The grounds of Christian hope, Part 3

You may like to read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

Imagine for a moment that a friend has promised to give you a holiday in Greece next year. What things make this promise uncertain to hope in?

I’m sure you can immediately think of some! Will Greece even exist as we know it next year? Will it be too unsafe to go? Will they have a currency stable enough for you to go?

But there are other factors as well. Will your friend be alive in 2013? Will you be alive, or will sickness instead keep you from going? Can your friend afford it? Is your friend a liar or insincere, prone to making promises he can’t keep? Or is he completely sincere now, but later he’ll change his mind?

From a human perspective, the future is always ultimately uncertain. We can only be certain about the future when it actually happens. Human promises, then, since they deal with the future, will also always have an in-built uncertainty to them. And it’s because of this that hope in someone’s promises can often feel like ‘wishful thinking’. For others this uncertainty makes hope dangerous: it’s better to have no hope at all than to endure failed hope or the revelation that one’s hope is false.

Our human experience of hope can make us cautious about biblical hope. While the uncertainty of hope is surely not the only reason, how little do you hear people speak of the Christian hope at church, at home, in Bible study, or wherever else you meet with God’s people?

Consider, in contrast, the character of God. Notice how each of the following characteristics of God triumph over uncertainty when it comes to his promises.

• God is truth; he cannot lie (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2).
• God is immortal and eternal; he cannot die (1 Tim 6:15-16; Revelation 1:8). God will always be there to do what he promises.
• God doesn’t change (Malachi 3:6); he is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). God will never change his mind about what he has promised.
• God is all-powerful. He works out everything according to his purposes (Ephesians 1:11). There is nothing that will prove beyond God’s power such that he cannot do what he has promised.
• God is all-knowing and all-present (Psalm 139); nothing is beyond his reach or knowledge such that his promises will be thwarted.

God is purposeful: his promises are not idle, but perfectly reflect his desires. If God lacked any one of the above qualities, we could not ultimately trust him. It is only as these aspects of him are held together that we can cast all our hope upon his promises. Unlike us, God’s being, his acts, and his word perfectly cohere.

When God promises something, it is very different from a human promise. In every single one of these characteristics, God is different from us. And these characteristics of God together triumph over uncertainty.

In other words, God is utterly faithful.

I’ve often heard preachers declare that, unlike human hope, biblical hope is certain. Yet the proof they give is grounded in the supposed meaning of the word. They say something like: “the biblical word for ‘hope’ conveys certainty, unlike our ‘hope’ which is ‘wishful thinking’”. Not only is it incorrect (the biblical word conveys no such thing; it’s a root fallacy, where the context is imported into and becomes the inherent meaning of the word), but it sadly misses out on something far better. The Christian hope is not certain because of linguistics; the Christian hope is certain because God is faithful.

This habit to turn to semantics over God himself could be said for ‘love’ in Scripture also. How many times have you heard agape-love described as ‘sacrificial love’? Our appeal to the meaning of the word is the word itself. agape means no such thing. Our understanding of love comes from God. It is he who teaches us what love is when we behold he himself (1 John 4:9-11).

The grounds of Christian hope is God himself (he is also ultimately the object of it too; see Briefing #387). These self-same characteristics of God are also the proper grounds for Biblical Theology and Salvation History, but that’s for another time. They are also the grounds for faith to, which is closely related to hope, but again, that’s for another time.

When we are tempted to doubt the promises of God, and when we seek to assure another of the promises of God, let’s triumph over uncertainty by pointing to God himself. When we look beyond ourselves to him, our hesitation about putting our hope in him will recede; as we dwell upon his nature, we’ll cultivate the certainty of hope.

In the next few posts, I want to explore how Scripture gives us confidence to hope as it points to the faithfulness of God not in abstract, but in history.

The grounds of Christian hope, Part 2

You can read Part one here. 

My PhD research is on the nature of prophecy in Deuteronomy. One of the things that piqued my interest in this area of research is the almost universal disregard that scholarship has for the usefulness of Deuteronomy 18:21-22. These two verses answer the question of how to identify false prophecy; the answer is non-fulfilment:

²¹ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’ — ²² when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.

The reason why most scholars across the theological spectrum dismiss this criterion of discernment as naïve (sometimes quite vehemently) is because it appears to be useless. If I have to wait until a prophecy is fulfilled (or not) to know whether it is true (or not), then surely by the time I have certainty it is too late to act upon it.

There are all kinds of answers to this ‘problem’ (sorry, you’ll have to wait for the PhD!), but let me touch on one aspect of the issue. Leaving aside the question of the criterion’s usefulness ‘in the moment’, whether we like the rule or not the criterion actually nails the issue of certainty with dead accuracy. From our human perspective, the future is inherently uncertain. We simply cannot guarantee the future. Even the most stable and seemingly safe expectations for the future (that I will still be alive tomorrow) may be taken from us (Luke 12:16-21). We can only really know that something will happen when it actually does happen.

Hope, then, because it deals with the future, is also always uncertain. We can only know if our hope is true when what we hope for actually occurs.

How God mitigates our uncertainty and gives us grounds for hope is what the rest of these posts are about. But let’s dwell for a moment on the ‘fulfilment’ principle of certainty when it comes to the promises of God, because Deuteronomy 18:21-22 is not a one-off abstract principle in Scripture.

Consider Moses’ encounter with God in Exodus 3. When Moses questions his role as God’s servant to do what God has promised (to confront Pharaoh and bring Israel out of Egypt), what is the proof that God gives Moses to show Moses that he has indeed sent Moses? It’s fulfilment: Moses will know when Israel worships God on this mountain (Exodus 3:10-12). It’s not the only thing God does in that passage, but it is the primary thing. God himself submits himself to this ‘criterion of fulfilment’.

As I say, the rest of these posts are concerned with demonstrating the ways in which God graciously triumphs over the predicament of our inherent uncertainty about the future. But if we fail to recognise the ‘problem’ of hope and uncertainty, then we’ll miss some of the other things Scripture uses to describe our future. The day of Christ will be a day of revelation, where what is seen in part will be seen fully; where all things are laid bare and seen for what they are. On the day Jesus returns fulfilment comes, and with fulfilment will come the vindication of the truth of God’s promises – to his glory and our eternal satisfaction.

The Bible is content with, and in fact promotes, an eschatalogical view of final certainty.

 ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

(Romans 8:24-25)

Hope is an eager expectation and desire for the future. When we have hope, we long to have what we do not yet have; we long to meet up with he or she whom we have not yet met up with; we long to have come to pass that which has not yet come to pass. Hope is an everyday activity, although it is perhaps most easily spotted in children: Christmas, birthdays, special treats or special adventures (as the Newlings call them, anyway!).

Whereas anxiety fears for the future, and despair cannot see a future, hope instead desires the future. Of course, in our murky experience, hope and anxiety can comingle – as we wait for test results, for instance. For some of us, we can also pre-emptively comingle despair with our hope and anxiety, where we experience despair before we know the outcome of a meeting or test result. More usually, despair is what kicks in when our hopes are proven false: our hopes are shattered and we cannot see a way forward.

