisions within these blocs, at least in the west, between liberals and evangelicals, between mainstream and fundamentalist, between conservatives and modernisers – using whatever definitions of these controversial and contested terms you like – and you begin to get some idea of how difficult it would be for a great Ecumenical Council to be called in the 21^st century at all, and for it to agree a Common Creed for the third Millennium if it did manage to convene.

We can’t talk about the ‘truth’ of Christianity but only about its ‘truths’, for there is no single Christian theology but a diversity of them.

2.3 And so to my third set of diversities. We have looked at the ‘ways’ - the different structures and forms of Church organisation and worship; and at the ‘truths’ – the varieties of things believed and taught. So to the third - the ‘lives’.

I could give you here a whole list of very different people whose lives have been lives of great Christian virtue and commitment, and in so doing demonstrate the diversity of styles of holiness, spirituality, and lifestyle seen in great and representative Christians down the years: but that’s not really what I mean. If I were to do that I suppose I would have to be equally fair and give you a sample of some fairly nasty Christian people too, but I won’t do that either. What I do intend to do now is to talk briefly about the different understandings within Christianity of what it means to live in a Christian way, of the different ideas of right and wrong found in the Church, of ethics and morality. And I can do that best, I think, by being quite contemporary and quite specific by looking at what’s going on in the Anglican communion worldwide at the moment, where we find that that particular multinational branch of the Church is experiencing considerable tensions on one specific ethical issue, namely human sexuality. Needless to say that issues of power are also involved – namely whether the focus of unity in the Anglican communion should be Canterbury, Nigeria or Sydney; that theological positions are also involved – liberal versus evangelical, to use the labels; and that other issues are drawn into the conflict, particularly women bishops and lay presidency at the Eucharist – but the focus of the controversy is that of human sexuality in general, and in particular what we should think about and do about homosexuality. What is the Church to do given the developments in western society around homosexuality of the last 30+ years? One set of Anglicans argue strongly for one response – homosexual genital activity is sinful; another argues that, given a committed relationship, it is not. Theological differences come in here, as do cultural ones and socio-political ones like post-colonialism too. One group argues for what they see as the traditional and Biblical position; the other argues that ‘new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth, they must upwards still and onwards who would keep abreast of truth’, as a Victorian hymn puts it, and that in this particular ethical issue we are now able to recognise through developments in science and psychology that homosexuality is not a sin or an aberration but a perfectly normal way of being human and therefore we must make provision in the life of the church for those who are homosexual just as we make provision for those who are heterosexual. The outcome is a large and important Christian group divided on what we do about gay people.

Time prevents me saying more here, but take almost any ethical issue you like from the personal to the global and you will find a wide and contradictory range of Christian opinion on it; with no single authority being able to proclaim the Christian view, though that fact does not prevent pressure groups, parties, organisations or individuals propounding their own viewpoint as the Christian one.

2.4 In the very early days of the Sociology of Religion, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim identified six components to a religion in a classification taken up later by others: doctrine (what is believed and taught), myth (what sacred stories are told), ethics (what is taught about right and wrong), ritual (what practices are involved in its worship), experience (what it offers to its adherents) and institutions (how it is organized). I hope that I have showed that in five out of these six, Christianity is marked by diversity – and the diversities in the other one – myth – the sacred stories told – really deserves another lecture to itself anyway. There are different ways, truths and lives, or to go back to those three ‘B’s’ – different ways of Belonging, Believing and Behaving. So I hope that in our gallop through church history, ecclesiastical management, worship patterns, theology and ethics I have established the point clearly enough that we are best to talk of ‘Christianities’ rather than ‘Christianity’. There are diversities of structures, organisations, systems; there are diversities of worship styles, priorities and patterns; there are diversities of belief, doctrine, theology and there are diversities of ethical methods and conclusions. So when I hear someone speaking in the name of Christianity I often find myself muttering that they’re not speaking for me or for Church or Christianity as I know it or think of it.

3.1 What then, if anything, holds all these diversities together? Are we talking about ‘diversity in unity’ or ‘unity in diversity’, as it’s sometimes put, or just about diversity in diversity? Sometimes the diversities are so great that I think there isn’t anything much in common at all, and I remember concluding one particularly fruitless correspondence with a Methodist from Redruth who was taking me to task over something I’d said by rather bluntly saying that it was pretty obvious that he and I worshipped different gods. So, is there a unity in these diversities? That’s the question to address in the final part of this lecture.

3.2 It is, however, a question which many Christians deny, just as they deny the diversities which elicit it. There is, say such Christians, Churches and organisations, no diversity because there is only one way, one true Church, one correct set of doctrines, or one Biblical position – theirs. And anyone who thinks differently or does differently is wrong and is not ‘Christian’ at all. ‘Heresy trials’ go back a long way in the Church, and we no longer burn heretics at the stake, but there are large parts of the Church which are convinced that if we don’t burn heretics God will in due course. The benign ecumenism of the twentieth century is dissolving, replaced by new militancies claiming that there is only one Christian way and it is theirs. It seems to me that the obvious failings of that way of thinking are so clear that they need no comment, but you can see how nervous I am about it by the fact that I have spent two-thirds of this lecture making the absurdity of that view clear. My view is, as I hope I have shown, that all this diversity is there, that all of these views and positions are properly called ‘Christian’ and that they all have their place in Christianity. I wish some of them were not there, of course. I would be much more comfortable with Christianity if everyone was the same sort of Christian as I am. I do not like being embarrassed, or angered or upset or ashamed by the nonsense, sometimes dangerous nonsense, done or said in the name of my Faith – but then I am a typically intolerant liberal. So given that all that diversity is to be labelled ‘Christian’, what, if anything, holds it together?

3.3 Here it seems to me there are two things that hold this diversity together: our history and our name.

3.4 Our history begins in Galilee in the first century CE where Christianity began as another of the sects which competed for popular allegiance in the Judaism of that day. A huge change came about when a Jew of the Diaspora, Saul from Tarsus in what is now south Turkey, became involved and radicalised the sect by turning it into a missionary movement. For whatever reason (the Holy Spirit, according to the Acts of the Apostles - nourishing soup according to the historical sociologist Rodney Stark (in The Rise of Christianity)) the movement spread rapidly through the Roman Empire, and was granted official status by Constantine in the fourth century. On the back of the Empire the Church became a formidable force in the European world, just as it virtually disappeared from its first bases in the Middle East and North Africa. European trade in the 15^th century and then the Missionary Movements of the 19^th century took the movement into every continent and today Christianity is the world’s largest and fastest growing religion, its decline in Europe being the exception rather than the rule. Every diverse form has its place in there somewhere – its roots and its raison d’etre – no matter how much some groups would deny it.

3.5 Equally basically and equally obviously, we are held together by our name, ‘Christians’ or ‘Christianity’. That name was first given to us when we were still a small Jewish sect, given in Antioch around 45CE (Acts 11.26), and given for a reason. The message of the sect focused on its founder, Jesus, a Jewish prophet and healer from Galilee, who had been executed by the Romans in Jerusalem in probably 33CE (though 30 or 36 are also possible dates), and who, so the message went, had been raised from the dead and who had appeared to his disciples for some weeks after his death before being ‘enthroned at God’s right’, as they put it. This Jesus they identified as ‘Messiah’, God’s appointed agent for the liberation of Israel, whose imminent arrival was expected at least in some quarters in Palestinian Judaism at that time. So they began to call him ‘Jesus the Messiah’/‘Messiah Jesus’ – which became ‘Christ Jesus’/‘Jesus Christ’ when the movement spread from Aramaic–speaking Jews to those whose first language was Greek. So those who followed him were eventually called, by outsiders not by themselves, ‘Christians’. New adherents to the sect were invited to make their allegiance to Jesus by the dramatic ceremony of baptism and by naming him as ‘Lord’, a title which was both religious (the Jews called God ‘Lord’) and political (the Romans called Caesar ‘Lord’) and were expected to live by his teachings but also, primarily, to benefit by his death and resurrection. His death by crucifixion was a huge theological problem for them – no Messiah was expected to die that way – and his resurrection a huge intellectual one (and controversies over the meaning of both, but especially of the Cross, have divided Christianity to this day), but his death and resurrection were turned into good news – here was the defeat of death itself – the great enemy – and by it transformed life was available here and now with and life beyond death guaranteed. And that, really, is that. To name Jesus as ‘Lord’ and to commit to belonging to his movement with others who do the same and to commit to behaving in a Christlike way is what every Christian does – nomatter how differently they understand what they are doing or how different the forms of their belonging may take.

4.1 So let me end with personal testimony. For me, being a Christian means belonging to a Church, to a warts and all Christian community (in my case the Methodist Church). In terms of behaving, it means trying to love my neighbour as myself, a great Jewish commandment which Jesus reiterated to his followers, and to imitate Christ in my values and attitudes. In terms of believing it means thinking that Jesus is the best clue there is to the meaning of life, the universe and everything; and that in him – in his teaching, his life, his death and his resurrection - I see right into the heart of God, the God he called ‘Father’ and the God he encouraged us to call ‘Father’ as well, the God whose ‘name and nature is love’ and whose heart is ‘most wonderfully kind’, as two old hymns put it.

Or to put my believing into something more like a Creed, I believe

in life and light and love, despite the power of their opposites which we see all around us

in God as the hidden source and the sustaining power of life and light and love in all their many and varied forms

in the story of Jesus of Nazareth, where we see life and light and love lived out in a human life, death and resurrection

in God’s call to all humanity to live for life and light and love in the power of his spirit

in God’s eternal generosity towards our human failings

in the ultimate victory of life and light and love over death and darkness and hate

That, for me, says enough.

or The Use and Abuse of the Bible in British Methodism

(A short paper read at the conference to launch ‘Unmasking Methodist Theology’ at Liverpool Hope University, September 7^th, 2004)

1 This Short Paper entitled The Bible might say ‘No’ but we say ‘Yes’ and subtitled The Use and Abuse of the Bible in British Methodism is essentially a follow-up to and illustration of my chapter – ‘Revelation in Methodist Belief and Practice’ - in Unmasking Methodist Theology. In that chapter I show that however little this may be known by or however little it may be acceptable to many in British Methodism, the official position of British Methodism is that the Conference is the final arbiter in the interpretation of the Bible in and for the Methodist Church. Therefore there are issues, by the decision of the Conference, where the Bible might say ‘No’ but we say ‘Yes’ and vice versa too. In this paper I will illustrate two such issues and comment on the applicability of this to a third.

