God's
Word Contains All Things Necessary
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
[Diocesan Life, Oct.'98]
There is a growing tendency to belittle and dismiss with a label anyone who brings
the Bible into a conversation about morals or doctrine. Fundamentalist is the
label. It's like calling anyone who opposes cannibalism a vegetarian.
The same label is applied commonly -- to mean extremist or radical -- also to
Islamic terrorists, Orthodox Jews, and people who prefer acoustic to electric
guitars. The implication is that the people in question are beyond reason and
something of a danger to normal people who are happy, thank you very much, going
with the prevailing cultural winds.
The distinct danger of sin lurks, of course, in any stereotyping of people. Episcopalians
almost always use the label as a smear or a dodge. The word, fundamentalist,
was coined early this century to provide common ground for unity among right-wing
Protestants. Among the five fundamentals was "the verbal inerrancy" of the Bible,
the idea that every syllable of the Bible was inspired and to be followed as
absolute truth. Of course, even the real Fundamentalists do not follow their
own rules, dismissing any passage about church or sacraments that is too "high" as
being "figurative."
I know of no Episcopal fundamentalists. I know no one who takes every word of
the Bible as literal truth, insisting on a six-day Creation, life in the gullet
of a whale, burning adulteresses to death, or the tantalizing rule in the Old
Testament that children who habitually sass their parents are to be taken to
the edge of town and stoned to death.
Nevertheless, every deacon, priest, and bishop in this church has sworn publicly
to believe that the Bible "is the word of God, and contains all things necessary
for salvation." Bishops have additionally sworn to maintain and defend this belief.
How can I with one hand hold that the Bible contains all that we need to know
for salvation and with the other hold "new teachings?"
The underlying question is what we mean by "word of God," if not divine dictation.
The answer is the subject of many books.
Basically, the church recognized in the books it came to call the Bible the authoritative
passing on of the story of God's people, of the foundational teaching of the
prophets and apostles, and of the poetry and proverbs of saints lost in the wonder
of love and praise of God.
Long ago the undivided Church recognized the Holy Spirit's gift in these writings,
and set them apart in the "canon" or defining rule about what is scripture.
That's the easy part, but how do we interpret the Bible if we are not to use
it simply as a weapon or to prove something?
In 1979 the church was united enough to adopt a catechism that said the test
of new doctrines is whether or not they agree with, or at least do not contradict,
the scriptures. What does that look like in practice? Two examples may help.
One is about maintaining a standard, the other is about the discovery that society
must change.
To help explain what we mean by the authority of scripture, the bishops of the
Episcopal Church said in Philadelphia last summer that we look for the united
testimony, the overall picture that the biblical writings provide on a question.
On marriage for instance, rather than taking a few passages that lay down rules
- or a few passages that show even Abraham and David abusing marriage
-- the overall testimony of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is that God intends
one man and one woman to live together in a permanent covenant. In that covenant
they are to discover and show the kind of self-giving love that is Christ's,
and to mediate to each other and to their children grace, guidance and encouragement.
On the basis of that overall message, despite the very real abuses of
marriage and especially of women that can be documented in the scriptural story,
we understand the divine institution of marriage to be a sacrament, a grace-bearing
relationship that is unique among the many human relationships.
On the other hand, although the scriptures do not attack slavery in
general, slavery is severely limited in the Old Testament; and, between the lines
of his letter to Philemon, Paul strongly hints that Philemon ought to free his
now-baptized slave. More important than this specific evidence against slavery
is the growing pattern of human dignity, equality, and unity found in the scriptures,
culminating in Luke's portrayal of a Christ for everyone, and Paul's proclamation
that in Christ there is neither slave nor free ...
Christians eventually(!) concluded that people could not be property. Christians
are still learning what it means to respect the dignity and freedom, the wonderful
gift that is in each human being. The point is that although there is no passage
that says, "amend the Constitution to prohibit slavery," the implications of
the biblical witness in general led to the position taken by Abolitionists in
the last century. The task begun there is far from over.
We are not fundamentalists. We do believe, however, that the Bible contains the
truths of the Faith; and we believe that God's word puts out roots from which
grow wonders yet undreamed. We continue to rely on God's Spirit to help us recognize
and rejoice in all of God's gifts.