Although hope looks to the future, the nature of hope is such that it determines our present (as do anxiety or despair). In the hope spoken of in Romans 8:24-25, for instance, it engenders ‘patient waiting’ (which should not be contrasted with ‘eager longing’, which is also spoken of in Romans 8). Hope shapes and defines our lives in the present as we act in accordance with our expectations of the future. And again, we see the effects of our hopes every day, even if we call them by other names like ‘expectations’ or ‘wishes’, and even if they remain as ‘unstated expectations or assumptions’. Hope shapes our decisions, our demeanour, and our dialogue.

The Bible deals with the future on a cosmic and eternal scale. Because God is the creator of all things, only he can tell us the significance of creation: where it is heading and for what purpose. And yet, because the Bible deals with the future of all of creation, it therefore deals with our futures on a personal level, since we are part of this creation too. This hope on a dual cosmic-personal scale is again seen in Romans 8. Paul states:

 ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. ²³ And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

(Romans 8:19-23)

The aim of this short series is to provide some reflections on the grounds of the Christian hope. What gives us confidence to hope as we do (assuming we do hold to the Christian hope, rather than our own hopes for our eternal future)? Conversely, then, the aim of this short series is not to speak about the object of our hope (that is, what we have hope in). I’ve largely written about that previously in an article about ‘heaven’ and the new creation (Briefing #387).

In reality, if the Christian hope is to be cultivated in our lives, we need dwell both on the glory of the object of our hope and on the glory of the grounds of our hope. We’ll only grow in our longing for the Christian future if we actually fix our eyes on it; but we’ll only grow in the confidence of our hope if we fix our eyes on the reasons (grounds) why we can have such hope at all. The extent to which we embrace and permit ourselves to be ‘enthralled’ by the Christian future depends on both of these factors.

What God has in store for us is so glorious it should capture us on the mere telling of it. In this broken world, however, we are well wary of false hopes, of wishful thinking, and of failed hopes. We need confidence to embrace the hope God has laid out for us, and in his grace God gives us that confidence in abundance.

I will, however, say two brief and general things by way of the object of our hope in the remainder of this post.

First, we must never reduce significance of what we hope for merely to the present. Hope shapes and defines our present, without a doubt, but at the same time it preserves the object of our hope as a good thing in and of itself. We dwell on the future God has promised us, not merely because of what it cultivates now, but because the future is good in and of itself! In other words, even if the Christian hope had no ‘here and now’ effects, it would still be an entirely wonderful and glorious thing to fix our eyes upon. If the only value we can see in hope is its pragmatic value (how it makes life ‘work’ now), we’ve not understood the Christian hope at all.

Second, and related to this, we must resist the temptation to buy into the view that ‘the journey is more important than the destination’. It’s a classic high-school English kind of topic; and so much of our literature and movies is founded upon it: action or romance (or both together, more often than not), our movies focus on the struggle and the development of the relationship, not on what happens afterwards. How many sequels involve the love interest moving on in-between films so that a new journey towards relationship can be shown through the sequel?

This view of the journey being more important than the destination appeals deeply to our experience. How many of us have children (or ourselves when we were children) who longed for that special toy at Christmas, only for it to be forgotten by New Year (or Boxing Day)? Of our team to win the cup, only for … what exactly, afterwards? Can anyone say that their latest electronic device, when long hoped for, is ultimately satisfying? Why do we upgrade rather than replace, then? As a tool, they’re great (or not!), but as an end in themeselves … not so much. The object of our hopes can be so fleeting, so unfulfilling, that they don’t satisfy (and, for another day, it would be worth exploring the relationship between hope, contentment, greed and envy).

I will write later about the ‘journey’ and the Christian hope – it is a vital thing, after all (Romans 5:1-5). But we must never buy the lie that the journey is more important than where we are heading. If we do, we’ll never embrace our Christian future fully.

God has in store for us a future that alone is satisfying and fulfilling beyond our ability to comprehend. If this true, the question we need to ask is: how can I be certain of the future?

Are we devoted to the public reading of Scripture? Part 8

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. (1 Tim 4:13)

This is the final post in Scott’s series on the public reading of Scripture. You may want to read the first part, the second part, the third part, the fourth part, the fifth part, the sixth part, or the seventh part of this series.

As we move into the last post in this series, I want us to finally ask what ‘public’ reading involves.

Technically, ‘public’ doesn’t occur in the verse, as older translations will testify to. But the sense of ‘reading’ in its historical-linguistic context implies an audibility, and the clear context of the chapter is Timothy’s responsibility within the church.

‘Public’, then, means ‘out loud in the presence of others’. It’s not a comment on reading the Bible out loud to non-Christians (more about this in a moment), nor is he trying to make a comment about reading in church as opposed to private reading; Bible scrolls were rarer compared to our day, and if the Bible was to be known to all, it needed to be read out loud to all.

I hope you can see from the last post, however, that, whatever the benefit of private reading, it is public reading in church that promotes and expresses our present heavenly/future reality.

I hope you can also see that gifted Bible reading in the presence of others—with whom we can discuss it and pray—is of more value than private Bible reading (as valuable as that is!). You see, we have a tendency in our sinfulness to deceive ourselves (Heb 3:12-13). We need each other to prevent ourselves from hearing God’s voice and yet hardening our hearts against it. In fact, we have a responsibility to each other for this (this is why Psalm 95, which Hebrews 3-4 keeps returning to, was chosen to be read in every Anglican prayer book service).

But these verses also assume that we do this daily (Heb 3:13), and the first Christians did exactly that (Acts 2:26)—just like any family would. And so we return to our Reformed heritage, which, you may recall from an earlier post, assumed that Christians would meet day and night every day, to hear God’s word and to pray.

Here, then, is the hard challenge before us: can we become so devoted to the public reading of Scripture that we regain daily meeting to do this? I have no idea how to bring about such radical change—the departure from the workaholism and the materialism of the world would be significant. I’m not saying we must go there overnight, but I am wondering if we can make steps in that direction. We’ll only ever go there, however, if we are devoted to God and his word, and are truly enthralled by the glory of such activity.

Having watched the Tour de France for a few years, and now exploring bits of England, I’m starting to understand what village life may have entailed in an agrarian culture. Everyone lived in the village, within a couple of hundred meters of each other, and went out into the fields each morning, returning each evening. Churches were almost universally at the heart of the village. In such a society, it is very easy to frame the beginning and end of a day with a short time of public Bible reading and prayer—everyone is in transit and close to each other at the same time every day. At the heart of the village, it is also readily accessible for non-Christians to listen in, or be invited in. A prayer book for morning and evening prayer (not Sunday morning prayer) is entirely explicable in such a culture.

We no longer live in such a society. We travel great distances for work, and work beyond the times the sun sets, we travel at different times, and our networks are disparate; whom I live amongst is almost entirely different to whom I work with.

Yet here are some thoughts for what we might do:

• Start early. My god-daughter and her Christian friends decided to read the Bible together at school, off their own bat. They see each other every day and have a lot of discretionary time. How great would it be if our Christian brothers and sisters at school learnt the habit early of reading the Bible together—no frills, but letting God be heard, regularly and consistently?
• How great would it be if this continued through to university groups? Again, a very high amount of discretionary time, used for the sake of God being made known. And, like the school context, the university café is ‘in the marketplace’, where non-Christians can readily hear and be invited to hear God speak.
• Many people catch the train to work, and I know lots of Christians that get specific trains and carriages to be with other Christians—most non-Christians seek out train-line friendship groups too. Again, we have a regular, daily, ‘marketplace context’ for Christians to read the Bible publicly together. No preparation, nothing fancy, but God’s magisterial presence and breath-taking power at work on a daily basis.
• For Christian mothers dropping their children off at school. The school gate post-drop off and pre-pick up is again loaded with opportunities.
• For Christian shopkeepers to open their shop 15 minutes early so Christians in the local marketplace can come to read the Bible together? Or those in the CBDs, to transform the city work and prayer triplets into daily Bible readings and prayer?
• For ministers who have church buildings on the train line, in the      literal marketplace, and next to schools (which is many of us), to open our buildings and host such pre- and post- peak hour meetings daily?