In much of Methodism as represented in such things as letters to the Recorder, speeches in Conference and Synods, discussions in Local Preachers Meetings and even sermons, a great deal of Methodism works on the assumption that the Methodist understanding of the Bible and the correct use of the Bible is expressible in the formula - The Bible says - Therefore!. Popular though that might be at many levels within Methodism, and even maybe growing in popularity, this short paper will suggest that that formula represents abuse of the Bible and misunderstanding of the Methodist position. Contrary to that, this paper will suggest that Methodist usage and understanding is properly expressed in another formula – The Bible says – So?. This is a formula which takes the Bible with the utmost seriousness but does not conclude that Methodism simply reads what it must do or not do from statements in it.

The issues which I will use as examples in this paper are those of the Ministry of Women, the Remarriage of Divorced People and Gay Sexual Ethics.

2 ‘The Bible says’ (note the speech marks) 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, Presidents of Conference and Circuit Stewards who hold positions of authority. Indeed, so strongly do we feel on this issue that we have flagged it up as one of the biggest reservations we have in our new Covenant relationship with the Church of England that their current policy of excluding women from the episcopate falls far short of what we regard as a given and a non-negotiable. So here is a very clear example of the Bible saying ‘No’ but Conference saying ‘Yes.’

If we look briefly at how this came about, the amazing thing is that in the Women and the Ministry report to the Conference of 1933 which boldly and succinctly declared that it was high time women were ordained as ministers, there is no mention of the Bible at all. Changes in society, and what we would call issues of justice, are the justifying arguments used there. Nothing came of this report, of course, and the Conference of 1948 reversed its decision. The 1961 report of the Committee on the Status of Deaconesses and the Admission of Women to the Ministry is a much longer report, beginning with 4 pages of discussion of the Ministry of Women in the New Testament, one of which is devoted to discussion of the two ‘No’ passages. The conclusion is reached that,

‘… while the authority of the New Testament is final for the Church in all ages, it is an authority which concerns the great matters of the faith rather than one which covers the detailed applications of the faith to the conditions of any particular age, since these conditions necessarily differ so widely. Here the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit to respond to every situation as it arises … we are no longer required, in other words, to regard women as subject to men, and cannot exclude women from the ordained ministry on the ground of such subjection’ (Statements of the Methodist Church on Faith and Order, 1933-1983, pp161f)

Both interpretation and Biblical statements themselves are context-specific, we might say, and ‘time makes ancient good uncouth’. The Synod responses to this were processed by the 1963 Conference, and its brief report makes no mention of any adverse comment on the Biblical interpretation offered in the original. The rest, as they say, is history – the Bible might say ‘No’ to the Ministry of Women but we say, emphatically, ‘Yes’. The Conference, on this issue, does not appear ever to have been in The Bible says – Therefore! mode, and in the 1961 report especially, clearly and carefully operated in the other one - The Bible says – So?.

3 ‘The Bible says’ (note the speech marks again) 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 canonical sayings of Jesus): but since 1945 we have permitted divorced people to marry again in our churches. The third section, just over a page in length, of the five-page report to the Conference of 1944 from the Committee on Divorce and Re-marriage of Divorced Persons deals with the New Testament material, but it does so under the heading ‘The Mind of our Lord’. It recognises the complexity of the divorce statements in the Gospels when it says that ‘this question (of the indissolubility of marriage) is not easily settled by an appeal to the recorded sayings of our Lord. The evidence is conflicting.’ It refers to ‘the divine ideal of marriage’ in what we would call creation-ordinance terms with reference to Mark 10:6-9 and then adds that,

‘Our Lord leaves it to the reason and conscience of His disciples, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to interpret and apply that principle to every condition and age.’

It then proposed, and I remind you that we are talking 60 years ago, that under certain conditions, divorced people might be remarried in Methodist churches. It recognised that not all ministers would be happy to do this and introduced a conscience clause. Some of the canonical words of Jesus, no less, might say ‘No’ to the remarriage of some divorced people but we say ‘Yes’. The Conference, on this issue, looks to the Bible to seek the ‘mind of our Lord’ and concludes - how shall I put it? - that even his canonically attributed words are a guide but not a chain in that search. Here again The Bible says – Therefore! mode is not in evidence, but the The Bible says – So? clearly is.

4 Here are, then, two 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 is considered 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. So, for Methodists, 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. We provide no guidelines for this process, and we have no approved set of interpretative principles, hermeneutical devices or exegetical techniques. As I point out in my chapter, our Methodist way is to work with that rather crude, undefined and in some ways seriously misleading quadrilateral of ‘Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience and come to a conclusion through conversation, discussion and debate ultimately settled if need be by a vote. Not for nothing is our church’s governing body called the ‘Conference’.

5 So finally, let us turn to the ongoing argument in Methodism about homosexuality, in which the The Bible says - Therefore! formula tends to feature prominently. I do not wish to get involved in the debate itself. I make no comment on the Derby Resolutions (strange though I continue to find them and incomprehensible though I think they are). Nor do I advocate any view in the so-called pilgrimage to which we are allegedly committed. Nor do I offer anything new about the Biblical passages so often cited. I take it as read that human sexuality is a huge, complex and controversial subject, that the Bible is a huge, complex and controversial book and that putting the two together is, therefore, a huge, complex and controversial task.

In the Conference treatment of both the Ministry of Women and the Remarriage of Divorced People, Bible texts are set in a wider Biblical context, so let me do a bit of that first. As far as human sexuality is concerned, 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 prophets. These good gifts are so easily misused and people and society as a whole suffer as a result. 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.’

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 but that overall principle is clear. This leads many Christians today (and the Derby Resolutions) to say that the Church must take a bold and counter-cultural stand for lifelong marriage, and for chastity before it and fidelity within it. 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.

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. That might be true of some of the texts, but the argument depends at least in part on precise definitions of Greek words which are not easily defined. Much more seriously, that kind of argument actually shares the presuppositions of the view it seeks to counter, as it too works to the The Bible says – Therefore! formula as it tries to demonstrate, with what seems to me like not a little special pleading, what the Bible really says. I submit that Methodists have a bolder and better card to play if they choose.

For us, I suggest, the real question is not what these texts meant (what sexual practices or relationships they include or exclude and so on) but what they mean (ie what value we will choose to give them). In other words, we can (if we choose) do with these texts what we do with those about women in church or divorce. We can (if we choose) say the same about gay sexual practices - that although the Bible says ‘No’, we say ‘Yes’. Some will say that we must not so choose, 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. Others say that we can so choose, for 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. My point is that there is absolutely no doubt that we have that choice, for Methodism operates by the The Bible says – So? formula and not the other one, and that choosing to say that ‘although the Bible says ‘No’ here we will say ‘Yes’’ is completely in keeping with both our hermeneutical theory and our interpretative practice.

6 The Methodist Church has been committed to ongoing engagement with the complex issues of Human Sexuality since the Derby Conference of 1992, though so far this engagement in ‘pilgrimage’ has been low key. The one-page Faith and Order Committee report on Human Sexuality in 1993 on the treatment of this question in official documents to that date points out that ‘We should be clear that the issue here is the way in which we use the Bible in making ethical decisions’ (Statements and Reports p591). I endorse that statement completely, which is why I offered this short paper to the organisers of this conference.

I hope that this paper has illustrated, and done so quite simply, that in making our ethical decisions in the two not insignificant issues of the Ministry of Women and the Remarriage of Divorced People the Methodist reading of the Bible is that of ‘Although the Bible says ‘No’ we will say ‘Yes’’.

This, I believe, has implications for other issues, not least currently that of homosexual practice. Here the Bible clearly says ‘No,’ but given our practice this in itself does not rule out the possibility of Conference deciding, after due conferring and debate, that we might say ‘Yes’ believing this conclusion to be ‘the guidance of the Holy Spirit’ in this matter as the Conference reports on the other two issues believed it to be in theirs.

I suggest that, whether it is liked or not, the Methodist position vis-a-vis the Bible is best expressed by the formula The Bible says – So? and not by the popular and frequently heard formula The Bible says – Therefore! and in Methodist terms, I further suggest, the latter constitutes abuse of the Bible and the former represents our particular, and possibly even peculiar, but certainly good, use of it.

Thank you.

(This started life as a couple of Saturday morning sessions for the Totnes Deanery. It has been done in a number of places since and, of course, has changed in the doing.  This could be used in a Bible Study or Discussion Group)

1 Anyone who has ever tried to read the OT from beginning to end soon discovers that it is a very difficult ‘book’ to make sense of. Listening to snippets from it read in church on Sundays often has the same effect. There is no doubt at all that the OT is difficult to understand in more ways than one and that we need help to make sense of it.

2 But there is a problem even before we start, the problem of defining what we mean by ‘the OT’ for there are at least two different Christian versions of it, a ‘Protestant’ and a ‘Roman Catholic’ one.

The ‘Protestant’ Bible has an ‘OT’ of 39 books and the ‘Roman Catholic’ one has extra books in its OT and extra chapters in some of the same books. Roman Catholics call these ‘extra’ books the ‘Deutero-canonical’ books and Protestants call them ‘the Apocrypha’. To make life even more complicated, different Orthodox Churches have OT’s with some other books in them.

3 Then there is another sort of problem in that word – ‘old’. We tend to contrast ‘old’ unfavourably with ‘new’ and in terms of the Bible that results in a contrast between the OT and the NT in which the OT is often seen as inadequate if not downright bad, and superseded by the much better NT. But even if they don’t make that contrast, many people have real problems when they read the OT. We could list a whole A – Z of them, but we’ll just mention four:

a. A is for Anthology – the OT is a library or collection with many different kinds of books in it, each needing to be understood for what it is. And it is a very big collection; its sheer size is a problem in itself.

The OT is in fact a collection of many different books, and within many of the books themselves there are a number of different types of writing. There is poetry and prose. There are books of sermons with notes about the preachers (eg Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos). There are books of hymns (Psalms) or proverbs (Proverbs), books of rules and regulations (eg Leviticus), and ‘history books’ (eg Joshua, 1 & 2 Kings). There is a book of love poetry (Song of Songs), a theological essay on the problem of evil (Job), some novels (Ruth, Esther), an apocalyptic tract (Daniel), some philosophy (Ecclesiastes) and, very importantly, great stories of ancestors and God’s great deeds of old (Genesis, Exodus).

b. B is for Bygone – the OT is a very old book, a fact often disguised by modern translations. Much of what it talks about seems irrelevant to our world, and chunks of it are just plain boring (those genealogies and lists of obscure rules).

Its earliest parts go back to perhaps 1000 BC, its latest to around 165 BC. We can ask about authors and the dates of production of these writings. Sometimes there are answers to those questions and sometimes there are not. Sometimes the answers help us to read the passage better, sometimes they don’t.

c. Y is for ‘Yuk!’ – there is much in the OT that is morally offensive (all that violence and killing which a vengeful God seems to do or to approve) and utterly distasteful (all that sacrificing of animals). It reads at times like a very barbaric book indeed.

d. Z is for Zerubbabel – the OT is full of strange names of people and places. It comes from a foreign world where things are very different from ours, and its very strangeness is a problem.

