Bible Sunday

25th October 2009: Sung Eucharist 9.00 am

Preacher: The Revd John Chynchen, Cathedral Chaplain

Readings: Isaiah 55. 1 – 11; 2 Timothy 3. 14 – 4. 5; John 5. 36b – 47

“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching…and…people…will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.” (2 Timothy)

Three years ago, almost to the day, I stood up here and exclaimed to a startled congregation: “It is Bible Sunday!” I had just been to Sydney and had braved the grim, grey portals of St Andrew’s Cathedral where I encountered the Dean, Philip Jensen, who in reply to my diplomatic profession of admiration when referring to the diocese’s target of ten percent growth by 2009, growled back at me with ill-concealed distaste: “You don’t understand at all what we’re doing here. We’re not talking about congregations…groups of a hundred or so. We will have ten per cent of the people in Greater Sydney worshipping in Bible-based churches by 2009. Waving his floppy Bible at me in a dismissive gesture, he was gone.

His brother and boss, Archbishop Peter Jensen, is the principal standard bearer of the Calvinist/Neo Baptist element within the developing conservative evangelical power grab in the current kerfuffle over biblical authority – partially obscured by the sexuality smokescreen – that has seriously impaired the unity of the Anglican Communion.

Addressing the 2006 Sydney Synod, Abp Jensen said this: “We have usually managed to favour the Bible as our source of truth rather than the opinion pages of our newspapers. The communiqué, following the recent meeting of the Global South Provinces in Kilgali, Rwanda, is breathtaking. It is firmly Bible-based. We will work together to recognise the Anglican identity of all who receive, hold and maintain the Scriptures as the word of God written.”

Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria, with 17 million Anglicans, had a louder trumpet than Jensen but Sydney had the cash…and was then the richest diocese in the Anglican world. But that was three years ago.

Speaking at the 2009 Synod in Sydney on 19th October, Abp Jensen – now a founding architect and Secretary of GAFCON and FOCA – told the assembly:

We began with the idea that we may be 25% down in income; we discovered that it was going to be something like 50%. People have risen above sectional interest. As a result we have the opportunity to go forward in new ways which may prove even more profitable than before. I ought also to add a tribute to those whose ministries have already been curtailed, or will be, if we pass the Ordinance. I have seen serious faces; I have detected pain and grief; I have heard strong arguments in favor of a favorite cause; I have seen some hard bargaining. The whole move from five bishops and five archdeacons down to four bishops has not been without its anguish.

In the current conflict within Anglicanism, echoes can be heard of a larger struggle within Christianity that has been ongoing for more than a hundred years. With the advance of science and the growing acceptance of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, key theologians and churchmen concluded by the early twentieth century that the old faith had been essentially disproved. They began to imagine a more reasonable Christianity – one less insistent on miracles, resurrection and a transcendent God who directed history from a heavenly remove. Higher Criticism of the Scriptures informed a new understanding of the historical Jesus; the Hegelian dialectic shaped a new image of an immanent and impersonal God…an unknowable force whose will was worked through human progress.

The new theology met stout resistance within the churches. The “modernist – fundamentalist controversy’’ of the nineteen-twenties split some of the mainline Protestant denominations, and eventually gave rise to the modern evangelical movement. The Anglican churches, because of their liturgical unity and comprehensiveness – Queen Elizabeth I’s dictum -- believe what you want…just use the same prayer book – was better able to absorb the new thinking, or, at least, to mask it. Under the guise of Anglican comprehensiveness and under the cover of Anglo-Catholic worship and liturgy, this modernist liberal religion took root in the western Anglican world and spread to some far-flung parts of the British Empire. The words were similar, the meanings had changed but the people in the pews were left in th dark…told nothing…until quite recently!

Twenty-five, thirty years ago…the conservative Evangelicals twigged what had happened and retreated behind their walls of exclusiveness. St Andrew’s Church in Nathan Road is no more than two kilometres from this place but it offers a vastly different religious experience – with more in common with the Southern Baptists than the Anglicanism we know here.

Quoting the Bible is hardly a winning tactic in the current standoff. The two extracts I repeated at the beginning, from 2 Timothy are excellent examples of ammunition useful to both sides of the fence. The Bible acquired its written form between 1000BC and 150CE, when people believed that mental illness and epilepsy were caused by demonic possession and deaf muteness was caused by the devil tying the tongue of the victim. The Bible was quoted to undergird the divine right of kings, to justify slavery, to support the idea that the Earth was flat and the centre of the universe, to condemn first Galileo and later Charles Darwin, to justify segregation and apartheid, to demonstrate that women are inferior and unfit to vote, unfit for higher education, unfit for entry into the professions or for ordination in the Church. Why do people now think that quoting the Bible in the service of ill-informed homophobia will fare any better?

However, there may be chinks of light at the end of the tunnel. Let Archbishop Peter Jensen explain further from his address to the 2009 Sydney Synod:

You see I am not sure that God is directly ‘speaking’ to us through these large losses (US$140m) – but, it may be that the Lord is chastising us for our sins – but then some would say that it is the sin of arrogance, others would say it is because your bishops went to GAFCON (and not to Lambeth! JHC), others would say it is because of the Diocesan Mission. But then it may not be our sins at all - it may be that the Lord is simply seeking to test us; or perhaps he is seeking to stop us doing something which is right in itself but not in accordance with his secret will; or perhaps he is challenging our faith, to rely on him more boldly for our finances. Certainly it is a serious warning to us about what the Scriptures call ‘the uncertainty of riches’.

Where will we be fifty years from now? We are up against a large challenge and there is no guarantee whatever that we will survive except as a small but wealthy cult. The cultural mood is not flowing with us, and immigrant numbers are also not in our favor. I realize that for many Pentecostal Christianity is the answer and they will extol its attractions and its capacity to attract some of the very people who are missing from our churches. My problem with that suggestion is in the nature of Pentecostalism. I judge that its love-affair with modern culture will leave it insufficiently tied to historic Christianity, and that there is a chance that it will not be recognizably Christian in fifty years. That is a harsh judgment and I hope that I am wrong; but there are already signs of diversion from the fundamentals.

I think that some of us will more readily come to terms with culture for missionary reasons, but not being as careful as we should be about the purity of doctrine, we will lose the structure of the faith and become effectively Unitarian. The theological weakness will begin, I think, with an impoverished doctrine of sin. From this will come a semipelagian anthropology, an exemplarist soteriology and a humanistic Christology. It will probably develop two forms - a wet pietistic one which will still look for spiritual experience, and a dry intellectualist one which will embrace cultural respectability.

Of course the opposite danger is to flee from the world and embrace not merely theological but also cultural conservatism. The heirs of such brothers and sisters will survive and survive to bear witness to the gospel; I would rather be with them than with the others. But we will be as invisible in the general culture as the smallest sect is today.

Ours has been an easy, undemonstrative, tolerant, ambling along sort of religion – not wanting to be too intrusive but wishing its comforts to be available in need. The best Anglican church is one that stays true to its tradition of inclusion and tolerance. At its most extreme, an evangelical future will find the church uncompromising in its exclusion of outsiders…of anyone who dares to question Bible-based authority and Bible-based judgements.

Several thousand years after Leviticus was written, we live our lives very differently…as even Sydney’s Abp seems willing to concede. We are no longer nomadic tribesmen, herding our sheep, goats and camels. We can, however, still go out of our way to love our neighbours as ourselves. Amen.