From the Press

'How to Believe in the Bible Without Being Eccentric'

By Graham Cray

This article first appeared in the Church of England Newspaper on Thursday 10 July 2003 and is reproduced with their permission.

Evangelicals are scripture people and gospel people. The two are inseparably intertwined. We are committed to live and proclaim the truth of the gospel which is made known to us through the truth of scripture. The Bible will be the one the three keynote themes addressed at this year's NEAC4, and rightly so.

So central is scripture to Christian faith that the Church in every age has to fight its own 'battle for the Bible', defending it against those arguments and philosophies of their day which threaten to undermine its authority.

Two dangers accompany this necessary vigilance. Firstly the battle may move on. Well thought-through strategies to commend scripture may prove to be answers to questions no longer being asked. New critical questions may have emerged without receiving the attention they deserve.

Secondly the battle is always being fought on 'enemy territory'. The Bible being defended against attack. But we defend scripture at the periphery, as it were, when our primary reasons for submitting to scripture are found in the centre, related to the core doctrinal themes of our faith. So the danger is that an evangelical doctrine of scripture becomes literally 'eccentric', off-centre.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries evangelicals battled against claims that science disproved scripture, against sceptical criticism claiming to identify errors in scripture, and against claims within the church, that either reason or tradition have prior authority over scripture. Modernity was the front line.

But the battle has moved on. Postmodernity now sets the most powerful challenges, and postmodernism, often of a radically pluralist and sceptical nature, provides the most pressing and potentially corrosive challenges. It is as though our key arguments, honed in recent centuries, have been outflanked. Truth, whether in scripture or anywhere else, is seen as a human construct. There is your truth and my truth, but not the Truth. Texts (all texts, not just scriptural texts) have no fixed meaning. Meaning is made up through interpretation. Any suggestion that there is a truth which all must acknowledge is oppressive, a power play.

Thank God we have not been outflanked. At NEAC2 in Nottingham, Anthony Thiselton introduced us to many of the new questions about interpretation. Since then he and a string of major evangelical scholars (John Goldingay, Kevin Vanhoozer, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Timothy Ward and many others), have been addressing these issues. The battle is being fought well on the new front, and fresh light is being thrown on the nature of scripture. Although my concern is that many evangelical Anglicans don't know that a new front has been opened.

We must fight on both fronts. The old challenges may be made less often, but the pivotal issue on the old front, the historical accuracy and trustworthiness of scripture, still needs to be affirmed and defended.

I have used the language of 'battle' because so much is at stake. But I have also used it to evoke the memory of the 'battle for the Bible' in the last century, when evangelicals divided from one another over the terminology used to affirm their confidence in the trustworthiness of scripture. Those who used the term 'inerrancy' and their fellow evangelicals who were committed to 'inspiration' and 'infallibility' but believed the use of 'inerrancy' to be a mistake, became deeply critical of one another. We began to be more distrustful of fellow evangelicals of a different terminology than of our most radical non-evangelical critics. That is eccentric. It is off-centre. And echoes of it live on today.

NEAC gives us a time to unite at the centre. To rehearse and reaffirm the central fact of our commitment to scripture. That scripture is where Christ is revealed. That he is the central and uniting theme of the whole Bible.

That there is no Christ by whom we may be saved, than the Christ revealed in the scriptures. That it is the role of the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ and he does that supremely and finally in and through scripture.

It is time for Anglican evangelicals to be centred evangelicals. There is no more time for eccentricity. But from the centre we can all be renewed to fight those necessary battles on both fronts.

The Rt Rev Graham Cray is Bishop of Maidstone