Pipe dreams? Unrealistic? Too much? The early church didn’t think so. The Reformers didn’t think so either. Perhaps we need to think more creatively than they, but if an uncreative person like myself can come up with some ideas, think what we might do together. Yes, there are lots of issues to consider (like, how Bible study groups and training courses fit in with all this), but it’d be a shame if we let some questions prevent us from action. It’d be shame if, because point ‘e’ seems so far away from point ‘a’, that we failed to make the easy steps to points b, c, and d in the meantime (like the suggestions in my second post).

All it takes is for us to not shrink back in fear, but to be brave, and strive for God’s voice to be heard in this world. All it takes is for us to trust that God’s sheep know the shepherd’s voice, and he’ll call his people to himself. All it takes is those of us who are devoted to the public reading of Scripture to be devoted, and delight in God as he does his work.

2 Comments »

Gary Ware

Scott,
Thanks for this series of posts.
Although I support the line that you’ve taken from the outset, I’ve still appreciated the comprehensive and practical way that you’ve sought to explore and unpack what a commitment to public reading of the Scriptures should mean for a local church.
I trust the practice will be a blessing to the folk you serve and to you.

Ellen Hrebeniuk

The trick with this will be to avoid the ‘holy huddle’ problem.  If I’m off reading the Bible with the Christian mothers I know, I’m not with the non-Christian mothers I don’t know.  Frankly, I’d prefer to deepen relationships with the second group—but perhaps that’s another consequence of the no-longer-village lifestyle: I just don’t have enough time with anyone!

Are we devoted to the public reading of Scripture? Part 7

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. (1 Tim 4:13)

This is the seventh post in Scott’s series on the public reading of Scripture. You may want to read the first part, the second part, the third part, the fourth part, the fifth part and the sixth part of this series.

We are in deeply serious trouble if I have to justify the need for devotion to the public reading of Scripture. They sound like fighting words, don’t they? But they’re not. They’re words of plea, with tears in my eyes, that you let God be heard. He doesn’t need us of course, but surely the sheep who know their shepherd’s voice would want to hear that voice as often as they can.

So, if you’ve been asking the question “Why should I bother with this?”, or saying to yourself “Nice thoughts, Scott, but it’s not for me“, then this is the post for you. For all of us, I hope this post will help you understand why I’m so passionate about this, and, I hope, give you the same fervour.

First, God’s word is more than God’s word about himself (although it is that!). When we encounter God’s word we encounter God himself. We meet God in/by/through/with the word. Even if the Bible were only a word about God it ought to be the source of our greatest delight. How much more when we realize that we actually meet God with the word!

Second, God’s word is more than God’s word about his plans and purposes (although it is that!). God’s word brings God’s plans and purposes about. God’s word and God’s Spirit go together; God’s word unfailingly achieves whatever purpose God has sent it out for (Isa 55:10-11). God’s word is living and active (Heb 4:12); not just sufficient for all matters of faith and conduct (2 Tim 3:14-17), but efficient for all matters of faith and conduct also.

Third, that word is life to us. We live by God’s word. But if we are to be devoted to the public reading of Scripture, if we are to be consistent with our doctrine of Scripture, we must reflect an active, deliberate desire for all Scripture to be read, because we know and trust both that God’s word is eternal (1 Pet 1:23-25), and also that “man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut 8:3).

These things don’t happen when our Bibles are closed and on the shelf, or in the pew in front of us. They happen when the Bible is read.

Now you may choose to say at this point that this doesn’t necessitate public reading of the Bible. Perhaps not; silent reading by myself at home will do these things too (more of this in the final post). But let’s observe what God’s plans and purposes are, and why he is making himself present amongst us:

God’s plan and purpose is to gather a people to himself, to his glory. He is creating a people to dwell amongst. If we meet God in his Word (the Son, who comes to us clothed in God’s word in Scripture), and God’s word brings this about, then church (God’s gathering), for it to reflect its present heavenly and future reality and the reason God brought it into being, must actively promote the presence of God’s word, not minimize it. There are all kinds of ways we “let the word of Christ dwell in us richly” (Col 3:16-17), but it seems to me logical that a large component of that would actually be the reading of the Bible to each other. Further, it would be very odd indeed if we were to promote private reading of Scripture at the expense of or without promoting or guaranteeing public reading, if the desire of the God we meet in said word, and the purpose he is bringing about by said word, is a people who are gathered around him, whom we meet in his word/son – that is, a corporate reality.

I’ve stated these breath-takingly majestic realities very briefly. But I implore you to spend a few minutes reflecting on them. There is so much that could be said about each. And there is so much else that could be said too on the benefits of devotion to public Bible reading – a few of which I’ve listed below:

• It gives an opportunity for God’s word to be heard by the illiterate amongst us (there are usually a few, and if we include those who really struggle to read (it is a gift not everyone has), then there are far more than a few).
• It gives an opportunity for those who are blind, or mentally ill (unable to bring themselves to read) to hear God speak.
• It gives the church Bible literacy once again: we reverse the downward spiral into Bible ignorance, making it hard to understand the Bible, and create an upward spiral, whereby our increasing familiarity with the Bible makes it easier to understand the Bible and thirst for more.
• It corrects some of the workaholic excesses of some ministries, as we learn to sit and hear God speak, and let his Word and Spirit grow the kingdom in ways beyond our imagining.

I’m sure you can think of others; I’m sure I’ve mentioned some in previous posts too. My plea and one desire is that we let God speak as much as we can, so all can hear, and so we can sit under him to learn, know, be transformed, and delight in him. But it’s actually God’s plea, too, isn’t it?

“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live …

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:1-11)

12 Comments »

Mark Calder

One of the many interesting (and humbling) things about coming to Brisbane Diocese is the realisation that the time given in the Sunday gathering to the public reading of Scripture is a far greater proportion of the total time than in many Sydney churches (including Roseville when I was there). We read an Old Testmant reading, a Psalm, a reading from the Epistles and one from the Gospels each week. The public reading itself can take up to 10 minutes!

I have found it encouraging and challenging!

Sarah Dorber

Truly inspiring posts that ring with convicting truth. Thanks to God for giving you the heart to post this series Scott.

Gordon Cheng

Great stuff, Scott. May we be humbled, rebuked and changed by the public reading of God’s word. At the very least, may we start doing it again!

If our passion for preaching displaces our passion for God’s word, we are at best not thinking through why we believe preaching is so important. Failing that, we are Barthian in that we are identifying our preaching with the very word of God, and it all goes downhill from there.