4 Seeing the OT as a problem and being bothered by these difficulties is not new. As early as the second century AD a famous Church leader and missionary called Marcion decided that they were actually insurmountable problems and that the OT should not form part of the scriptures of the Church. In his view the OT taught about a God who was quite distinct from and definitely very inferior to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In 144 AD he was only just convicted of being a heretic, it was a close call, and he has had followers in the church ever since – even if they have never heard of him. But he was considered to be wrong, and the OT, for all its strangeness and its problems, was and is regarded by the Church as ‘sacred Scripture’ and included in the Christian Bible.

5 My suggestion is that taking these four problems seriously is in fact the best way to begin to make sense of the OT – which is to recognise at the very beginning that the OT is an anthology of ancient and alien religious literature. It is not an easy read, or a Christian read, or a contemporary read. It comes from a very different world to the one we live in. If we recognise that, we have taken a very important step.

6 There is a common shape to the OT in all Christian Bibles which gives us a useful overview of the contents of the Anthology:

a. the ‘history books’ – Genesis to Esther – 622pp

     = the Story of the People of God

b. the wisdom books – Job to the Song of Solomon – 239pp

     = the Daily Life of the People of God

c. the prophetic writings – Isaiah to Malachi – 371pp

     = the Future of the People of God

This is, incidentally, a different shape than that of the Hebrew Bible.

The ‘Hebrew Bible’ consists of the 39 books of the ‘Protestant OT’, but it puts them in a different order. It is divided into three unequal parts. The first and most important part is called Torah (Genesis – Deuteronomy). The second, less important part, is called Nevi’im – ‘Prophets’ – (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings / Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve). The third and least important part is called Ketuvim – ‘Writings’ – (the rest of the books in the ‘Protestant OT’). The Hebrew Bible is sometimes called TeNaK, from the opening letters of the three parts, though this can be spelled in a variety of different ways.

7 The ‘history books’ (note those inverted commas) tell a story, beginning with the story of Creation and then soon narrowing down to the story of Abraham and his descendents with all their ups and downs. In Genesis to Deuteronomy (the Torah) the story tells of God’s promise to Abraham of descendents, land and blessing. Eventually his descendents become slaves in Egypt, and in the exodus (‘the great escape’) God rescues them through Moses, guides them through the desert, makes a covenant with them and gives them his Teaching/Law at Mt Sinai and leads them to the edge of the Promised Land of Canaan.

The Torah is the name for the first part of the Hebrew Bible – which is a narrative

beginning with creation in Genesis 1 and taking us to the arrival of the Israelites at

the wrong side of the River Jordan at the end of Deuteronomy. We used to call this part of the Hebrew Bible The Law, but that word gives the wrong impression. We could translate it here as The Teaching, The Guidance, The Instruction or even The Gospel, but it might be best not to translate it at all. Most of the five books of the Torah are narrative – the OT does its theology by telling stories.

Just as Christians talk about ‘The Gospel’ and read the Gospels; so Jews talk about ‘Torah’ and read the Torah. Jews see Torah as God’s great gift. They celebrate Torah and rejoice over it. Torah, though it contains 613 commandments, is not a burden or a chore. Jewish faith is not legalism or legalistic. That is a serious anti-Semitic misconception. The antidote is to remember Simchat Torah, the end of the liturgical year service where they dance around the synagogue with the Torah scroll, ‘delighting’ in Torah. Another antidote is to read Ps 119 and remember that the longest psalm of all is a celebration of Torah.

The story continues through Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings to tell of their successful entry into Canaan, where they chose a king for themselves and set up a monarchy which proved to be a disaster. After Solomon’s death the nation split into two. The northern kingdom (Israel) was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC and the southern (Judah) destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC who took many into exile in Babylon. This was an absolute catastrophe. At a stroke they lost their Promised Land, their anointed king (‘Messiah’) and their Holy City and its Temple. They were devastated, and tried to find an explanation of why this had happened. These books supply the answer – it is your own fault, you have brought it all on yourselves, because you, and especially yopur kings and leaders, have failed to walk in God’s ways. In 540 BC Babylon was defeated by the Persians under Cyrus who let the exiles who wanted to (most didn’t) go home. After that Israel was a small and poor colony of Persia and Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther tell that later story.

These ‘history books’ tell the story of the People of Israel and read like a History of the People of Israel. But there is a huge controversy about this. How does the historical narrative of the Bible relate to ‘real’ history? How does the world of or in the story relate to the world outside the story? Some historians (we call them the maximalists) argue that the OT tells the story more or less as it really was, making allowance for exaggerations and odd mistakes here and there; though they debate among themselves whether you should put the ‘Real History begins here’ marker at Abraham, Moses or at the Emergence of Israel in Canaan in the 12^th century BC. Others (who we call the minimalists) argue that you can’t use the OT as data for writing a history of Israel at all, that it is very late storytelling which largely invents the past of which it speaks. Most of us come in between, and regard these stories as ‘fictionalised history’ told by a faith community as its way of doing its theology, affirming its faith, and sustaining its identity.

Some dates:

Abraham – with many question marks around this King Arthur sort of figure – around 1800 BC

Moses and the Exodus – around 1250 BC

David and the United Monarchy – around 1000 BC

Fall of Samaria (capital of the Northern Kingdom – Israel) 722 BC

Fall of Jerusalem (capital of the Southern Kgdm – Judah) 586 BC

Exile in Babylon – 586–538 BC

Maccabean Revolt – 167 BC

Death of Herod the Great – 4 BC

Jewish Revolt – 66 CE and Fall of Jerusalem – 70 AD

Bar Cochba revolt and the end – 132 AD

If people live by stories, and they do, these ‘history books’ tell the story of God and his people. Who wrote many of them, when or where, we cannot say: but eventually they were put together into the long story that we now have which tells of who we are, and how we came to be, giving lessons from the past for the present and the future. And I say ‘we’ because Christians believe that we are the descendents, by faith rather than by our genes, of Abraham – so this ‘old, old story’ is ‘our story’ too.

8 The ‘wisdom books’ in this scheme are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, though technically scholars only call the first, third and fourth of these ‘wisdom literature’. All of them deal with living as the people of God in one way or another.

Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes look rather different, but they are the OT’s examples of ‘Wisdom literature’ (see the three groups of people - prophets, priests and the wise – referred to in Jere 18:18). This ‘Wisdom literature’ comes from two groups: the educated ‘wise men’ of Solomon's court and the popular ‘wise people’ of the villages (eg 1 Sam 14:2, the wise woman of Tekoa). The wise look around at the world with open eyes and see what is going on and by observing nature and human affairs draw conclusions about the best way to live, to live in harmony and fullness of life. The basic conviction of this way of thinking is that wise living leads to fullness of life, whereas folly leads to death, and wise living is based on carefully reflecting on the way the world works. God is not left out of this (‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’), but his will and his ways are to be seen in the creation and the life of nature and human beings. God is ever-present as validating and ensuring the ‘order’ and ‘regularities’ of life: but neither the immediacy of prophetic religion nor the reality of his sacramental presence is prominent in Wisdom thought. Israel shared this ‘Wisdom’ approach with other nations. Two prominent literary forms in the Wisdom literature are the proverb (as in Prov 10-22:16) and the ‘Instruction’ (as in Prov 1-9). Favourite words and ideas are ‘the wise’, ‘wisdom’, ‘understanding’ and ‘the way’, and their opposites ‘folly’, ‘the fool’ and ‘the scorner’.

Job is a classic of the world's religious literature but it is also an enigma of a book. What is it about? The book is long, complex and complicated, but does it have a theme? Is it about the problem of suffering? Is it about providence and rewards and punishments? Is it about the absence of God? Is it a protest against orthodox OT teaching that righteousness is rewarded and sin is punished or is it a vindication of it? Are different parts of the book in conflict? It is probably best thought of as a long theological reflection on this set of big themes.

Psalms is the hymn book of the Second Temple, the one rebuilt in Jerusalem in 516 BC after the return from exile. It contains a whole variety of hymns, worship songs and choral anthems, ancient and modern in their day.

Song of Songs started life as a collection of love poetry, but was later understood to be celebrating the love of God for Israel.

9 The rest of the OT is made up of the prophetic writings – Isaiah to Malachi. Originally the prophets spoke to their own generations in the name of God with words of either encouragement or warning. They were especially hot on ‘social justice’. But their words often contained a threat, that if their hearers did not change their ways they would bring punishment on themselves one way or another. So these books originally taught more or less the same thing as Joshua – 2 Kings, that if people did not walk in God’s ways they would find themselves in unfortunate circumstances, ie the exile. But they also contained hints of hope, that in the end God would make it all right. That is why the OT ends with these books, because they point to a yet unknown future in which God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, not least through a new and faithful king of David’s line (the ‘Anointed One’ or ‘Messiah’).

Who were the prophets? What was a prophet? What is prophecy? The problem in answering these questions is that ‘prophet/prophecy’ are slippery words which have been used over centuries and in different contexts, hence they have multiple meanings. Nowadays we almost invariably assume that prophecy is about predicting the future.

In the OT prophecy is only very partially about predicting the future. In OT terms a prophet was God's spokesperson, preacher, messenger, announcer; the one who spoke out in God's name. He or she declared the will of God to God's people in a particular place and time. Cf Ex 7:1 where Aaron is called ‘Moses' prophet’ = his spokesman, and the use of the verb ‘prophesy in Ezek 37:4-10. t is often said that the OT prophets were ‘forthtellers’ rather than ‘foretellers’, and that crude distinction is quite helpful.

Prophets came in all shapes and sizes. What appears to have been important in the prophets in Israel is not their existence, but the particular message they communicated and its effect on the path of the nation's history and its contribution to the national sense of identity at a particularly critical period in that history. Without Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the unknown prophet responsible for chapters 40-55 of the Book of Isaiah, it is highly unlikely that the people of Israel would have survived as a nation, that Judaism would have developed as a religion, and that we would be discussing the OT at all.

The ‘Eighth Century Prophets’ are particularly important here. They were the first prophets whose words were written down and collected into books named after them. You will still find them occasionally referred to by an old title – the ‘writing prophets’. We have stories of the deeds of the important prophets who came before them – Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha – but not collections of their words.

The following key verses of these prophets represent the distinctive kernel of each one’s approach (if I may pick and chose):

Amos 5:24 – Amos, speaking around 760 BC, is appalled at the injustices he sees in Israel and insists that above all, the LORD is a God of Justice (ie outgoing concern to make everything right for everyone, to establish Shalom) who requires that his people practice social justice.

