An Anglican Communion-wide project that will examine how Anglicans worldwide read and interpret Scripture will soon be launched.
The 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting on May 9 approved The Bible in the Life of the Church project, which was created in response to a proposal from the Windsor Report. Published in 2004 by the Lambeth Commission on Communion, the Windsor Report offered prescriptions on how the Anglican Communion could settle its deep divisions over the thorny issue of human sexuality.
What will this bible program seek to teach the Global South? Will an emphasis be placed on the revisionist perspective on topics such as sexuality and more fundamental issues (interpretations) such as the ‘role’ of Jesus in the New Testament and the authorship of the New Testament?
No doubt from the list of contributors and speakers that this is the Global North hermeneutic. Since the Global North has the New Thang Gozpell (c), it will undoubtedly be the lens/filter/current thinking used.
However, the Scripture is over us, not we over it. The Global South and genuine believers would do well to avoid this like the errors of Dothan, Korah, and Abiram – Numbers 16.
My concern about this project is that the driving force and motivation behind this program is ultimately revision-driven -a reinterpretation of the scriptures that fundamentally reflects today’s western culture and society and that distorts the hermeneutics of the past two thousand years.