Roger Gallagher

Hi Scott,

I’m part of the leadership group for a proposed new congregation my church wants to start next year. I thought that your series would be good for us to think through, and so forwarded a link to this post to the other leaders. One of them raised concerns with some of the language used, which they’ve allowed me to reproduce:

“That was an interesting article, but challenging. I don’t really understand “When we encounter God’s word we encounter God himself” as though he is manifested in the words..? I can understand that as we read the word it is God speaking to us and the Spirit helping us to understand and things, but this sounds like more than that? Also where it says that we meet God in his “word/son” as though they are the same thing? I know John 1 says Jesus is the Word, and that all of the Bible points to or is about Jesus, but still… I’m finding this difficult and don’t feel right thinking God is words on a page! Can someone direct me to some more reading on this, please?”

Would you mind responding to their concerns?

Scott Newling

Hi Roger,

Thanks for passing on these questions – they are very much worth thinking through, and as I said, I put it very briefly in the post, which has led, at least with the second one, to a little bit of carelessness of expression.

I’m sure I’m going to be careless in expression here too – so invite panelists who know better than me to reshape / articulate better / correct what I’m about to say

I’m going to try and answer them without getting into some fairly technical discussion. For the theologically trained amongst us, what I said should be fairly clear anyway (especially as we think about such things as Act and Being, and Word, and the simplicity of God, etc): as Robert Doyle keeps helpfully reminding his students, ‘word is mode of God’s being, not a mode or the mode, but mode’.

What I was trying to summarise is that we have a tendency to separate out various things belonging to God’s nature and acts (and speech), to create a distance or a space between them that isn’t there biblically (ie, theologically).

To give you some examples, this is perhaps most obviously seen in the unwitting (although sometimes witting too) splintering of the Trinity that goes on in Christian circles. God is one, which means that any act of God is always a trinitarian act. Each person is involved in any act because God is one: we can’t separate him out from himself; each person is involved distinctly, but they are involved. We must therefore seek to fully integrate our understanding of their activity yet without collapsing the distinction between them.

We know this in creation, for instance: all things are from the Father, all things are through the Word, and by the Spirit (Gen 1:2, 1 Cor 8:6). Again, we know it in prayer: we pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. And so on. Distinct roles, but unified.

But when it comes to gifts, for instance, Christians tend to think that it is a particular thing the Spirit does. But the Father gives gifts in Romans 12, the Son gives gifts in Ephesians 4, and the Spirit manifests them in 1 Cor 12. Gift-giving, like all God’s activity, is a trinitarian activity, not a unique ministry of the Spirit.

The one that provides the greatest danger to us at the moment, however, is the distance people have put between the Spirit and the Word/Son. The two go together (eg, Ps 33:6 puts it nicely, or Eph 6:17). But people tend to look for the Son/Word of God in one place, and the Spirit of God in another, which has led to all kinds of aberations.

Coming back to the issue of meeting God, then.

Even from the second century (Irenaeus), Christians have been recognising the biblical testimony that only God can make God known. When we think of this trinitarianly, the only way we know the Father is through the Son (Jn 1:17, 14:6f etc, Matt 11:27, etc). It is the Son/Word of God who makes the Father known. If we have the Son we have the Father also. He doesn’t say something about God or give us a glimpse of God, but, in the words of the hymn the Son is ‘God revealing God to man’. He is ‘the exact representation of his being’ (Heb 1:3)

Which means there is no going behind or around Jesus to know God: the God we meet in Jesus is God. Which means our knowledge of God is always personal, always Christ-oriented, and always salvific (in the context of the saving work of the gospel). There is no truly knowing God without experiencing God himself.

Our present knowledge / experience of his presence is marred in this overlap of the ages, to be sure, but here is where we hold the great hope of the return of Christ and the new creation (see this month’s Briefing for two articles on this): the day Jesus returns is known in Scripture as the day of revelation; furthermore, our experience of the new creation is to be in the presence of God, where we will know fully as we are already fully known (1 Cor 13). The revelation of God and the presence of God (Word / Act / Being) need to be held together, not separated out.

But what about the Bible (and the Spirit!)?

The Bible is the testimony of the Spirit to the Son. It is the Spirit of God by whom the prophets wrote (1 Pet 1:10-12, 2 Peter 1:19-21), and they were testifying to Jesus (1 Pet 1:10-12, 2 Cor 1:20, etc). And it is by the Spirit of God that the apostles testify to and eye-witness to Jesus (Acts 1:1-11 … notice the oddities of exactly how Jesus teaches them in those 40 days, etc), such that the apostles saw themselves as not communicating a new word, but simply making clear as eye-witnesses to Jesus, all that was written about him in the OT (Rom 16:24-27, 2 Cor 1:20, etc).

All Scripture, then, is God-spirited (2 Tim 3:16). It is God’s testimony about God that we may meet God; it is the Spirit’s testimony about the Son that we might know the Father.

Scott Newling

So the Word of God Inscripturate is distinct from the Word of God Incarnate, but the two are inseparable: as Calvin puts it, Christ comes to us clothed in the gospel promises. If I want to meet Christ, the Word of God incarnate, I must and can only meet him in the Word of God inscripturate; if I read the Word of God inscripturate, I meet the Word of God incarnate.

Perhaps the easier way to put it is like this:

Where can I go to meet God?

We meet God in Jesus, and him alone (actually, that’s a question from the OT, and the answer then was the temple: the symbol of God dwelling with his people. For us to meet God we meet him in his temple – Jesus (Jn 1:14, 2:22?), our Immanuel (‘God amongst us’)).

But where can I go to meet Jesus?

The Bible – the Spirit’s word about him. The apostles had a unique privilege – blessed are we who have not seen and yet believe (John 20 and Thomas).

This is why the Bible is so fundamental to our present earthly expressions of church. Our heavenly reality is that we are presently gathered around God in Christ in the heavenly realms, united to Christ by the Spirit; to express that now, we gather around God in Christ – whom we meet in the Spirit’s word about Christ.

I hope this short explanation explains some of my short-hand in these posts, which can get a bit confusing without this background!

But I hope you can see also that it is a mistake to create a space or a distance between the Bible as God’s word, and encountering God himself. As the Bible is read (the Spirit’s word about the Son – the Spirit who has united me to Christ), then I have the Son – and if I have the Son, then I have the Father also, in whose presence I am spiritually already.

If all this is too confusing, probably the best place to head is Deuteronomy 4. There, as Israel come before God, as God descends on the mountain, their experience of God’s presence is his voice.

And to bring it back into our present discussion of the public reading of Scripture: God’s presence/word at Sinai to the people gathered around him is the first place in the Bible that is described by the word ‘church’.

Tim Wilcoxson

“…With tears in my eyes, that you let God be heard. He doesn’t need us of course, but surely the sheep who know their shepherd’s voice would want to hear that voice as often as they can.”

This is a non-sequitar.

The logic goes:

Sally loves God, therefore Sally should love what God says, and God does “say” something in the Bible, therefore Sally should agree to x amount and y type of public Scripture reading.

The premise doesn’t match the conclusion. If people love the Word of God it will have a prominent place in the service, as well as in private, and conversational life, but it doesn’t necessitate the exact requirements you have made.

Goodness, give people liberty in the way they express their devotedness to Scripture. The congregation I am a part of meets several times a week, and our meetings are Bible-centric (including reading and studying the Sacred Text). However, we simply don’t match exact structure of public reading you have been mentioning in your posts. And based on your very specific conclusions, it implies we (and a lot of faithful, Bible-saturated people) must not love the Shepard’s voice. Perhaps you didn’t intend this, but it certainly comes off that way.

