What we desperately need, if we are to pursue a biblical, Christian and indeed Anglican mission in the postmodern world, is the Spirit of Truth. There is no time to develop this further, but it is vital to say this one thing. We have got so used to the postmodern sneer that any truth-claim is instantly suspect. And at that point many Christians have lurched back to the apparent safety of a modernist claim: conservative modernists claim that they can simply look up truth in the Bible, without realising what sort of book it is, while radical modernists claim they find truth in today’s science, without realising what sort of a thing that is either. But we cannot go back; we have to go on; and the Spirit of Truth, often invoked in favour of any and every innovation in the church, is actually at work when we live within the great story, the love story, God’s love-story, and become in turn agents, missional agents, of that story in the world. Truth is not something we possess and put in our pockets, because truth is grounded in the goodness of creation, the promise of redemption for that creation, and the vocation of human beings to speak God’s word both of naming the original creation and of working for new creation ”“ the word, in other words, of mission. The Spirit of Truth is given so that, living within the great biblical story, we can engage in those tasks.
[blockquote]All this is of course nurtured by the straightforward but deeply powerful tradition of the daily offices, with the great narratives of scripture read through day by day, preferably on a lectio continua basis, so that ‘living prayerfully within the story’ is the most formative thing, next to the Eucharist itself, which Anglicans do. Classic mattins and evensong, in fact, are basically showcases for scripture, and the point of reading Old and New Testaments like that is not so much to ‘remind ourselves of that bit of the Bible’, as to use that small selection as a window through which we can see, with the eyes of mind and heart, the entire sweep of the whole Bible, so that our ‘telling of the story’ is not actually aimed primarily at informing or reminding one another but rather at praising God for his mighty acts, and acquiring the habit of living within the story of them as we do so. That, I suggest, is the heart of Anglican Bible study.[/blockquote]
So very true, there is so much depth and so much of a biblical education in the traditional structure of our services. The challenge is to bring this into our modern services. Non-Anglicans attending our churches point out our scholarship and our emphasis on education as a great strength of Anglicanism.
[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51671-2005Apr13.html]Abortion keeps things tidy.[/url]
Oops. Commented somehow on the wrong post!
[blockquote] I have tried to offer a robust account of the way in which the Bible is designed to be the vehicle of God’s authority, not in an abstract sense but in the dynamic sense of the story through which God’s mission in the world goes forward in the power of the Spirit. [/blockquote]
Having read many of bishop Wright’s tomes at Regent, I find above, that he does what he does elsewhere, and that is fail to say the thing that I am waiting for him to say. To bring focus to what I mean, think of the above quote. If the Bible is designed for anything, who then designed it? As he mentioned, the church cannot simply re-write it, why not? Clearly because God is it’s author, through his prophets…oh, but we knew this already from the creed. And what of God’s authority? He mentions that Jesus said in Matthew 28 that all authority had been given to Him and not the writings that would come through his disciples. Fair enough. But how would we know this if it were not for Matthew’s writing? And just what is a “vehicle of God’s authority”? This I think opens a can of worms, for as Canada’s own Michael Ingham stresses so well in his Mansions Of The Spirit , all the world’s religions have some sort of divine vehicle, and what makes the Christian “book” superior or more truthful than theirs?
Wright has made a career out of correcting the Augustinian Western Greek thinking reformers, but at the end of the day I will take someone like J.I. Packer’s understanding of scripture and its authority as a foundation from which to understand its ability to be a “vehicle” of any kind for the Church before Wright’s. Simply put, I do not feel he has said anything here that would clarify anything for anyone in the Anglican Church no matter where they sit on the “liberal” to “conservative” spectrum. All that he has said can be understood or spun to support most current positions on Biblical Authority, in my opinion.