Hosea 11:1-2 – Hosea, living a decade later, is tormented by the religious apostasy of Israel who love the wrong gods. Yet he is also convinced that the LORD’s love will not let his people go.

Micah 6:8: - Micah is the rural contemporary of Isaiah of Jerusalem, around 700 BC, with a message much like Amos.

There is no single verse of Isaiah of Jerusalem (whose words and life are covered in Isaiah 1-39) which encapsulates his many-sided message. Basic to his stance is his vision of the Holiness of God, who he calls, distinctively, ‘the Holy One of Israel’. This holiness of God is primarily a moral holiness which looks for moral holiness in God’s people.

A very useful way into the ‘prophets’ which helps to make some sense of their sayings, is to ask five questions:

1. Who said this?

2. When was it said?

3. Why was it said?

4. Where was it said?

Then 5. What does it mean?

10 I must admit that Marcion had a point. The OT is a very large anthology of ancient religious literature, some of which is pretty unreadable and some of which is unquestionably offensive, although both of these things can be said of parts of the NT too. So I can certainly understand why the OT is a largely unopened book as far as the Church today is concerned, I cannot leave it there. Although the OT is an ancient library from a strange culture, and despite the fact that it is long, complicated and at times both utterly tedious and downright repugnant, it is nevertheless worth staying with if we want to think about ‘God’ and ‘the meaning of life, the universe and everything’. Marcion had a point, but so did the mainstream church leaders of his day who decided that he was wrong.

11 Some useful Books

John Holdsworth Prophets and Loss: exploring the OT, Church Times study guide

John Holdsworth The Old Testament, SCM Studyguide

Robert Davidson A Beginner’s Guide to the OT, St Andrew Press

John Drane Introducing the OT, Lion

John Barton & Julia Bowden The Original Story, Darton, Longman & Todd

Stephen Dawes Let us bless the Lord: rediscovering the OT through Ps 103, Epworth: Inspire and Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding, Southleigh both now in the books section of this website

(A talk to the Truro Methodist Circuit Local Preachers Meeting, 4^th October 2004, on Rick Warren – The Purpose Driven Life)

1 First, thank you for the invitation to share something with you in your LP Fellowship here tonight. As I wondered what to do with you today, three possibilities ran through my mind. One was to repeat with you one of the workshops I had done in the national Methodist conference on the Bible – The Word at Whitby – last spring. I had that material to hand, it had been very well received, it was practical. That was a very attractive possibility for tonight. The second was to talk about and promote a book – Unmasking Methodist Theology – an important book, as this bit from the back cover blurb indicates …. In so doing I would have to declare an interest, that I have written chapter 10 in part 2, ‘Revelation in Methodist Practice and Belief’. It is an important book that ministers and preachers need to read. The third was to do something with Rick Warren’s – The Purpose Driven Life. I had not read the book, and only vaguely heard of it, before I had begun to hear conflicting views about it in and around this circuit in which I live but do not belong. A friend showed me the frontspiece, which appalled me. Another friend stood up in the Good News Spot at Synod and said that it was great good news that the Truro circuit was about to use this book in a programmatic way. I was confused, but then I get confused quite easily and I could simply pass by on the other side - the Truro circuit is nothing to do with me nor I with it, and I have more than enough to do and worry over with my responsibilities to SWMTC, the University of Exeter, the St Austell Circuit, the connexional Faith and Order Committee and the District Probationers Committee. On the other hand the Truro circuit LP Meeting had invited me to speak to them at this Fellowship, and I have reached the point in life where either I talk about important things if I’m invited to speak at meetings, or I don’t go at all. So I thought that before I made my mind up about what to do tonight I’d at least read The PDL – which I have done. Having read it, I can see where both of my friends are coming from. Like the one, I can see material in this book that is appalling – or at least seriously open to real question: like the other, I can see material in this book that is appealing – or at least seriously open to real potential. In the end I decided to dare to be a Daniel and to spend this time with you looking at the book and asking what issues there are for British Methodist Local Preachers and Ministers in using this particular book in 2004 in an official capacity

2 So let me begin with four general observations about The PDL

a. The first is a description. What sort of book is The PDL? What category of theological book is it? Where does it fit on the bookshelf of the theological library? The answer to that basic question is that The PDL is a book of spiritual direction from an American conservative evangelical perspective. Let me unpack those terms. ‘Spiritual direction’ is not a term we use much in Methodism, though Wesley was a ‘Spiritual Director’ and the early class and band meetings were exercises in corporate spiritual direction. ‘Spiritual direction’ in classical Christian understanding is the guidance given by a teacher to a learner in the practice of the spiritual life, given to enable the learner to ‘grow up in every way …into Christ’ (Eph 4:15), and traditional styles of spiritual direction vary from the totally directive to the journeying alongside. And it is probably because Wesley did it in the totally directive style that subsequent Methodism has shied away from any kind of interest in spiritual direction at all. Today, the idea and practice has spread from the Catholic tradition into most areas of the Church, and The PDL is an example of it in and from another Christian tradition. Rick Warren is, though he might not call himself that, a Spiritual Director and what he offers in The PDL is spiritual direction. He is an American Conservative Evangelical and he offers his spiritual direction from that position: American, that is his culture and background, that’s where many of his illustrations are from and that’s his style; and Conservative Evangelical in that he clearly subscribes to the classic Conservative Evangelical statement of faith and operates comfortably with the assumptions and presuppositions of that position. I have nothing against Americans or American Conservative Evangelicals, but I do need to point out first that the UK is not America, despite globalisation and America’s intellectual colonialisation of the rest of the world, and second that the British Methodist Church does not subscribe to the classic Conservative Evangelical statement of faith – we are not a member church of the Evangelical Alliance

b. More briefly, despite frequent disclaimers The PDL is clearly influenced by therapeutic ‘step-programmes’. Without doubt these programmes work for certain kinds of people, with certain psychological profiles and certain learning styles, but equally without doubt, they don’t work for others. And more trivially, if you are as irritated by ‘numberisms’ (the 5 great benefits of living a purpose-driven life – p30, the 3 Biblical metaphors which teach us God’s view of life – p42, the 3 barriers that block our total surrender to God – p78, the kind of worship that pleases God has 4 characteristics – p100, Jesus’ 3-step process of conflict resolution – p165, the 4-step process of temptation – p203, the 5 factors of your SHAPE – p235, the 5 ways God has shaped you for service – p248, the 6 characteristics of real servants – p264, your life-message has 4 parts to it – p289, the 3 basic issues in life – p312, life’s 5 greatest questions – p314) as I am, this book will irritate you considerably

c. Although The PDL makes the huge claim that after the 40-day spiritual journey it offers its readers they will know God’s purpose for creating them and so their stress will be reduced, their energy focused, their decisions simplified, their lives be given meaning and themselves prepared for eternity, the book does not offer ‘cheap grace’ nor does it offer any kind of modern ‘prosperity gospel’ nor any simplistic ‘come to Jesus and all will be well’ message. It is more realistic and hard-headed than that, fully aware of the difficulties of living the Faith in the world as it is

d. My general feeling about The PDL as a whole, is that its message, ie its advice, or instruction, or spiritual direction, or exhortation – call it what you like – is not as bad as part of me had feared it was going to be. I can find plenty of bits with which to quibble, sometimes seriously quibble, but that is true of most books for most of us I expect: but there is plenty in this book which is valid, urgent and relevant. I pick only three examples, pretty much at random. On p103 we read that ‘There is no one-size-fits-all approach to worship and friendship with God,’ and that is something all of us could ponder with great profit, especially if we are a preacher who is convinced that our size of worship is exactly the size our congregation really needs! On the top of p220 we read this sound commonsense wisdom – quote. Or this from p276 - quote. That having been said, however, I have to say that this book is not for me. Partly this is because of its style – and you have already seen some of its ways of putting things which are counter-productive as far as its purpose of edifying me is concerned, but mainly this is because of its basic theology, for I am not a conservative evangelical. I never have been one and I have no intention of becoming one. That particular approach to friendship with God, to pick up the phrase I quoted a minute ago from the book, just doesn’t fit me. And if it doesn’t fit me then there will be quite a number of other, traditional and middle-of-the road Methodists whom it won’t fit either; and therefore you as preachers need to think very carefully about how you promote this very particular way of thinking about faith and discipleship in a Methodist circuit which contains a much wider range of theological understandings and faith positions than the one in the book

3 Now let us go on from that crucial point, to two other meaty issues, which anyone and everyone who engages seriously with this book, either in reading it or in preaching from it, will need to address: the question of ‘Determinism’ and the question of ‘Literalism’

a. First, the question of Determinism. I said earlier that when I read the frontspiece I was appalled. The sentences that appalled me were these – ‘Before you were born, God planned this moment (and Pastor Warren has italicised those two words) in your life. It is no accident that you are holding this book’. What appalled me was the suggestion that God plans things in detail like that for us. When I read on my disquiet grew, as I read on p17 that ‘You were born by his purpose and for his purpose’, with by and for in italics this time, and I was nearly stopped altogether by the bit on p21 which says ‘His purpose for your life predates your conception. He planned it before you existed …’ But then I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised that this meant that God had planned my purpose, not that he had planned my conception. Somewhat relieved that this was not determinist after all, I turned to Day Two, and discovered that my sigh of relief was premature, for this chapter is highly determinist (read the quotes on pp22-23). In this theology God decided how and when Serena Benzie would die of cancer and leave Rob behind with the two little children, or how Gerald Burt would first lose Margaret and then develop lung cancer himself – not that God knew all that, I have no problem with God knowing these things, that is orthodox Christian theology – but that he decided them, determined them, arranged them. This is what this chapter seems to be saying, and these are the urgent pastoral questions that any reader of this chapter or listener to a sermon on it is bound to ask. Is God really like that? Is life really plotted and planned like that? Those are the questions raised by this approach. If this really is what the chapter is saying, then you must be prepared to face the inevitable and unanswerable challenge - If that is the case then God is a monster, planning the terror, violence and pain that rapes and destroys so many lives every day! And if that is the case, then it is a way of understanding providence and the work of God which is simply unacceptable in that it flies in the face of any orthodox Christian doctrine of providence and human free will

However, in the rest of the book (apart from pp235 and 259 that is) this determinism is qualified. After all, why write a book to try to persuade people to change their lives if the shape of their lives, changed or unchanged, is predetermined by God anyway? The very existence of The PDL assumes our freedom to choose. Then we read quite frequently, not that God determines the nasty things that happen in life but that he ‘allows’ them (pp194, 218, 246f, 273), that there are such things as ‘uncontrollable circumstances’ (p272) and that Satan has a responsibility in all this evil. The book makes much use of the idea that God is able to use whatever happens to achieve his purposes within us, and saying that God is able to use the events of our lives is not the same as saying that he determines what those events will be. Romans 8:28-29 comes in here, as we would expect it to, and though it is a difficult passage with a significant textual variant, Rick Warren’s use of it falls within what I would call orthodox parameters, even when he uses the phrase ‘God is pulling the strings’ on p195. In fact pp194-5 are quite crucial here and are quite orthodox (quote the four passages)