I think your posts are well meaning and somewhat helpful. However, they are bit bombastic and cocky. This is what happens when you make specific, absolutist requirements without clear biblical justification, and instead make emotional appeals (tears in eyes, if you really love the Shepard, etc etc).

Also for your consideration, better reading instead if simply MORE reading.

Frankly there is more of a dearth of prayer life than there is of Bible reading in the Church in my opinion. Maybe that is just in the U.S though.

Nonetheless, thank you for the challenge presented in your posts.

Despite my objections I appreciate and value you.

Much love.

Scott Newling

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your input.

Somewhat ironically, you’ve badly misread both my tone and what this whole series is about.

I invite you to re-read my posts, out loud, and this time replace ‘cocky’ and ‘bombastic’ with ‘quiet sincerity’ in your tone as you read me. The image of a ‘cocky and bombastic Scott’ is not only bewildering, but somewhat bemusing too – and I don’t say that carelessly or cockily either!

Sadly, you’ve taken my sincere attempt at qualifying the emotion of the posts as being sinister in effect. It’s not wrong to express and describe emotion when writing (eg, was Paul wrong, Phil 3:18, 2 Cor 2:4, etc), and it has to be taken at face value.

My apologies if you have taken the ‘you’ of the relevant sentence as being general – the ambiguities of pronouns! It follows on from the end of the previous post, and, as mentioned in a previous discussion, these latter posts are addressed to the hypothetical minimiser of scripture in church to a few verses per week.

I hope that re-reading me in light of these observations will help you see also how far your summarisation of my argument is away from what is going on here – and how most people have understood me (ie, I don’t think I’ve been too confounding in how I’ve written it, although maybe I have – online is a difficult medium for communication). Absolutist requirements (that lack scriptural justification) is not even remotely where we’re at in this series. It’s a series aimed at providing wisdom for people (conscious my experience will likely only have affinity with a particular church heritage) to work out a biblical mandate, of what devotion to scripture looks like in practice, of what actions accompany the heart and mind that is devoted to Scripture.

And yes, to be sure, it’s a series that is a rebuke for some, who live, as mentioned several times in the posts, with the knowledge that there can be a distinction between what is in our hearts and what is in our practice. It rebukes me like that too. And for all of us in that boat: yes, I am saying we need to change.

But I’d be a fool if I said ‘change is needed’ but then never gave suggestions (both short term easy one within easy reach of my particular heritage, and long term big dream scenarios) of how to go about it.

Thanks again,

S.

Tim Wilcoxson

Scott,

I think you misunderstood me on an important point. I don’t think you are a cocky and bombastic as a person. I simply mean that the way you write at times has great potential to sound cocky, which I think is owing to a lack of qualification. I apologize if the words I used were hurtful. That wasn’t my intention. I should have qualified my own statement more.

You point out an apparent lack of public scripture reading, and then you conclude by implication that the problem is a lack of love or affection for Scripture, or possibly a lack of confidence in the clarity of Scripture. Perhaps a church doesn’t do 20 minutes public reading of genealogies, however they have bible memory programs, classes on proper hermeneutics, private reading programs, and longer chapter readings as the basis of the exposition. There is an apparent love for Scripture expressed in those various practices without having the public readings as you described. Your logic appears to say “since they don’t have public readings as I described, they must not love Scripture or trust the clarity of Scripture.”  With further clarification I may grant that this is not what you meant.

Another note, several readings with a completely different context can feel like several sermons being preached in one limited space of time. A person feeds on Scripture through concentrated meditation as opposed to quickly reading and moving onto the next thing. It may not be good to split your attention on multiple themes brought up in the various passages read.  Should Psalm 119:15 be lived out in the service? What does a good meditative environment look like in regards to public reading? Is it possible to meditate properly if your moving from one things to the other with little time for private or public reflection?

To sum up, I cannot argue with more Bible. I can only say a hearty Amen! I just want to define what “public reading” must mean for the local church without being excessively narrow (unless warranted by Scripture).

Thank you for the exhortation to more Scripture.

Scott Newling

Hi Tim,

Thanks for taking the time to reply and clarify – that’s helpful.

Yes, you’re right, everyone exists in very different church contexts and backgrounds with practices I’ve not touched on remotely, and my series will I’m sure at times sound quite odd to those in a very different context: both in the presenting issues, underlying causes, and ideas for solution. As I said at the outset, my only experience of church has largely been the trends of some sydney anglican churches (and those with an affinity to them): everyone else is in many ways just listening in.

For those within this context, or with understanding of it, the picture I painted of church life, where it is entirely possible for a person to hear somewhere between 7-15 verses in an entire week no matter how many various meetings they attend (because everything doubles up on the same short reading at church): this is where some churches have ended up, and others are heading in that direction.

At this point, yes, I do believe that there is a quantitative aspect to devotion to PRS (cf: third post where I define devotion as having ‘maximising tendencies’ rather than minimising ones). What that quantity is is like asking how long a piece of string is; what I have done is shown what heritage Sydney anglicans have: BCP 1662 and back to 1552, to show how they thought of PRS, and how remarkable a difference there is.

As that mirror is held up, what does it reveal? Not as a trump over other practices (private, family readings, preaching, teaching), but as an outworking of 1 Tim 4:13.

Anyway, much more to say, but as I prepare this material for a differnt context, your comments are helpful to try to reframe for a more general audience. Thanks, S.

Tim Wilcoxson

“At this point, yes, I do believe that there is a quantitative aspect to devotion to PRS (cf: third post where I define devotion as having ‘maximising tendencies’ rather than minimising ones).”

That is helpful to emphasize. I am glad you brought that up. That is certainly clarifying.

I don’t know that I have ever been exposed to Sydney Anglicans – very interesting.

Lawrence Tang

With reference to Scott’s and Roger’s discussion on separation between God and the Bible,

I think many churches and their members see relating to our Lord through prayer and “listening” to his small still voice. They see these activities as dynamic and I suspect “älive”. Reading scripture on the other hand is less “exciting”. It needs to be understood in context, checked with other Scripture and applied thoughtfully in our lives. While I am not advocating the former, I have to admit the practice is very real in our churches today. As a result of this seperation, the reading of God’s Word does drop back into the background. There is a great need to demonstrate that God speaks today and through his Word and understanding his Word is no less powerful than having God “speak”to that person (you know what I mean).

I am not going to say that the christian life is about trying to see how exciting stuff can pop out of Bible readings (though often times God does that), but there needs to be a consciousness while going through scripture that interpreting it and understanding it does not make the message any less real and relevant. And this urgently needs to be taught where I come from.

May God help us do that.

Are we devoted to the public reading of Scripture? Part 6

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. (1 Tim 4:13)

This is the sixth post in Scott’s series on the public reading of Scripture. You may want to read the first part, the second part, the third part, the fourth part, and the fifth part of this series.

In my last post, I made one observation about why we perhaps don’t change in this matter: fear. There is another, although not one I say easily. It’s a simple reason, if appalling; perhaps some aren’t devoted to the public reading of Scripture because they no longer believe it’s worthwhile. The next post will dwell much on the infinite worth of reading the Bible to each other. But first, to our possible unbelief.

