I recently had occasion to attend a Christian gathering which involved, among many other things, a particular speaker who gave a deeply insightful, cogent, and moving defense of the authority, trustworthiness, and life changing power of God’s Holy Scriptures. Along the way, the presenter, a justly famous scholar, pastor, and writer, made one side comment that had this Anglo-Catholic boy wincing. As an illustration of the glad news of post-medieval Anglicanism’s embrace of the centrality of scripture, he noted the apparently true fact that, whereas prior to the Reformation, each newly minted priest of the English Church was presented with a chalice, each has since then been presented with a bible.
Alas, I cannot see this apparent triumph of word over sacrament as a particularly celebratory development. The replacement of chalice with bible would seem to represent precisely the sort of rejection of the sacramental world of the Church Fathers that the English Reformers sought to more forcefully reclaim. It also would tend to mark the Anglican as a theologically Protestant Church in the more recent sense, rather than one in continuity with the great Catholic Tradition.
Following the speaker’s presentation was a panel discussion during which was mentioned a statement a very few months back by an Archbishop of the wider Anglican Church: “There is a difference between taking scripture seriously and taking it literally or as being inerrant or infallible. The books of the Bible are the inspired response to revelation, but the responses are fallible, and responses are not identical with the revelation for the ”˜word of God comes to us through the words of men’ to quote one theologian.” The panelist who mentioned this (full disclosure: it was this writer, who did not believe it proper at the time to discuss his reservations about the above-mentioned remark) considered it both representative of the understanding of a significant portion of the progressive vanguard who dominate the councils of The Episcopal Church and other relatively small parts of the Communion, and as problematically simplistic and wrong-headed.
The primary implication of the Archbishop’s proposed hermeneutic would seem to be that Divine Revelation, inasmuch as it has any objective reality, takes place off the page, as it were, and is communicated to us by error-prone, culturally conditioned, and scientifically ignorant men whose primary role is to misunderstand and thereby obscure the purity of the Divine Revelation. Holy Scripture, on this view, is an essentially human artifact that at best records subjective encounters with the divine, but both the experience itself and record thereof are filtered through the fallible, contingent métier of ignorant sinners. The goal of biblical interpretation, then, is to clear away the dross of human error so as to tease out the nuggets of divinity that lie hidden underneath. Generally speaking, these little nuggets are held to be fairly incomplete and disjointed, leaving a vague God about whom we have very little real information. The human author, in this understanding, is set against the divine inspirer rather than the two being combined in an incarnational whole.
Stepping back to the speaker I heard, to whom I will henceforth refer, with no intention of being either precious or pretentious, as my Evangelical Brother, let us suppose that I have heard him properly, that his offhand remark was indeed indicative of a position he holds regarding the precedence of scripture over the sacraments, and that I indeed disagree with him in this regard. Were he and I to enter a debate, we would both share a view of Holy Scripture as both inerrant and infallible as regards that which is necessary for salvation, and a most significant part of what is necessary for salvation is accurate, objective knowledge about who God is in Himself.
My Evangelical Brother may well present arguments, based on scripture, supporting his position regarding its primacy. I would present mine, based on scripture, regarding the equal importance of the sacraments as commanded by Christ. We would both share a view of Divine Revelation as incarnational, that God has drawn the authors of scripture into His fullness such that they are, through divine inspiration, capable of presenting His self-revelation without their contingency or sinfulness obscuring their presentation of His objective actuality. In its humanity, scripture can be studied critically; in its divinity, scripture is both authoritative and transforming. Scripture is not a scientific textbook as scientific knowledge is not necessary to salvation. Scientific knowledge changes nothing of what scripture reveals regarding the character of God ”“ or of man, who is as much a metaphysical as corporeal being. Literalism, a modern error from which the Anglican Communion is generally free, never enters the discussion at all. Scripture is not Divine Dictation and neither I nor my Evangelical Brother would see it that way.
Note that one who shares the Archbishop’s view ”“ to whom I will, with the same intention stated above, refer as our Progressive Friend ”“ cannot possibly enter into this discussion. The moment he begins to converse with the two of us on matters relating to scripture, the dispute we have been engaged in ends and a new one must begin, one concerned with fundamentally different matters. Our Progressive Friend does not share our incarnational understanding of scripture, and cannot accord to it the same authority as that recognized by my Evangelical Brother and me. His disagreement with us will not be over the interpretation of scripture, but rather its definition. We cannot be in dispute over the content of Divine Revelation until we have gotten past our disagreement over its fundamental nature and this conversation can only take place when and if our Progressive Friend acknowledges his basic differences with us.
And this our Progressive Friends have thus far strongly refused to do. It is understandable that they would prefer not to see themselves in such a light. But simple honesty should require them to acknowledge the chasm between their views and ours. The situation in Anglicanism has gotten too dire for anything less.
–This article appeared in the April 27, 2008 edition of The Living Church magazine and is posted with the author’s permission
I’d feel a lot better if the Church gave newly-minted priests BOTH a Bible and a Chalice as well as the infilling and anointing of the (true) Holy Spirit. The three would symbolize the three entities entrusted to the Church – Truth, Love and Life (power, light, strength) – AS GOD DEFINED them in His Word through the ages – not as the post-modernists have attempted to re-define them.
I agree with Daniel that the Church in the Reformation made a terrible mistake in substituting the Bible for the Chalice in Ordination. I also take his side, generally speaking, about the authoritative function of Scripture, as long as we remember that it is authoritative because the Church, being inspired, was able to perceive it as such, and was able to reject other “scripture” as non-canonical. Article 6 says that scripture contains all that is necessary for salvation, in the sense that nothing that can be read in it or that cannot be proved thereby, is not necessary for salvation. That is the job of the Church, which stands above and beneath Scripture, and is prior to it both in time and ontologically. For surely not everything that is in the Bible is necessarily to believed as required for salvation.
Deacons got a book of the Gospels and priests got a chalice, because those were the distinctive tools of their ministries. They correspond to the “big change” in taking up each order’s work: deacons can proclaim the Gospel to the Assembly, and priests can say Mass.
Part of the reason priests received a chalice was the cost of a chalice — usually pure gold inside and silver on the outside (or gold all around!), more than a ‘humble’ priest could afford for himself.