So I am left with a huge problem here: just what theology of providence is the book working with? I think it is basically working with an orthodox theology of providence (notice I say ‘an’ orthodox theology of providence – there are in fact several orthodox theologies of providence and this particular one might not suit all of us) – that God wills good for each of us and for all creation, that bad things happen in God’s world which are outside his control but which he permits to happen, and that God is at work in his world to bring good out of even them. You might or might not find that an acceptable doctrine of providence, but it is an orthodox one, and I think it is the one with which Rick Warren is actually working. But if that is the case he should not have written what he has written on Day 2, for what he has written on that day crosses the line into determinism and expresses an understanding of providence which is outside the boundary of orthodox Christian theology. And the problem with Day 2 is that coming where it does, it makes a huge impression. Your task as preachers and teachers is therefore to correct that impression, and undo the damage that chapter 2 does to God and our picture of God. I put it as strongly as that

b. Second, much more briefly, but as far as I am concerned in the end even more dangerously, the question of ‘Literalism’

Reading The PDL we are left in no doubt that Pastor Warren believes that when the Bible tells the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah, Job, Jonah, Daniel and the Three Young Men it is telling factually true stories about the real lives of real people. He likewise believes that Solomon wrote Proverbs and that David wrote the Psalms. Neither of these beliefs have featured in Methodist Local Preachers textbooks or in Methodist ministerial training for generations. The oldest LP OT textbook on my shelf is Horace Cleaver’s An Approach to the OT of 1955 and it takes for granted the approach to these things established by Peake in his Commentary of 1919. These views of Pastor Warren might be widely shared in the southern states of the USA, and might still be believed in pockets over here, but they have no credibility at all and Methodism teaches quite something quite different about these ancient and important stories and characters. The taking of these things literally in The PDL ties Christianity into a way of understanding and using the Bible that is simply not true, and which therefore risks bringing both the Christian Faith and the Bible into disrepute. The book could have made all its points equally effectively without misusing the Bible in this way, but given that it does use the Bible in the way it does the book becomes, for me, virtually unusable, because it is expecting its readers to believe things about the Bible that I individually and Methodism in its training textbooks and courses just do not accept to be the case. For me, this is no minor, trivial or incidental point, but a highly crucial one because I take the Bible too seriously to see it being abused in this literalist way. If The PDL is to be used, it seems to me, preachers need to say both loudly and clearly that the Methodist Church just does not understand the Bible in the same way that the book does

4 So what can I say in conclusion? I make no comment on the policy decision that your Circuit has taken in deciding to use and promote this book – it is not my place to do so: but I do say two things to all of you in this Preachers Fellowship this evening – and it is my place to say these as your invited guest speaker who is also a fellow Methodist preacher:

First, that you all by virtue of the public and representative offices you hold as Methodist Local Preachers or Methodist ministers have preaching, teaching and pastoral responsibility to handle this book with considerable care, to subject it to rigorous theological critique and, at least with regard to its confused teaching around determinism and its Biblical literalism, to correct it

And second, that you all by virtue of the public and representative offices you hold as Methodist Local Preachers or Methodist ministers need to remember and to acknowledge whenever you use it, that The PDL offers one perspective on the Christian Faith and the meaning and nature of the Christian life, but only one, and that this perspective is that of a very particular theological point of view whose one size will certainly not fit all of the Methodist people

2 LORD JOFFE’S BILL

7 hour debate on Friday May 11th 2006.  3 Methodist ministers in Lords: 2 (Leslie Griffiths & Roger Roberts) voted against and 1 (Kathleen Richardson).  A limited bill which would:

Give docs right to prescribe drugs for terminally-ill patient to use to end own life

Only for people with less than 6 months to live

Patients must first sign form to say they wanted to die,

Must be of sound mind and not depressed

Must be suffering unbearably

The Bill was defeated by 148 votes to 100

Quote from Lord Joffe, “Patients should not have to endure unbearable pain ‘for the good of society as a whole’”

3 THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT  ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Ex 20.13, Deut 5.17)

‘Thou shalt not kill’ is obviously not a blanket ban on killing because ancient Israelites killed their enemies in war and their moral deviants in capital punishment with full Biblical support (and the Christian Church endorsed such practices for centuries)

So most recent translations following LXX (and NT) translate the commandment as ‘You shall not murder’ (NRSV, NIV, REB, GNB, NJPS, TNIV – but not NJB or RSV), which sounds more helpful 

[LXX  phoneuw – to kill/murder (principally in LXX for RaTSaCH).  When this is quoted in the NT (Mt 5.21, Mk 10.19, Lk 18.20, Rm 13.9, Jas 2.11) it is vb phoneuw.  Noun phoneus - a murderer. Heb vb in both places is RaTSaCH (vb elsewhere at Deut 4.42, Num 35.27, 1 Kg 21.19, Ho 4.2; root 46x in OT) - one of 7 Heb verbs used for killing human beings. (NIDOTTE 3.1188 – ‘the taking of life outside the parameters laid down by God’; TDOT 13.632 – ‘culpable killing by the use of force’) ie ‘illegal killing’ and OT gives egs, of which murder is the principal one, tho accidental killing is also included]

(A Study Day in the Continuing Ministerial Education programme of the Diocese of Truro and the Cornwall Methodist District, 26.1.09.  The four sessions on that day were accompanied by powerpoint slides – which are mentioned in situ in the text below – and the presentation can be found at no.2 on the powerpoint page of this website)

Session 1  ‘Fundamentalism’ - the evolution of a word

Session 2  Christian Fundamentalism - the growth of a movement

Session 3  Fundamentalism and the Bible          

Session 4  The Threat of Fundamentalism

The blurb for the day:  We can hardly hear a news broadcast these days without some ‘Fundamentalist’ group or another being mentioned, but what does the label mean?  Stephen will take us through the development of the term in the 20th century and then look at the claims that modern Christian Fundamentalism makes about the Bible and the threat it poses, not least to traditional British Christianity. 

[slide 1]

Session 1  ‘Fundamentalism’ - the evolution of a word  [slide 2]

1  Once upon a time, up to about the 1970s, ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalists’ were words found and used in Christian discourse, and in a rather narrow and confined part of that discourse at that.  Nowadays they are words found in public discourse, and in fact are found very frequently.  In this session I simply want to trace the evolution of this ‘F-word’.   James Barr [slide 3] begins what is still regarded by many as the definitive critical study of Christian 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.  Thirty years on from that, 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.  The back cover of one of many important books appearing on Fundamentalism sums up the current situation like this,

The most conspicuous form of religion to emerge during the 20th century is ‘fundamentalism’.  Any account of the modern world that ignores the impact of the forces of fundamentalism will be significantly deficient.  Whether one considers debates within faith communities concerning the correct interpretation of sacred writings, or opposition to western secular values, or religiously inspired political activism, or indeed some forms of international terrorism, fundamentalism seems to be a perennial and ubiquitous religious tendency (Partridge: back cover).    

2  The words ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalist’ are derived [slide 4] from a 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).  We will come back to these beginnings in session 2.

3  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 [slide 5] is concerned, for example, the obituary of A S Peake in The Times of 20th 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, again in the Methodist context, 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 (Hughes:34).

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 (Dawes 2000:294).  By that term I mean that they are, for whatever reason, largely oblivious to the issues raised by or the approaches taken to 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.

4  At this point we need to stop and ask what we are really talking about.  What was this ‘Fundamentalism’ that Peake defeated in Britain and which continued to exist on the Christian scene in the USA only as a small, discredited and obscurantist minority viewpoint?  Here I simply want to refer to James Barr’s very important definition, which we will come back to later.  In Fundamentalism he described what many or most Christians perceived of or classified as ‘Fundamentalism’ [slide 6]:

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

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

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

Harriet Harris adds [slide 7] another three characteristics when she writes about the situation in the USA in the mid-twentieth century, saying that Fundamentalism’ became the name-badge for those who

did not engage in social action,

did not attend mainstream educational institutions, and

did not mix with non-fundamentalist Christians even for mission purposes (Partridge 2001:5)

and much the same could be said of the same groups in Britain.

5  This situation continued in western Christianity 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 the force to be reckoned with [slide 8].  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.  Harries reminds us that it is important to recognise the difference between contemporary ‘evangelicals’ and ‘fundamentalists’ both in America and in Britain, but she concludes that despite important caveats ‘Fundamentalism exists in the evangelical world’ (Harries 2001:47).  We must return to this question this afternoon.

6  Since the 1970s, however, ‘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 [slide 9].  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 seen 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.  And more recently still, [slide 10] some Christians have come to refer to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and their chums as ‘secular-fundamentalists’.  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).

7  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 [slide 11] identified nine recurring characteristics of ‘Fundamentalism’, demonstrating a ‘family resemblance’ among the disparate groups it identified [slide 12]:

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

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

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

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

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

Elect membership, viewed often as the faithful remnant

Sharp boundaries, separating the saved from the sinful

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

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

8  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.  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), though its predecessor ‘modernity’ appears regularly too, as does its sister ‘globalisation’.  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 modernity, postmodernity and globalisation.  It is the value system of this worldview, 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).

Malise Ruthven in his Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction, puts it like this,

Put at its broadest, (Fundamentalism) may be described as a religious way of being that manifests itself in a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identities as individuals or groups in the face of modernity and secularization (Ruthven:5-6).

Finally, in terms of definitions, the same ideas are used by Peter Herriot (Religious Fundamentalism: Global, Local and Personal) when he says that social scientists can identify five common features of contemporary religious movements which, taken together, enable them to be identified as ‘fundamentalist movements.  His five features [slide 13] are that:

a. Fundamentalist movements are reactive; that is, that they believe that their religion is under mortal threat from the secularism of the modern world, and therefore they must resist and fight back;

b. Fundamentalists are dualists: that is, that they conceive of the world in terms of binary opposites - God and the Devil, good and evil, truth and falsehood etc – and operate with a strong in-group/out-group distinction;

c. Fundamentalists believe that their holy book is supremely authoritative in its writing about what to believe and how to act;

d. Fundamentalists also work, however, by using a selective interpretation of their holy book, one which enables their movement to adapt and change in response to changing circumstances in their conflict with their opponents;

e. Fundamentalists hold an eschatological position, expecting God to act decisively in history, and see their struggle as part of achieving God’s victory (Herriot:2).