When you go to church, at what point in the meeting do you expect God to do his work of transformation in your life? Further, as you think about the way the meeting is organized and structured, and the way various elements are arranged and contextualized, where does your minister teach you to expect the work of God’s Spirit to occur?

As in all these posts, may I humbly ask you, please, to not answer the question with what you know to be true, but answer the question with what you have come to expect (i.e., depend or rely on; or have faith in, in other words).

My guess is that, for many, the honest answer to those questions is the sermon. Don’t for a minute hear me dis Bible teaching! But I’m hoping you can see the glaring issue here: what about the rest of the meeting? Isn’t all our speech to be such that we “let the word of Christ dwell in [us] richly” (Col 3:16-17)? (I have some posts on this next year with regards to singing.) But most particularly: shouldn’t we expect God to change us in the very reading of the Bible, not just the preaching of it?

For various reasons, I fear that we no longer expect this. Of course, I can’t tell you what you think! But I can draw attention to trends in church practice which are the outworking of our hearts and minds (wittingly or not). So let me share some indicators which have convinced me why I think we need to spur one another to individual and corporate repentance in this matter, where needed.

Have you ever noticed how we tend to pray to understand God’s word after the Bible reading and before the sermon? Have you noticed how our relaxed liturgy often means that that prayer opens with “As we come to hear your word now …”? That the focus of the prayer is directed to what is to come (the sermon) as opposed to what was just heard (the Bible). It’s great to pray to understand God’s word. But what does the location, vocabulary, tense and tone of that prayer teach the congregation about where we think the ‘action’ is?

Combine this with further habits in our meetings. How many times have you heard the service leader say “In a moment Scott is going to get up and preach to us tonight’s passage. But before he does that Calvin and Aidan will read the Bible to us?” (i.e., the trajectory of where we are heading is the sermon, not the Bible in itself). More, the sermon runs for around 10-15 times the length of the Bible reading(s) (Again, I love longer sermons, so don’t hear me as disparaging that)? What do these things reveal about our priorities; is Bible reading held in as high importance and delight as the sermon? Is the Bible reading—in the moment of the reading—a place we expect God to refine us?

Does this sound anything like your church? What do these verbal/structural habits teach a church over time? What do they reveal about what we unwittingly (or wittingly) believe is going on in church as far as the work of God’s Spirit goes? As in the last post, everything we do in church communicates theology, consciously or not, and it is imbibed, consciously or not.

So the question, then, is this: as the Bible is read to us, do we rejoice (with trembling) as we listen—that we are hearing the living God who transforms us into his glory? Or is it merely the preparation for what the speaker is going to preach on, and that is where God will ‘do his thing’? Unless we can get this clear, we’ll never be devoted to the public reading of Scripture.

The strict one-to-one correspondence between what is read and what is preached does not help us here. I’m not for a minute saying we stop reading what we are preaching on—not at all! But I am saying that we need Bible reading that is independent of the sermon too. We need to teach each other to be enthusiastic for Scripture in its own right.

Aside from knowing the perversity of my own heart, the thing that first started to convince me that our churches have learnt this deafness all too well is when they ask pastorally, after church, or publicly during question time, what the point of having the second Bible reading was. In their minds, the second Bible reading is only relevant if it ties in with the sermon. And if the preacher doesn’t mention it, why did we bother with it? And if it is a reading independent of the other passage, even more so. When this begins to crop up, I can’t help but suspect that, in people’s hearts, public Bible reading has been reduced to an adjunct to preaching. And for those of us who are elders, we share in responsibility for that, for having taught them that in how we conduct the ministry of the Word.

Is this sad lack of perceived relevance why churches have gone to one Bible reading? What confirms my fears, however, is when I have raised this issue with lay people and pastors. When people have responded with a reluctance to have more Bible reading in church, it is universally because they believe that people won’t understand it if it stands on its own. And so we return to the clarity of Scripture. The clarity of Scripture doesn’t preclude a blurb that gives context, a couple of questions to ask as the passage is read, and prayer after it. But—let’s face it for what it is—the lack of faith by ministers of the Word that the congregation can understand (by God’s grace) the Bible which God chose to write as he did (the depths of Zechariah was God’s choice)—places significant question marks over what people really believe the relationship between Scripture and preaching and the Spirit is in ministry.

Let’s be clear; what are very good intentions (preaching from the Bible, not from the air; tying the readings together to show the interconnectedness of Scripture) are in danger of devolving into a place no one with a high view of Scripture can go: we’re in danger of supplanting the Bible with preaching, rather than holding them both, together, in high place and esteem in our practice. And in some places this is happening already, with sermons that subsume the reading within them, and services without Bible readings. And when you change church practice, theology follows.

As I said, it’s not with casualness that I write these things. If this isn’t you, praise God! But, being conscious of it, will you be a safeguard for those for whom it is, and guard your church against it? Whatever the case, let’s remember that we simply read a tiny amount, publicly, compared to the Reformers; whatever the case, we need to seek for answers of how we’ve ended up here. Is there a theologically-driven reason why churches are heading down the one reading route? Is there a theologically-driven reason why churches are increasingly pairing Bible study groups with the sermon series? If not, have we unwittingly let pragmatics determine practice, and now that practice is determining belief? How anaemic are our churches because we refuse to let God speak for himself?

9 Comments »

Anthony Douglas

I can’t remember if I’ve said this in this series already, but just in case I haven’t:

My practice is to have a second reading, which is explicitly a systematic series from week to week and month to month. So, while the sermon reading might reasonably jump around from week to week (for instance, I’m doing John in ten weeks, and we’re not reading a whole two chapters each week) (oh no, I just outed myself!!) (no, it’s OK – the point of the series is in part to show how the read passages tie in to the rest of the chapters/book, so we are looking at the lot…), the systematic reading is absolutely sequential.

Horrible sentence – start new paragraph.

I’ll attempt a table.

Series reading               Systematic reading

May skip parts               Skips nothing
Runs for length of series   Runs across many series
Always tied to sermon     May be used in sermon

The last point alludes to what you said, Scott, about ‘tying the readings together’. I presume you refer to the practice of essentially having two sermon readings, with the second reading potentially coming from a different part of the Bible every week. I agree, yuk. But I have found it helpful to point out connections as they arise; precisely because the second reading is not being deliberately selected to line up with the sermon, it makes a powerful point about the unity of Scripture when it does! I’ve got one lady who keeps ringing up days later to tell me how excited she still is about how that second reading is still ringing in her ears…

Of course, I confess, I do cheat a little. So I don’t pick the sequential readings totally at random. This year, for example, we’ve read 1 Peter while working our way through Ephesians and Exodus. Isaiah 40-66 has accompanied a series on pneumatology, 1 Timothy and Ephesians. It’d go nicely with 2 Corinthians, too, if I’d been doing that. Hebrews has complemented John beautifully.

And here I display my Anglican rebellion. I think it’s daft to insist on one OT reading and one NT reading. To start with, it means you’ll never read a solid chunk of the longer OT books, unless you choose to impoverish your preaching by spending a year on only the NT. And secondly, you’ll effectively proclaim the bifurcation of Scripture. I shoot for balance, certainly, but there have been weeks when we read two passages from the OT, and none from the New! On those weeks, I admit I did name-drop Jesus a couple of times

Martin Kemp

I’m reminded of the comment from Oliver O’Donovan which says that it has been the bible reading which has saved many churches with bad preaching from going completely down the tubes. Or something like that.

