PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

The Place of Scripture                                                                                                  Text
Sermon January 24, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          The question of authority in religion may seem a little bit abstract, but when we listen to the pronouncements of Muslim jihadists the issue of authority gets very practical very fast.  Islam teaches that Allah personally dictated the words of the Qur’an in Old Arabic to Muhammad; so all the teachings and all the practices of Islam come directly from Allah to the people in the book and in the way Muhammad himself lived out those teachings.  In Islam, the Qur’an is “the word of God.” 

          The Bible doesn’t hold the same place in Christianity.  Authority in Christianity is like a three-legged stool, as John Wesley described it; and God’s message comes to us in three ways.  The divisions in Christianity are based in part on which of these three ways a denomination takes as the primary channel of God’s word.  One of the legs of that three-legged stool is the ancient, traditional teaching and practice of the church—as one early writer expressed it, “that which has always and everywhere been believed by everyone.”[1]  The idea is that the church’s tradition goes all the way back to the Apostles, so tradition is older than the Bible.  Of course, over the centuries that tradition has undergone additions, subtractions, reinterpretations and has sometimes become a frozen, stiff, life-less set of standards.  But the church’s tradition is the reason we baptize; it’s the reason we celebrate Holy Communion; it’s the reason ministers preach in worship services; and so on.  So we Protestants affirm the tradition; but it’s the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches that make the tradition primary.

          The second leg of this three-legged stool is the Bible.  The Bible didn’t just drop out of heaven, and God didn’t dictate the very words in ancient Greek to the apostles.  Over the period of the first century of the church, apostles, evangelists, Christian prophets and scribes wrote about the ministry of Jesus and applied Jesus’ message to the life of the churches.  Then for another two hundred years Christians read what had been written, prayed over the books and letters, sometimes argued with each other; but what they were looking for was a genuine word from the heart of God—the divine message.  Sometime in the 200’s they came to a general consensus about twenty-seven books in which they heard the voice of the Spirit of Christ continuing to speak; and those twenty-seven books became our New Testament.  The Old Testament underwent a similar process among the Jews—a process that wasn’t finished until about 90 A.D.  But the words in the Bible are not “THE word of God”—the Word of God is Jesus Christ.[2]  In the Bible we read and hear the call and command of Christ’s Spirit to the church together, and to our hearts individually.[3]  Protestants take the Bible to be the primary channel of authority.

          What about the third leg of that three-legged stool?  That third leg is personal religious experience.  There have always been Christian groups who have considered personal religious experience to be the primary channel of authority:  the Desert Saints, the Quakers, and others.  But in the last hundred years, dependence on personal religious experience has become very widespread through a movement we call Pentecostalism.  The southern hemisphere, especially Africa and South America, are seeing the explosion of a Christian faith based primarily on religious experience.[4]  But we all have a sense that without the heart, religion is flat; so we all affirm personal religious experience. 

          So the three legs of John Wesley’s stool are:  tradition, the scriptures, and personal religious experience.  And, Wesley said, we must interpret all three using human reason.

          Now I’ve said all that to highlight the context in which we Protestants depend on the scriptures.  We stand with one foot on the ancient tradition of the church, and one foot on our personal experience of the Spirit of Christ; and in our hands we hold the open Bible.  So with that image in mind, let’s talk about the place of the scriptures in Christianity.  I want to mention four of the most important places of scripture:  in doctrine, in theological discussion, in ethics, and in our devotional life. 

          First, through the scriptures, God gives the church light in a formal way by laying down the basic doctrines of Christian faith.  We wouldn’t know what God is like if we didn’t have that long, long story of God’s dealing with Israel in the Old Testament.  Everything we teach about God, including everything Jesus said, is demonstrated in the story.  Also, we wouldn’t know anything about Jesus of Nazareth if we didn’t have the New Testament.  The sorrowful story of his passion and the joy of his resurrection are only available to us in the Bible.  So the Bible is foundational for Christian doctrine—what the church teaches is rooted in the scriptures.  Even the differences between denominations come about because of different readings of the scriptures; so although we may be organizationally divided, we are one in Christ.  Sometimes someone will come to me and ask me a question about doctrine; and the first place we always go is to the Bible.  In the baptismal liturgy this morning we offered the Apostles’ Creed, one of the oldest summaries of the Christian faith; and is it any surprise that the Apostles’ Creed simply tells the Bible story?  So the place of scripture is at the root of Christian doctrine.

          Now you and I both know that Christians disagree among ourselves as individuals about a lot of things.  Some of that comes from logic, or philosophy, or differences in worldviews; but in our conversations with each other about what we believe and how to live, we find our grounding in the Bible.  This is not “doctrine,” which is formal and official:  this is “theology,” which means “God-talk”—and every one of us is a theologian, every one of us thinks about what we believe.  The Bible gives us a common vocabulary to talk together about our thoughts.  If we didn’t have the Bible we wouldn’t be able to name a lot of what we believe:  “grace,” “sin,” “beatitude,” “church,” “fallenness,” and on and on.  Without this vocabulary we would be like jungle-dwellers trying to talk to Eskimos about heat-stroke.  We have this book, we call it the Holy Bible, the scriptures, which we all have in common; and it gives us a language of faith and faithfulness.  Even when we’re talking about our personal religious experience, we use the language of the scriptures so we can be understood—so we can have something to tell each other.  So not only does the Bible lay the doctrinal foundations of official Christianity, it also acts as information and provides each of us with a vocabulary to talk to the other about our faith. 

          The third place of scripture is in ethics.  How should you live?  What does it mean to be a Christian living in the natural world?  And here some Christians find rules—maybe the Ten Commandments, while other Christians find the law of love; but they’re both received from the scriptures.  When it comes to dealing with the poor, the sick, the alien, the homeless, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel:  Remember that story of the Great Judgment in Matthew 25, where Jesus says:[5]

We are aware that the laws of our country, our state, our city are intended to regulate right relationships and justice, but sometimes they miss.  Sometimes the law requires that the court let someone go free when everybody knows what they did was wrong; or the other way around.  How do we know?  We have another ethical standard, one that can’t be written into law because it’s really story and inspiration; and we get it from the scriptures.  So the third place that scripture holds for us is in laying the foundations for our ethical living. 

          And fourth, the place of scripture is in your personal, private study and prayer.  To put it another way, the scriptures make it possible for you to wrestle with God about the most important, deepest, dearest things in your life.  We have devotional booklets on the table in the back of the church, but when you open one up, it takes you to the Bible.  Some people have found it helpful to read the Bible through using some organizational plan, and for them the long story of what God is like, of who Jesus was, of how one should live—all unfolds slowly, thoughtfully, and in a way that makes sense of your personal life.  Let me say this a different way:  one of the most important places of scripture is to help make sense of your life. 

          In the First Lesson today, in the fifth century before Christ, when the Jews returned to Jerusalem from Babylonian Captivity, Ezra gathered them at the city gate and read the scriptures to them, and they wept because they were touching base with the foundational story of their nation and of their lives.  In the Gospel Lesson, when Jesus went to his home synagogue and announced his mission, he used a passage from the Bible to describe it.  Yes, we use our common sense when we read the book, but the book also reads us; and it’s in that conversation with the scriptures that we find our lives being transformed.  So what is the place of scripture?  We stand with one foot on the church’s tradition, and one foot on our personal experience of Christ; and in our hands we hold the open Bible; and maybe, just maybe, we can become more than we were before.

AMEN