Anglicans, OT/NT and Inerrancy

The current situation in the Anglican Communion is rather difficult: some within it have difficulty loving those who are seen to be eroding the very nature of Anglicanism, expressed in the authority of Scripture; others have difficulty loving those who condemn gay relationships as unscriptural as something that Church ought to oppose, rather than bless. How to deal with such diversity is a difficult question, with which many senior Anglicans – not least Rowan Williams – have been wrestling.

I had an interesting conversation with a lecturer yesterday, about an essay he was writing for a popular book on the Old Testament in Christianity. This, I think, discussion offered a profound insight into the current debate.

He used two NT examples of Christian engagement with the Old Testament:

- Jesus and the Rich Man - Then someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’ (Mt 19)

- Paul on Abraham in Galatians - Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed. (Gal 3)
These two passages adopt rather different understandings of the OT: the Matthew passage places the Law as the defining feature of faithful response to God; Paul, however, uses Gen 15:8 to advance his justification by faith rhetoric against the Law.
I have often heard preachers dismiss the gospel story (or any number of others, also) as Jesus encouraging the man to keep the commandments in order to show him how much he needed to have faith, and thus inherit the Kingdom. This is a fine example of the substantial misrepresentation of important canonical texts in the service of an allegedly ‘high’ doctrine of Scripture (ie, iron out any difficulties in the biblical text in order to preserve the credibility and uniformity of the whole).

But this is precisely what the text does not do. The canonical editors, in particular, make no attempt to dot all the I’s, and cross all the T’s; or to ensure that ambiguities are resolved and difficulties removed. Instead, they canonise the diverse witness of the Church and its authors.

Before returning to the current state of the Anglican Communion, a brief comment on the inerrancy debates, to which I alluded earlier.

Some Christians are deeply concerned with ‘preserving’ and ‘upholding’ the inerrancy of Scripture – ie, that Scripture contains no errors, and that any error emerges out of poor interpretation rather than ‘fault’ in the text itself (in effect, creating a position that could never be denied, even in principle – a nonsense). One of my conclusions is to suggest that this approach inhibits, rather than enhances, a searching engagement with the scriptural witness. Rather than hearing Christ’s words to the rich man as they were intended, and exploring the tension between these words and, say, Paul’s in Galatians, this tension is explained away. Easy answers are preferred to good answers, and an interpretative monopoly favoured over genuine dialogue.

Returning to the current debates concerning the place of women and homosexuals in the Anglican Communion, I think that my lecturer’s argument has something to say: diversity is canonised, and held to be scriptural by the Church. Faithful witness does not require uniformity in experience and opinion, expression and doctrine. The subject matter to which Scripture points is more mysterious than anything else in out experience, and resists the formulation of simple, monopolising interpretations. Diversity in the Anglican Communion, then, and in our experience of God seems to have some legitimacy in the scriptural texts that form a basis for the Communion’s existence in the first place. Perhaps Scripture’s own diverse and unconcluded explorations of the nature of God, humanity and the world might offer hope to a divided Church, and encourage debating with and deep listening to each other, rather than dominating each other.