9  But before we come to the conclusion of this session on the evolution of a word, we must remember [slide 14] that ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalists’ are not words which people use about themselves, their ideas or their religious group; they are words used about people, ideas and groups by those who oppose them.  As James Barr put it, back in 1981,

 … 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). 

10  And that brings us to the end.  Today [slide 15] ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalist’ are words in common use; but no longer does in refer simply to Christians who believe certain things about the Bible.  It also refers to Islamists who engage in terror, and to obscure ultra-orthodox Jews, to name only two more of its applications.  As a recent Christian encyclopedia puts it, [slide 16],

Nowadays, the word fundamentalist is just as likely to conjure up the image of a Muslim suicide bomber or a member of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group in Jerusalem as a conservative Christian from the American mid-West who insists on the literal truth of the Bible  (Bowden:481).

Session 2  Christian Fundamentalism – the growth of a movement [slide 18] 

1  I’m one of those people for whom the best explanation of anything is to trace it historically.  For example, that allegedly most central and most beautiful of all Christian doctrines, the Doctrine of the Trinity, is for me best approached along historical lines: why did the early Church go down that road?   By what steps and for what reasons?  Asking, and answering, those kinds of questions, leads me, at any rate, to the position of having some sort of sense of what the doctrine is about.  This historical method is not everyone’s way of doing theology, though it is in fact a traditional one, but it’s the one that works best for me.  So if we do that here, follow the steps by which Fundamentalism emerged, we should be in a position to understand it better.  So let’s build on the brief outline I gave in session 1.

2  The place to start is in the USA in the decades following the Civil War of 1861-1865.  In that period so-called liberal theology [slide 19] made substantial inroads into the American Protestant seminaries and universities.  The primary feature of this liberalism was an acceptance of and reliance on scientific methods for the discovery of truth.  This way of looking at things contrasted sharply with the older Christian commitment to revealed truth, especially as the Bible was supposed to contain it.  So instead of looking to the Scriptures to determine the truth of something, liberals often held biblical texts up for comparison with scientific theories, such as Darwinian evolution, and when they found disagreements between the Bible and science, they went with science.  At the same time they were applying this evidence-based, search-for-truth method of enquiry to the Bible itself, a method of looking at the Bible which had its origins in the German universities.  By the turn of the 20th century this form of biblical scholarship had taken root in most major American seminaries and divinity schools, just as it had in Britain.  But there was a difference.  In Britain the churches largely welcomed these developments, whereas in the USA many conservative Protestants did not.  For them the Bible was the source of literal truths about the world, and they resisted anything which challenged that view.  So in the last decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant denominations in the US conducted heresy trials against well-known professors who were thought to have gone too far in accepting the ‘modernist’ ideas of the liberals.  That happened occasionally in the UK too, but to nowhere near the same extent – the most famous case in Britain [slide 20] was the dismissal of the OT scholar William Robertson Smith from his post at the Free College of Aberdeen University by the Free Church of Scotland in 1881.  In the States Conservatives maintained a firm hold on some of the nation's most illustrious divinity schools, especially Princeton, the bastion of conservative Presbyterianism, but neither side was able to claim victory and by 1900 it had become apparent that an real split had opened up in American Protestantism.  To the liberals, the conservatives were dinosaurs whose inflexibility threatened to cause massive defections from the faith as more and more people, clergy and lay people alike, came to accept the truth of scientific knowledge.  The conservatives, on the other hand, saw the liberals as nothing short of heretics whose theological innovation seemed designed to destroy the faith itself from within.  The result was that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, an uneasy truce developed between the two sides.  Each tended to keep themselves to themselves, while firing occasionally shots at the other: but this was only the calm before a great storm.  During it the groundwork was being laid, especially on the conservative side, for the massive fundamentalist versus modernist controversy of the opening decades of the new century (although the term Fundamentalism was not officially coined for the conservative movement until 1920). 

3  It all came to a head in August 1909 when Union Oil magnate Lyman Stewart heard Amzi Dixon, pastor of Dwight L. Moody's church in Chicago, preach a sermon in which he lambasted ‘one of those infidel professors’ at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the strong-hold of liberalism in the early twentieth century.  Stewart realized that he had found in Dixon a man who could help him to fulfill his aim of publishing sophisticated Christian apologetic literature, works designed to provide ‘warning and testimony’ to anyone who might be seduced by modernist ideas.  Stewart and his brother, Milton, offered to put up $250,000 to finance a series of volumes to be edited by Dixon and a committee of his choosing.  Dixon agreed and with two co-editors solicited articles from leading scholars of American and British conservative theology, gathering all the contributions into that 12-volume series [slide 21], The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.  The first volume appeared in February 1910, and others followed periodically until 1915.  The Stewarts distributed three million copies of these volumes free of charge to pastors, professors, missionaries, YMCA and YWCA officials, and other religious professionals.  Many of the articles consisted of personal testimonies of religious experience, and some contained pieces attacking a series of ‘isms’ - Russellism (Jehovah's Witnesses), Mormonism, Eddyism (Christian Science), Spiritualism, and Romanism (Roman Catholicism).  But a full third of The Fundamentals was devoted to defending scriptural truth and attacking modern forms of biblical scholarship.  The issues were painted in ever-simpler terms: you either accepted the Bible or you did not.  While much of The Fundamentals is moderate in tone, especially when compared to later fundamentalist statements, its publication clearly helped erode whatever middle ground remained between liberal and conservative theologians.  The forward to vol. 2 puts it like this,

The Committee, to whom the two Christian laymen entrusted the editing and publishing of this series of books, have been greatly encouraged by the more than 10,000 letters of appreciation, which have come from all parts of the world; and the adverse criticisms have been almost equally encouraging, because they indicate that the books have been read by some who need the truth they contain, and their criticism will attract the attention of others.  All we desire is that the truth shall be known, and we believe that the God of Truth will bless it.

This volume goes to about 250,000 pastors, evangelists, missionaries, theological professors, theological students, YMCA secretaries, YWCA secretaries, college professors, Sunday School superintendents, and religious editors in the English speaking world; and we earnestly request all whose faith is in the God who answers prayer, to pray daily that the truth may ‘run and be glorified’ (www.encyclopedia.com/doc/Fundamentalism)

From that point on the rules of engagement for the ‘culture war’ between Fundamentalists and Liberals/Modernists in the USA were set.  The issues which had generated the conflict were, as we saw in session 1, the acceptance of Evolution, the post-enlightenment study of the Bible, and the ‘Social Gospel’ in many parts of the mainstream American churches.  Tied in was a difference of opinion over eschatology: the Fundamentalists looked for the imminent return of Christ, in a strongly millennialist way, the Liberals/Modernists did not.  But the real battleground was the Bible, and the key issue there was ‘inerrancy’.  The Fundamentalists used the word at every opportunity – the Bible is without error – the Liberals/Modernists replied that when you actually read it, you couldn’t say that.  Then the 1914-1918 War arrived, and added its fuel to the fire.  It convinced the Fundamentalists that the world was on the verge of moral collapse and the signs were clear that the End was near.  It also fuelled their arguments that Liberal/Modernist heresy leads to the collapse of Christianity and civilisation, after all, did it not all stem from German Biblical scholarship, and look at the depths of depravity to which Germany has now sunk?  World War I, liberal and conservative Protestants seemed to agree, was being fought to preserve civilization itself: but while the Liberals spoke of civilization in terms of democratic values and freedom from tyranny, the conservatives identified those same traits as the cause of the trouble.  And the modern parallels in fundamentalist Islam on that score are enormous, of course.

4  That’s how it began, but what happened next?  What happened next in the States was that the movement failed to take over the Northern Baptists and the  Presbyterian Churches, its obvious targets.  The Methodist churches were never targeted in the same way, and neither was the small and marginal Anglican church there.  Then came [slide 22] a major cultural disaster for the Fundamentalists – the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.  There was a Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in schools movement, and Ruthven describes what went on as a deliberate, put-up job and carefully engineered media trial (Ruthven: 12-14).  A young teacher, John Stopes, was put up to admitting teaching evolution by the American Civil Liberties Union who wanted to challenge that law.  It was a huge media event and the fundamentalist defenders of the state law won.  Stopes’ conviction was, however, quashed on appeal, which disappointed the ACLU who really wanted the case to go even more national through a higher federal court.  But their victory proved fatal for the Fundamentalists, because ‘they attracted so much public ridicule’ (Gifford: 255) and were ‘exposed as rural ignoramuses, rural hillbillies out of touch with modern thought’ (Ruthven:15).  This trial, as Ruthven puts it,

precipitated what might be called the ‘withdrawal phase’ of American fundamentalism – a retreat into the enclaves of churches and private educational institutions, such as Bob Jones University in South Carolina.  In the mainstream academies, seminaries and denominations, liberal theology, which accepted evolution as God’s way of doing things, swept the board (Ruthven:15).

5   Unfortunately, however, that withdrawal phase was only temporary, not least because this defeat merely confirmed to the Fundamentalists that they were right all along on the old ‘opposition indicates that we must be right, and the stronger the opposition the more right we must be’ principle.  After that, and here I quote again from Ruthven,

the trend towards withdrawal did not mean that American fundamentalism remained static.  Despite its exclusion from the mainstream, the half century from 1930 to 1980 saw a steady institutional growth, with numerous (mainly Baptist) churches seceding from national denominations in order to create an impressive national infrastructure of pastoral networks, parachurch organizations and superchurches, schools and colleges, book and magazine publishing industries, radio, television and direct-mail operations that built on older institutions created during the 19th-century revivals, such as the famous Moody Bible Institut in Chicago.  Whilst mainstream America, abetted by an increasingly centralized media, remained unaware of what Jerry Falwell would call the ‘sleeping giant’ in its midst, the giant itself became increasingly alarmed and annoyed at the encroachments of permissiveness and the growing assertiveness of mainstream secular culture (Ruthven:16).

And since 1970 the giant has woken up.  Paul Gifford produces a long list of the factors which led it its resurgence:  the strength of its institutions, the rising wealth of its members, cultural changes in the USA including the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Vietnam War and Watergate, the Supreme Court decision in 1963 against prayer in schools and the 1973 ruling to legalize abortion.  He points to encouragement from political fixers in the Republican Party and the lists the way Fundamentalists were mobilized in organizations like Christian Voice, the Religious Roundtable, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, and, the most high-profile of all, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority [slide 23] which between them targeted abortion, gay rights, the equal rights amendment, ‘welfare’, the teaching of evolution in schools, New Age movements, and more generally the ‘secular humanism’ of the Supreme Court, the media, and the educational system.  Overseas, they denounced communism and supported Israel.  Through these groups, he argues, Fundamentalism made its presence inescapable, especially as it began to monopolize Christian radio and television (Gifford:256).  So he writes this,  

In the 1960s and 1970s the South was being transformed.  Its religious homogeneity crumbled in the face of desegregation, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration from the North.  No longer taken for granted, Southern conservative Christianity aggressively turned itself into Southern fundamentalism.  Now the intra-denominational struggles, unsuccessful in the North half a century before, became possible here; and here the fundamentalists had more success.  They took control of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, in the mid-1970s, and after a long struggle controlled the Southern Baptist Convention by the mid-1980s (Gifford:256),

concluding that ‘This ‘Sunbelt Fundamentalism’ is now for many the primary expression of the movement’ (Gifford:256). 