Luke Isham

I like that model alot Anthony!  Apart from the lady who rings you about the passage, what has been the general congregation’s reaction?

Scott Newling

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for sharing your model. I did something similar earlier this year, before I left for the UK. We preached through Thessalonians, but read through highlights of Ezekiel independent of that (although with some ‘accidental’ crossover). It was a first step in seeking to start breaking down the dependency of the readings on the sermon by having readings independent of it.

So thanks for illustrating that for us – and as you say, the accidental crossover is often more exciting than deliberate juxtapositioning of passages!

But, moving back into the series more generally and taking us back particularly to posts 1 and 2: if you don’t mind me saying, what you’ve illustrated here (which is what many of us have done, probably, including myself), isn’t enough. It’s a good first step (which again, some of us have done, including you and I), but we must take more steps.

And this is probably worth saying too, that overnight wholesale change possibly wouldn’t work. But to have a program of change, step by step (ie, to get to point e from point a by going through points b, c, d first) that will bring the congregation with it in understanding, etc, could be very valuable. ie, to make 2011 the year where we move term by term to devotion to PRS, so we can put more lasting things in place come 2012.

Yes, the need to preserve both an OT and NT reading has some advantages and disadvantages. And in this light, anyone creating a reading program across 2.5-5 years in our churches (which, for those just coming in, I suggested we need to do in post 2 / comments) will immediately be confronted by the reality of the OT being 3 times as long as the NT.

If one is committed to have both a NT and OT reading, this can be better preserved under a 3-reading model which I suggested in the second post (which is just what Moore College chapel practices). In other words, if the sermon is on NT, then we could have two readings from the OT, or one more lengthy reading from the OT (2-3 chapters etc.). Getting through the whole Bible is easier if we are happy to having readings only from one testament or another. Although, if one is having 4 or 7 chapters (or more!) per week being read publicly, then it is possible to keep the two in tandem, for those who wish, fairly easily I would think.

Mark Baddeley’s suggestion towards the end of the comments on the third post is useful here too: there’s no need to limit ourselves to 4 chapters/week (3 in church plus Bible study) or 7 chapters a week (3 in each church service plus Bible study). Why not just carve out each week a lengthy period of time for just listening to our God speak?

It was a long time ago now, but one of the first sermons I did was on the whole book of Ruth (my first minister was a patient man!). As a part of that I asked us to read the whole book with it: it took 10-15 minutes.

It’s not that hard to do, really. I expect people to listen to me for 35-40 minutes when I preach, and they almost always are happy to listen for that length too: imagine when we have gifted readers who’ve devoted themselves to exegeting the section they’re reading, who’ve practiced at length, to come and read that to us.

Luke Isham

So Scott you seem to be arguing complete immersion is preferable to familiarity?  Gordon’s earlier suggestion, in one of the comment threads, is to use Scripture more often in liturgical segues, which would make people more familiar with key passages.  But could both goals, immersion and familiarity co-exist in a service?

Scott Newling

Oh yes, definitely both.

Although the more we do ‘immersion’ every few years rather than once a generation, the unfamiliar becomes a bit more familiar too! Bible literacy is ours to promote and create, and overview courses, while invaluable, are just that: overviews. To get into the text, and familliar with it, such that the 10th time I go around Ezra I’ve seen it (and the rest of the OT, on which so much of Ezra depends) 9 times before. I’m speaking here just of familiarity, but the benefits besides – post 7.

I realised a couple of weeks ago in the way I’ve written the series that although the first post highlights BCP use of select passages as a weekly thing, I then limited myself to asking if we are devoted to publicly reading the the whole of God’s Word, and if so, what is the evidence of it.

But, having gone to a church that declared 1 Jn 1:8-2:2 to me every other week, when I first became a Christian, is life to me now, and continues to assure me when I doubt God’s desire to save even me.

To have been a student minister at the cathedral for two years, where every other week at 8.30 I led people to declare Psalm 95 to each other: that has been highly formative in how I approach Scripture.

All this may sound like I’m making church incredibly complicated. I actually think it makes it more simple, and simply hear and respond to God speak.

Thanks for the questions.

Anthony Douglas

It’s a big if, though, isn’t it? If one is committed to having both an OT and NT reading…

I appreciate the historical reason for it, but I’d be interested in hearing a theological defence of the idea. Anyone?

Luke – to be honest, there’s been no particular reaction from the congregation. I assume that something similar has been in place before my time, and I’m sure most of them haven’t twigged to my cunning plans. But you do get the occasional comment about the penny dropping.

Scott – I know this isn’t the post to raise this, but I’m here now, so…we’ve been taking it largely for granted that the R in PRS stands for reading. But it occurs to me to wonder whether this is the case…or whether it’s shorthand for ‘reading and commenting upon’, which I take it was the practice in synagogue and early church times. Might we be having the wrong debate?

Scott Newling

Hi Anthony,

Given the actual verse we’re discussing, I’d say reading is reading, since it he then moves on to preaching/exhortation and teaching. Given the semantics of the words (post 8), ‘reading’ is reading out loud and ‘teaching’ would be the thing that comprehends the practice you mention.

So, no, I don’t think we’re having the wrong debate – as you may have already guessed from my writing all these posts about it.

As for having both OT/NT readings? I was tying your comment back into the series rather than answering it per se. That is, what I’m suggesting is that, on a practical level, it’s really only an issue when we do so little reading as we currently do. The more reading we do, which is what I’m saying we need to move towards (and quickly), the less likely the issue would even come up.

But, yes, the theological rather than pragmatic question still remains. [But today is my day off and we’re going to the museum ]

But I’m also hoping we can move off this for this post, and return to the primary issue I raise, and which Marty’s O’Donovan quote moves us back towards: do we and our churches see and expect in our experience of church that the reading itself is a location of God’s activity, or just the preaching? What practices have people put in place that help preserve this (eg, like the sometimes MTC practice of having the sermon right at the end of everything and the independent readings well before)?

What I failed to mention in my personal testimony in an earlier post from my early years was that I *did* actually keep getting a form of Christian studies at high school. But even in my completely ignorant don’t-know-who-Jesus-is state, I knew I wasn’t being taught the Bible. And it was that knowledge that actually drove me to go get my mum’s KJV out of the wardrobe. And God kept me!

As this post is the pointy-end of the stick, I guess I really want us to return to answering the questions raised in the last 3 paragraphs of the post. We simply can’t afford to avoid self-reflection, and staff-meeting reflection, and church reflection on these things.

Stephen Shead

Hi Scott, thanks for this series. The whole issue has been one of my big concerns and frustrations for years – I seem to remember chatting with you about it at Fairfield.

I reckon, in terms of our doctrine of Scripture, it’s a kind of evangelical Roman Catholicism – only the “priest” (ok, “preacher”) can interpret the Word, and the rest depend on him to mediate the meaning. It is inaccessible to the ordinary believer. That might not be what we affirm or say we believe, but in our practice, that’s the message we communicate. And as you say, maybe it’s because we do actually believe it.

Thanks again, keep up the good work.

Are we devoted to the public reading of Scripture? Part 5

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. (1 Tim 4:13)

This is the fifth post in Scott’s series on the public reading of Scripture. You may want to read the first part, the second part, the third part or the fourth part of this series.

