Passion and dispute as we seek out ancient teachings

By Ron Ferguson

Published:

THE commissioners to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland are back home in their cities and towns and villages across the land, no doubt still reflecting on the decisive vote which supported Aberdeen Presbytery’s decision to sustain the call from Queen’s Cross Church to the Rev Scott Rennie.

The appointment of the Kirk’s first openly gay minister, currently at Brechin Cathedral, ensured that the deliberations made headlines not just in Scotland, but in different parts of the world.

I don’t want to discuss the case itself – I’ve made my support for Mr Rennie known already, and I stand by that view – other than to praise the standard of the debate on both sides of the argument, and to applaud the dignity of Scott Rennie and the representatives of Queen’s Cross and Aberdeen Presbytery throughout this whole case.

No, I want to talk more generally about the difficulties Churches face when dealing with controversial ethical decisions. So here goes.

The Bible is the Church’s book. It’s an inspired and inspiring book, as people down the ages have testified. It’s actually a huge, sprawling library of books.

Among other things, it contains history, prophecy, wisdom, poetry, psalms, gospels, letters and apocalyptic writing. It was written and compiled over many centuries.

Much of the material in the scriptures was originally oral tradition – stories told over Israel’s campfire. There are epic tales of larger-than-life characters like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joseph, David, Goliath, Solomon, Elijah. Some of them were written down centuries after they were first told. You could imagine Hebrew kids saying: “Tell me again the story of Joseph and his coat.”

In the Old Testament, there are wonderful, soaring passages from the great prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Amos. There are nuggets of luminous wisdom in the book of Proverbs. The book of Job is a brilliant, poetic drama about the problem of suffering. Jonah is a funny and sad story about a prophet who thinks he can run away and hide from God. There is exquisite erotic poetry in the Song of Songs (the Song of Solomon). The Psalms, which are the hymnbook of the people of Israel, contain great songs of praise, prayers, shouting at God, and imprecations.

In the New Testament, the Gospels are four portraits of Jesus, written for different audiences. They don’t always agree with each other, as you would expect with four different writers. St Paul’s epistles are the earliest Christian writings; you should think of Paul stomping back and forward dictating these letters to his secretary. Just like Paul himself, his writings are loving, passionate, angry, pastoral, difficult and brilliant.

For today’s Churches, the Bible is a huge resource and guide. It is also problematic. Much of the material was written for communities living thousands of years ago, and many of its teachings were addressed to agrarian people trying to survive in difficult circumstances.

In some ways, the human situation is always the same; in other ways, it is very different. Imagine trying to tell a desert nomad 3,000 years ago about telephones, television, computers, aircraft and nuclear weapons. That’s the world we inhabit nowadays.

The challenge for today’s Churches is one of the interpretation of scriptures which were originally written to address quite different situations. Many of the dietary and purity laws of the Old Testament, for instance, were very much of their times.

How much of these teachings is directly applicable to us in the Year of Our Lord 2009? Which teachings are binding today, and which are well past their sell-by date? The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. We do not have the original manuscripts. Every translation from Hebrew or Greek into, say, English, is itself a piece of interpretation. Scholars genuinely disagree about some of these interpretations.

Many parts of the Bible are clearly directly applicable to today’s Church and today’s world. Others are not.

Fundamentalist Christians read the Bible literally. For them, if it’s inside the covers of the black book, it must be true as written. Fundamentalists describe people who don’t take every word in the Bible as literal as “liberals”. When they use that term, they’re not being complimentary, that’s for sure.

At the conservative end of the liberal spectrum are the conservative evangelicals. It’s quite wrong to describe them as “fundamentalists”; they know full well there are contradictions in the Bible, and they admit that some of the ancient texts cannot be applied directly today. Therefore, unlike the fundamentalists, they don’t approve of stoning non-virgin brides or rebellious sons.

Fundamentalists regard conservative evangelicals as essentially dangerous people who talk the language of conservatism, but have a “pick ’n’ mix” attitude to the scriptures. As someone who was a conservative evangelical for a time, I think the fundamentalist accusation has much truth in it.

Like the conservative evangelicals, those on the more liberal wing also take the Bible seriously, but don’t believe that everything happened exactly as it says in the scriptures. They see the message of the Bible as spiritual, but they regard some parts of the Bible as non-historical and symbolic in nature. They also argue that the biblical writers obviously didn’t have much of the scientific knowledge of the world we have now, and that we need to take this new knowledge into account when taking ethical decisions in today’s world.

You can see from all this that the Scott Rennie issue isn’t so much about homosexuality as such, but about the authority of the Bible. That’s why it generates so much passion.

I believe that the Church needs both “conservatives” and “liberals”. Neither party holds the franchise on biblical truth.

We need those who pull us towards the tradition, and those who pull us towards the modern world. The tension of these different tugs may help us to stand upright on the slippery slope of Christian decision-making.

On that dangerous gradient, the Kirk may even manage to be a tear-stained community of brokenness and grace: which is where, I believe, God is calling the Church to be.