6  And that’s where we now are.  Ruthven opens his Very Short Introduction with a 1920s quote from a journalist that,

Heave an egg out of a Pullman window and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the US today’ (Ruthven:1),

The blurb to Sam Harris’s 2007 [slide 24] best-seller, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York Times, 2007) updates it,

44% of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years … Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the US government actually believed that the world was going to end and that its end would be glorious.  The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Not all of that 44% will consist of what are properly called ‘Fundamentalists’, some will be Evangelicals, and we shall consider the distinction later, but Harris’ point simply illustrates that the position in the USA now is that the Fundamentalists are in the Christian driving seat.  They are the ones who increasingly define what is and is not ‘Christian’.  And even more worryingly, they are accepted as such by secularists like Hawkins and increasingly by the media, a fact which should be a cause of real anxiety to the rest of us.

7  At this point I just want to widen my comments, from Christian Fundamentalism to Fundamentalism in general.  If we ask why this phenomenon is occurring as it is now, two words keep appearing, one of which is ‘modernity’ or ‘modernism’ which we saw in session 1 in the emergence of the original Christian Fundamentalism.  The other, which we also mentioned in session 1, is ‘postmodernity’ (Partridge passim, but especially Lyon pp252ff).  Just as Christian Fundamentalism emerged early in the 20th century as a reaction to modernity and modernism in its late-19th century forms, so today’s Fundamentalisms have emerged in reaction to late-20th century forms of modernity or postmodernity, especially secularisation and secularism.  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.  So just as Christian Fundamentalism began as a reaction to modernity, so contemporary 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).

8  We have spent a lot of time looking at history, and for me that is important, and we’ll finish the history lesson with something slightly different, or the same but put differently, from Karen Armstrong [slide 25].  In her latest book, The Case for God, she says that in plain history-of-ideas historical fact, and to the mutual embarrassment of both, Fundamentalism and Modern Atheism come from the same place, the rationalized interpretation of religion in the late 19th century.  They are both, in other words, products of modernity.  What happened in the Enlightenment, she argues, is that the ancient distinction between logos and mythos was abolished.  Logos was all about what and how: What is this?  How does it work?  Mythos, much the more important throughout the ancient world, was all about who and why: Who are we?  Why are we here?  The Enlightenment turned the values upside down, and modernity prioritized logos and dismissed mythos.  What happened next, and this is Stephen Dawes’ way of putting it rather than Karen Armstrong’s, is that Liberal Christianity took that modernism on board, demythologized the Bible and stepped boldly into the 20th century, in which it gradually realized that it had thrown the baby out with the bathwater.  Fundamentalism, though totally objecting to ‘modernism’, actually took it on board as well, but it did so by insisting that the Bible was all logos, and that what everyone else in Church and Synagogue down the centuries had seen as its mythoi were not in fact mythoi at all, but logoi, not Who? and Why? stories at all, but What? and How? ones.  So, back to Karen Armstrong, who writes,

This rationalised interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism.  The two are related.  The defensive piety popularly known as ‘fundamentalism’ erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century.  In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favour of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion.  In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as ‘creation science’, which regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate.  They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis (Armstrong 2009:7).

9  And with that mention of ‘Creation Science’ waiting for us after lunch, I think this is the place to end what I want to say here, and this superb quote also from Karen Armstrong is the quote with which to end it [slide 26],

… fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition it is trying to defend (Armstrong 2009:7).

Session 3  Fundamentalism and the Bible [slide 28]

1  I imagine that for most of us ‘Fundamentalism and the Bible’ seems an obvious heading for a session in that it focuses on what we all usually think is really at the heart of Fundamentalism, ie the Bible.  We have to make allowance, of course, for the fact that for Fundamentalists in Islam we would need to talk about ‘Fundamentalism and the Koran’ and for Fundamentalists in Judaism our title would be ‘Fundamentalism and the Torah’ and so on, but for us we’ll do ‘Fundamentalism and the Bible’ [slide 29].  However, before we go any further, James Barr makes a very telling point that Christian Fundamentalism is not quite as much about the Bible, or about what the Bible teaches, as Fundamentalists insist that it is.  He suggests that it is more about what Fundamentalist Bible Teachers teach that the Bible is about, which is, of course, not quite the same thing at all; and this is a point to which we must return.

2  If we go back to those distinguishing features of Fundamentalism the key word in what Christian Fundamentalists assert about the Bible is the word ‘inerrant’.  Other words are important, such as ‘authority’ and ‘inspiration’, but it is the ‘inerrancy of the Bible’ which is the keystone [slide 30].  ‘Inerrancy’ was not a new word in the 19th century discussions about the Bible, and it had been given prominence in the anti-liberal, anti-modern biblical studies movement by two important American scholars at Princeton, which was in those days the leading Presbyterian theological institution, Archibald A Hodge (1823-1886) and Benjamin B Warfield (1851-1921).  They argued that the original manuscripts of the Bible were ‘absolutely errorless’ because of their divine origin, although both conceded that as we actually have the Bible some

… apparent inconsistencies and collisions with other sources of information are to be expected in imperfect copies of ancient writings … (Edwards:377).

Like most religious ideas Fundamentalism is a spectrum rather than a point; and like all religious movements Fundamentalism is not monochrome; not every Fundamentalist agrees on every point with every other Fundamentalist.  Within Fundamentalism there is strong and forthright internal debate; within that ‘broad heading’ there are, to use the lovely phrase of Charles Wesley, ‘names and sects and parties’.  So some of the later Fundamentalists would not be so sure about this loose talk of ‘inconsistencies’, however qualified by that adjective, ‘apparent’, and David Zeidan cites and quotes from the website of a contemporary Fundamentalist writer that

Verbal inspiration means that God inspired not just the ideas, but the very words of scripture.  The Bible is therefore (and he quotes the writer’s actual words here) ‘pure, perfect, inerrant and infallible’ (end of quote – Zeidan continues).  God providentially prepared the biblical authors for their task, guiding and controlling them, so that all they wrote was God’s pure and perfect word.  The Bible is true from beginning to end, all its parts are fully and equally inspired… (quoting the writer’s words again) ‘The Bible does not contain the Word of God, it is the Word of God’ (end of quote – Zeidan continues)… In addition, God has preserved the Bible over the centuries… (quoting again) ‘the God who wrote the Bible has kept it’ (end of quote, and Zeidan concludes).  Inspiration and preservation are both essential truths, and the Bible thus rests on the twin foundations of inspiration and preservation (Zeidan: 225f) 

We are not talking here about a crude ‘dictation’ theory of divine inspiration but about God’s ‘providential guiding and controlling’ and the effect of the ‘doctrine of plenary inspiration’ is, to quote the words of J Gresham Machen (one of the original leading Fundamentalists who left the still-too-liberal Princeton to found the Westminster Theological Seminary) ‘(to) deny the presence of error in the Bible’ because, as Zeidan puts it, ‘The Holy Spirit kept the writers free from the errors that mar all other human books’ (1923, quoted in Zeidan:226).  So the very influential 20th century Fundamentalist writer [slide 31], Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), can write,

… the Bible is true and without error in all it speaks, including where it touches on history and the cosmos – it gives propositional truths all the way back to the first chapter of Genesis (quoted in Zeidan:226).

Zeidan sums it up like this,

For Christian fundamentalists the doctrine of the divine inspiration and inerrancy of scripture as well as its subsequent divine preservation, is the touchstone of true belief from which all other distinctives of the true faith flow.  It is the absolute standard of truth and the sole guide for beliefs and conduct (Zeidan:225)

3  The Bible passage upon which all this weight of doctrine is largely based is, of course 2 Tim 3.16-17, and so we’ll spend a moment there [slide 32].  It is, incidentally, the only place in the Bible where the word ‘inspiration’ is used about scripture,

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work (NRSV).

There is actually a slight problem with this text straight away, because there are two ways of translating the first line which gives two rather different meanings.  The NRSV gives the other possible translation in a footnote, ‘Every scripture inspired by God is also...’  I propose to leave that little problem on one side even though the second way of translating the line changes the meaning of the verse a lot.  In what follows I shall use the first version, which is the one usually quoted by all those who use it to support their views on the special authority and inspiration of the Bible.  The translation in the new NRSV is much the same as that of the old AV, which was, ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is...’  ‘Inspired by God’ translates a single word found only here in the whole of the Bible (theopneustos).  NIV translates it literally, ‘God-breathed’.  The scriptures which Timothy has known from childhood are ‘God-breathed’, ‘inspired’.  A small problem with this is that because this word is only used here in the whole of the Bible we cannot be absolutely certain what it means, but its general sense is plain enough.  These scriptures come, one way or another from God.  It is his life which flows through them.  It is his breath that gives them voice.  So far so good. 

It can also be argued on the basis of this word that the scriptures have a special and powerful authority because they are ‘God-breathed’ in a way that no other book or collection of books is ‘God-breathed’.  Some Christians might disagree and say that this goes beyond what the text actually says, but most Christians would be happy to say that one way or another the Bible is one of God's special gifts to us.  So far so good also.

But at this point those who use this verse to back up their belief in the inerrancy of the Bible usually take a giant leap forward, and go way beyond what this word means or this text says.  This leap is to argue that because the scriptures are ‘God-breathed’ they must therefore be without error.  They are inspired, therefore they are infallible.  So a doctrine of the infallibility or the inerrancy of scripture is established without any argument, and with only the simple assumption that if God is breathing into these books they must be without error.  That is a huge leap into a dangerous doctrine.  It is a leap without any evidence or support from the word ‘God-breathed’ or from the verse where this word is found.  Those who want to say that because the Bible is God-breathed it is without error are making an assumption, nothing more nor less than an assumption.  What they ought to do next is to show from the Bible itself that it is a valid assumption and a true doctrine, but this simply cannot be done once you actually open and read the Bible, because ‘errors’ and ‘inconsistencies’ abound (if you want a little list see chapter 5 of Black Pudding).

