Hi Greg, I have asked all the Far North Coast Presbytery to watch the SBS Documentary (available through Dymocks) on "Who wrote the New Testament?" - we will probably discuss some of the issues you raise. - Amelia Koh-Butler
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Greg Crawford Sent: Wednesday, 23 June 2004 6:16 PM To: 'insights' Subject: Bibliolatory Some time ago we had a travelling Bible show advertised up here in Newcastle. It was a caravan of people from Sydney pushing more conservative interpretations of the Bible. I can't say I went, but the promotional material made it sound like one of the persons of the Trinity was going to have to step aside and be replaced by the Bible. The Uniting Church has its own stance in relation to the Bible in paragraph 5 of the Basis of Union. However, after many decades in the Uniting Church I am starting to wonder whether this is an actual position, or just a statistical average of the many different views held within the Church. It seems to me the Basis of Union holds a tension within itself. On the one hand, it speaks of the Biblical witness as unique and as that by which our faith is "regulated". It goes on to say that the proclamation of Jesus Christ is "controlled" by the Biblical witness. Words like "regulation" and "control" suggest that the material has some sort of normative influence. On the other hand, the Bible is not identified with the Word of God, as many Christian traditions would have us do. We live in a multicultural community and that should raise some questions for us. Some time ago I hosted a Muslim-Christian dialogue and our Muslim guests eventually got around to inviting us to accept that the Koran was the infallible word of God. Such a stance surely invites us to question the process by which any human writings are elevated to such status and the validity of same. That process is more open to us through Biblical scholarship which gives an appreciation of the process and dilemma of making such claims about any body of writings. For example, we are faced with the fact that there are at least three different textual traditions of the Old Testament. Probably the oldest was that used by the remnant of the northern kingdom of Israel, the Samaritan Pentateuch. Then the translation of the OT into Greek from around 250-100 BC and finally a proto-Masoretic text that was very accurately copied from the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls until today. It seems the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve some traces of all three textual traditions. In some cases, for example the Book of Jeremiah, the differences are significant. Obviously this creates a problem for Bibliolatory. Instead of ancient manuscripts taking us back to a presumed original text, they take us back to the realisation that there were at least three different ways of telling and interpreting the story of Israel at the time of Christ, and that attempts to define a "canon" were the outcome of later political processes. The New Testament is little different. We are plagued by people who should know better. For example, Nicky Gumble, in the Alpha series, promotes the common misconception that the differences in the Gospel accounts arise because different witnesses remember things differently. Here is a man who must have failed New Testament studies! We know today that the different arrangements of New Testament "pericopes" were quite deliberate and expressed the theological message of the authors. It is impossible to uncover this information and not realise that the communities who passed on the Biblical material had a big hand in deciding what it should say and what should be included. To imagine that the Bible can thus be considered apart from the communities who constructed it flies in the face of logic! But there goes the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura. How then can any such scriptural materials be considered to be regulating and controlling? Or is to challenge that premise to "throw out the baby with the bath water"? In effect, do we not have to elevate the communities and councils who determined the canon to a status alongside the material they passed on? These questions fall alongside another realisation. The first Christians had neither an Old Testament nor New Testament canon. "Believing in the Bible" did not seem to be a vital part of their faith. Instead, they appear to have had a vital experience of the Holy Spirit. Bibliolators today want to make faith in the Bible an essential element of faith in Christ. But how can a stance that was impossible for the first Christians be essential element of Christian Faith? This leads to another suspicion: that, in the absence of a vital experience of the Holy Spirit, Bibliolators have substituted a book for a person of the Trinity, and made the book the object of their belief. Phew! Is that enough input to get some discussion going? ... No? Well what does the Uniting Church mean about the Biblical witness anyway? And what does that stance mean about the Uniting Church? - Greg ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
