God’s meanings in revelation are clear, but they are also fluid in their boundaries: there is a normative story to be told, one which, for the 1611 translators is focused upon the sovereignty of grace and the consequent impotence of human mediation between God and the world. Everything has to be read against the backdrop which alone makes sense of Scripture as a whole ”“ the unique divinity of Christ and the gift of absolving and transforming grace to all who repudiate trust in their own works. The translators were not all in precisely the same place in the complex map of internal Protestant controversy in the early seventeenth century, but all would have subscribed to this overall view. This being said, however, the exact way in which the words of Scripture are seen and read as transparent to these mysteries will not be settled once and for all by this or that particular bit of human hermeneutical enterprise. Thus, knowing what is going on in the work of translation is a stimulus to recognising the ”˜common imbecility’ of which Hooker speaks and so to deeper involvement in the common life of the congregation. The qualified indeterminacy of Scripture, manifest in the sheer fact of the translatability of Scripture and the diverse possibilities of saying what it says, becomes an ecclesiological matter: it brings into focus the biblical vision of mutual edification within the Body of Christ. And insofar as it thus becomes part of the opening up of the believer to the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, we can see that the Christological hints which we noted in Smith’s preface are indeed not simply about removing obstacles to a clear and straightforward message but connected with the strengthening of the common life in which alone revelation is rightly received.
The comments about Calvin’s sacramental theology as analogous to translation efforts of God’s Word make one wonder if +ABC stands in sympathy with the latter (frequently confused with zwinglianism or memorialism, which it decidedly is not).
Thank you for posting this. (I note in passing that a recording of Archbishop Rowan’s [url=http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/canterbury//data/files/resources/568/20101106_heresy_lecture.mp3]lecture on heresy[/url] from last November is now on his website. Note, its a 34MB mp3).
There’s an interesting and, as so often with the ABC, very delicately poised balancing act – juggling a critique of the claim that a “perfect” or “final” meaning can be found in Scripture, with the strong assertion that the meaning that can be found is nevertheless good enough to establish “the main doctrinal themes’, with an affirmation of “an everlasting and incurable uncertainty as to whether the adequate word has been found”.
Much of this is waffle.
This passage could have been written by one of the on-line random post-modernist essay generators:
[blockquote] “The qualified indeterminacy of Scripture, manifest in the sheer fact of the translatability of Scripture and the diverse possibilities of saying what it says, becomes an ecclesiological matter: it brings into focus the biblical vision of mutual edification within the Body of Christ.” [/blockquote]