2 Tim 3.16 is the key text used by those who believe that the Bible has a special authority because of its divine inspiration, and this verse is the only place in the Bible where the word ‘inspiration’ is used about the Bible.  The verse does talk about the importance and the value of the scriptures, and I for one would not want to deny either of those things, but all that it says is that scripture is ‘useful’.  This famous text says nothing about the historical accuracy or reliability of the Bible.  It makes no claims that the Bible is ‘without error’.  It does not even claim that the Bible is the supreme authority in the Christian Faith.  And it is not even talking about any of the Bibles we actually use, for none of them existed in the forms we have them when these words were written.  2 Tim 3.16 is the key text about the authority and inspiration of the Bible, yet the claim it makes is only a very modest one which will not bear the weight of theory put on it by Fundamentalists, and by some others too, it must be said.

4  And this is where I want to return to James Barr [slide 33].  He was a Scot and therefore a Presbyterian, born in 1924 and died in 2006, and he worked as a professor of Hebrew at a number of prestigious universities.  He had a number of particular interests, one of which was in the h-word, ‘hermeneutics’, ie how the Bible is read, interpreted and understood, and that’s what was particularly interesting to him about Fundamentalism – how did this powerful movement read, interpret and understand the Bible.  That’s what led to his big book.  He was also, however, a minister and never lost his pastoral concern, and that led him to his second book on Fundamentalism, the pastorally-focused, Escaping from Fundamentalism.  But it’s his observations on how the idea of inerrancy functions in Fundamentalism which concerns us here.  Let me quote,

In fundamentalism the truth of the Bible, its inerrancy, understood principally as correspondence with external reality and events, is fed into the interpretative process at its very beginning.  That is to say, one does not first interpret the passage on the basis of linguistic and literary structure, and then raise the question whether this is true as a matter of correspondence to external reality or to historical events.  On the contrary, though linguistic and literary structure are respected as guides, and indeed conservative literature contains a good deal of boasting about the command of these disciplines by conservative interpreters, the principle of the inerrancy of scripture has an overriding function.  It dominates the interpretative process entirely.  The questions:  Might the linguistic and literary form suggest that the passage is a myth or legend?  Might it be mistaken in matters of historical fact?  Might it be something generated not by external events which occurred in this sequence, but by problems in the inner experience of the early church? – such questions are therefore eliminated from the interpretative process from the beginning.  The fundamentalist interpreter may consider them, but only in so far as they are forced upon him by the arguments of critical scholars.  They do not form part of his own interpretative procedure at all.  This means, however, that though linguistic and literary form are respected as guides, they operate as guides only under the overriding control of the principle of inerrancy  (Barr 1981:51).

To sum all that up in a soundbite: if you are a Fundamentalist you begin reading your Bible with the understanding that what it says is without error, and everything you read must be read as being without error.  This [slide 34] cartoon sums it up brilliantly if you change the heading in the left-hand frame to ‘the post-Enlightenment Method’ and the one on the right to ‘the Fundamentalist Method’,

5  And the cartoon brings us straight to the clearest example of the contemporary Fundamentalist use of the Bible in its theory of Creationism or Creation-Science or, in its rebranded form, ‘Intelligent Design’.  This is not the place for anything like a proper discussion of this iniquitous nonsense, so I might at this point simply draw your attention to my next CME Day on Creation Stories for Today on 4th February.  Again, there are detail differences among the Fundamentalists on this one but the common core is that there is a Bible science of Creation, which is found in Genesis, and that there is a common enemy, which is the idea of Evolution.  On this basis there are some 7-day creationists who support Archbishop Ussher’s creation date of 4004 BC, while others understand the ‘days’ of Gen 1 to refer to different time periods than our 24-hour days and by the commonly used and very useful ‘Gap Theory’ can put the time frame of it all considerably further back.  If you’ve not come across the ‘Gap Theory’ let me treat you to two brief examples:

In the AV the opening of Gen 1 consists of two sentences, verse 1 (‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’) is one sentence, and verse 2 another (‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep … and so on’).  Gap Theory says that there is a time gap between these verses, with ample time for the created universe to take the shape it now has, for the earth to cool and all of that; or, in the version in the Schofield Reference Bible (which is the Bible for real Fundamentalists) for the original creation, with its dinosaurs etc, to go so badly wrong that God destroyed it, before starting again with the creation of the world as we know in the 6-day creation programme of Gen 1.3ff.  As Schofield says, ‘The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages’ (Barr, 1991:45).  The Hebrew grammar of the verses makes this kind of reading impossible, to say nothing of what we might call the ‘common-sense’ reading or the ‘plain’ meaning of the text: but that’s the Gap Theory.

Another example is the genealogy in Gen 5, which Archbishop Ussher took literally.  Not so, say the Gap Theorists.  For them the genealogy certainly gives connections and dates from Adam to Abraham, highlighting particular individuals, but it doesn’t give every generation or name every descendent in the line.  It contains many gaps.

6  So, if we’re giving credit where credit is due, some Fundamentalists deserve an A-star for ingenuity: but it is also at this point that they are exposed for failing to take the Bible as it is seriously.  They claim to take it with absolute seriousness and accuse the rest of us for failing to do so, but in reality a number of things are happening here: one is that they are failing to read the Bible as it is, one is that they are reading it wrong, and another is that they are imposing their interpretations upon it, and we’ll just look at them before we take a break.

How are they failing to read the Bible as it is?  Simply by insisting, against all the evidence, that the Bible is without error, and the amount of ingenuity which must go in to reconciling, for example, the three different time references to when Jesus cleansed the Temple must be phenomenal. 

How are they reading it wrong?  At the beginning of all reading is the moment that John Barton, one of Britain’s best contemporary Old Testament scholars, calls ‘genre-recognition’.  To use my usual illustrations: [slide 35] if I pick up a scrap of paper that says, ‘Take 2oz fl ...’ I know at a glance what I am reading.  I am reading a recipe, because I can see in those few words all that I need to tell me that the scrap of paper is a recipe.  If someone tells me, ‘There was a Scotsman, a Welshman and an Englishman’ I know what is coming because I know this genre; or if someone says, ‘Once upon a time’ I know what kind of story is coming.  I can’t remember when I learned the codes and markers of recipes, jokes and fairy tales, I suppose it was all part of learning to read, but I recognize them instantly, just as I recognize the genre of most types of literature that I meet [slides 36 & 37] but just occasionally, though, I don’t, and that makes reading itself difficult – and to give you an example, I had that problem [slide 38] with The Shack – am I reading biography here, a story about something that happened to its central character, or is this some sort of fictional story morphing into theology?  Whichever it was, I didn’t enjoy it.  But recognizing genre is the key to making sense of what we read, and so these reading codes and conventions matter.  If someone asked us to point out Mordor or the Shire on a map, for example, or talked about booking a train tour to Hogwarts School [slide 39] or tickets for the next World Quidditch Championship, we’d think they’d got Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter a bit wrong, wouldn’t we?  But that, I suggest, is exactly what Fundamentalism does: it imposes the genre of ‘propositional truth’, to use Schaeffer’s phrase, on the Bible from Genesis onwards; and so Gen 1 is read as ‘creation science’ and not as ‘creation theology’.  This is the current big example: Fundamentalism reads Gen 1 as if it belonged to the genre of science.  They are not alone in this, some evangelicals do as well, and we’ll come back to them after the break, and it must be admitted straight away that recognizing the varied genres present in the biblical material is not as straightforward as it might be, but in reading Gen 1 as science Fundamentalism is quite simply reading it wrong.

How are they imposing their own interpretations upon it?  Quite simply, just like we all do.  Every reader does, none of us read the Bible without mental spectacles, and the whole business of Reader Response Theory has done much to help us see that over the last 20 years.  But the difference between the Fundamentalists and the rest of us, is that we admit it, recognize it and even, in moments of lucidity, recognize that our interpretations might be wrong, might be getting in the way and so might need changing.  Not so, say the Fundamentalists: ‘you read God’s Word in your way (to paraphrase the joke) but we read it in His’. 

7  It is a fact of life 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.  It and it alone, it insists, and maintains this insistence despite all its internal squabbles, believes the Bible correctly, which 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) [slide 40] 

At the heart of Christian Fundamentalism lies the conviction that it possesses the truth - definitively, uniquely and plainly; and that it alone reads the Bible as God’s revealed, inerrant and authoritative Word. 

What that does to the rest of us, and what we can do about it, is for after the break

Session 4  The Threat of Fundamentalism  [slide 42]

1  First let me say that I do not apologise [slide 43] for the title of this session, for I am convinced

a. that the global phenomenon of Fundamentalism does pose a threat to the shalom which God intends for all the human communities on this planet.  This may not be the cataclysmic threat to world peace sensationalised in some parts of the media, but I think it should be recognised that militant Fundamentalisms, and as we have seen many Fundamentalisms are never far away from militancy, can do considerable damage to human wellbeing. 

b. that the phenomenon of Christian Fundamentalism does pose a considerable threat to the attitudes, values, norms of behaviour, theology and understanding of the Bible in what I would describe as British mainstream Christianity.

2  So before [slide 44] we go further here is another definition and description of Fundamentalists,

Fundamentalists are passionate oppositional ideologists with a dualistic world-view based on a selective reading of a holy text and working for a millennial kingdom of God (Herriot:112).

3  Threat 1 

[slide 45]  The physical threat of Fundamentalist militancy is real

[slide 46]  American/Islamic      Gush Emunim/Hindu Fundamentalists

4  Threat 2

[slide 47]  Fundamentalist v Fundamentalist ‘crusades’

5  Threat 3

[slide 48]  The threat of the demonization of all religions - ‘Spirituality good/Religion bad’ 

[slide 49]  Religious people are freaks/fanatics

6  Threat 4  The threat to mainstream Christianity

[slide 50]  Growing churches

[slide 51]  ‘Black and white’ ethics 

7  Threat 5  The threat to Evangelical Christianity

[slide 52]  The pic is of Revd Prof I Howard Marshall, a Methodist minister who has recently retired as Prof of New Testament in the University of Aberdeen, a scholar of international repute and an evangelical. 

The latter half of the 20th 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 (see 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. 

[slide 53]  And arguably there is a sign of that in the 2005 revision of the Evangelical Alliance’s ‘Basis of Faith’, as illustrated here in slide 54: 

2005 Revision: 3 The divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which are the written Word of God—fully trustworthy for faith and conduct.

1970 Statement: 4 The divine inspiration of the holy Scripture and its consequent entire trustworthiness and supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.

8  Threat 6  The threat to the Bible and those who read it

[slide 54]  Schofield/NRSV       

[slide 55]  ‘Teaching’/Learning

[slide 56]  Misrepresenting the Bible 

9  Threat 7  [slide 57]   Christian Fundamentalism is the religious dimension of USA-driven globalisation.