We’ve already touched on some reasons why we may not be devoted to the public reading of Scripture, especially in the second post. Nevertheless, in this fifth post, I want to draw some of these out and push us further.

It’s impossible to specifically cover all the reasons for the decline in public Bible reading, of course (but I’m going to try!). My encouragement to you, however, is not to fall into the all-too-common trap of dismissing the elephant in the room simply because you can legitimately quibble with some of my observations about said elephant: the elephant is still there, after all. In the end, it doesn’t matter if your elephant is an African and mine is an Indian—it’s still going to hurt when it runs us down. What am I saying? Please don’t use a (perhaps valid) critique of my posts as an excuse to avoid personal responsibility and outworking in this area.

Let me generalize four reasons why we don’t. The solutions to each we can discuss, although they should be fairly clear.

First, for some of us, I think it is simply because we’ve never thought about it before. We’ve been so busy affirming our belief in the authority of the word, and our desire to teach (and be taught by) it faithfully, that we just haven’t noticed that we don’t actually read much of the Bible with each other anymore.

Second, we don’t have the habits which guarantee significant Bible reading because we have, for the most part, abandoned formal liturgy. And by this I speak not just of what happens in a service (the order for morning prayer, for instance), but what governs the administration of those services across a period of time (tables of readings across years, etc.). Whatever the reasons we left prayer books behind, we also left behind safeguards to have the whole Bible read regularly. And, rather than inventing the wheel again, each of us in our own parishes, we’ve chosen to try and get along without one.

Third, for some, I believe we have privileged certain non-theologically-determined, pragmatic ideas and practices in our thinking about church, and have not realized that the outworking of these reflects poorly on what we truly believe about the nature of church, church growth, and Scripture. We may keep breathing words of love for the Bible, while in reality we’re deceiving ourselves about our devotion to it.

Our theology is not abstract, and our practice is not neutral theologically. There seems to be an unwitting tendency to view our theology as the fence that keeps us safe, while we adopt whatever practice seems to work (pragmatism) within the boundaries of that fence to ‘get things done’. Our biblically-shaped theology remains abstract; our practice consists of ‘plundering the Egyptians’ for what works.

Theology isn’t abstract, but relational and participative: those who know God walk in the light as he is in the light. If we claim to know God but walk in darkness, we deceive ourselves and truth is not in us. Further, pragmatism isn’t neutral (I have some posts on this for the new year, so stay tuned). Everything I do is theological—especially when it comes to church. However I choose to organize and structure a church meeting, whatever culture I develop in meetings over time, whatever structures I put in place to shape church practice, I am saying something about what I believe church to be, of what I believe causes church growth.

Our theology is not (simply) the fence which keeps our strategy (methods) from running astray; our theology is our strategy—it is fence, paddock, shepherd and all. Let’s bring our doctrine to the fore in our strategy meetings. Imagine we sat down together, for instance, and said: “We believe in the clarity of Scripture. What would our church look like if we worked that out in practice? And how would working this out in practice promote other doctrines rather than squash them?” That’s a strategy meeting worth going to.

Let me be more specific: when we reduce the Bible reading in order to privilege something else in our meetings, we are shifting the congregation’s understanding of what church is. When we choose to not read some bits because we deem it inappropriate, we forget that God wrote them—that perhaps in his wisdom he might possibly have known what he was doing when he did. When we choose to not read some bits because it seems irrelevant or unclear, we teach ourselves and our congregations that God’s word isn’t eternal, and isn’t clear. When we choose to not read the Old Testament especially because it is ‘unfamiliar’—how else are we going to get familiar with it? The non-Christian world certainly isn’t going to help us. When we choose to reduce Bible reading for something else, do we, then, in effect say that our means, our words, are better than God’s word to grow people?

Fourth, I think we don’t change in this matter because we’re afraid to do it. The overwhelming spirit of the age is entertainment and instant gratification, and we feel the pressure to conform. The entertainment factor of Leviticus is, let’s face it, next to zero, and the relevance not immediately apparent. But it’s still God’s word; he intended Leviticus to be exactly as it is. And when did entertainment become the determiner for what we do at church? When did sobriety and seriousness become anathema to church? Furthermore, boredom is not the problem of the subject matter. Boredom is in the heart. If we find Scripture to be boring, it’s not God’s fault, and the solution isn’t to silence God! If you find a part of Scripture boring, ask God to give you interest in it because you love him and want to know what he has to say. Again, the Bible is well aware that some bits are harder to understand than others (2 Pet 3:16-17). But where did we get the idea that the solution to this is to stop reading it?

14 Comments »

Tom Shelton

Furthermore, boredom is not the problem of the subject matter. Boredom is in the heart. If we find Scripture to be boring, it’s not God’s fault, and the solution isn’t to silence God!

I love this!  It really shifts the focus onto the person’s heart and takes away their excuse.

Ellen Hrebeniuk

I wonder what non-Anglicans here have to say about the abandonment of formal liturgy?  How do other denominations deal with Bible reading?

Remember also that there are plenty of people in Anglican churches now who might never have heard the Prayer Book regularly enough to have realised that more Bible reading is possible.  As we have privileged other aspects of church life in our services, it does not occur to us to question the amount of Bible we get.

Incidentally—what should we cut from our services to put the Bible back in?  Sermon length?

Anthony Douglas

I was mortified to see a reading cut from – of all places – a confirmation service.

The irony was that the scheduled reading concerned Peter’s failure to confess Christ in the high priest’s courtyard. Perish the thought of reminding confirmees what they were standing for…

Karen Beilharz

Thought you might find this article on the KJV’s 400th birthday interesting: RT @GuardianBooks How the King James Bible shaped the English language http://bit.ly/aQI86V. No public reading of Scripture to celebrate!

Luke Isham

Does the translation matter Scott?  I like and acknowledge your point about boredom being the product of sinful hearts.  However that line of argument can sometimes lead to “taking your medicine because it’s good for you” approach.  On the other-hand your overall thesis is very challenging and timely.  If it’s really the words of a living God then why not read it out load more often.

So in that context Scott, (along with encouraging people to practice the reading)maybe we shouldn’t just have long passages from the ESV.  Maybe a very familiar passage from the Message or OT narrative from the NIV etc.  What do you think?

Mark Baddeley

Our theology is not (simply) the fence which keeps our strategy (methods) from running astray; our theology is our strategy—it is fence, paddock, shepherd and all. Let’s bring our doctrine to the fore in our strategy meetings. Imagine we sat down together, for instance, and said: “We believe in the clarity of Scripture. What would our church look like if we worked that out in practice? And how would working this out in practice promote other doctrines rather than squash them?” That’s a strategy meeting worth going to.

I think this, and the two paragraphs before it, would make a great basis for another series, Scott.  I suspect a lot of people would like to get reflections on how theology and practice should partner each other.

Dannii

Incidentally—what should we cut from our services to put the Bible back in?  Sermon length?

Why should anything necessarily need to be cut? Just make the whole thing longer! And if anyone thinks more Bible readings aren’t worth having longer Sunday services they should have no influence over those services!

Scott Newling

Hi everyone,

Thanks for these comments.

Anthony & Karen – the ironies abound don’t they? The guy that wrote that guardian article: you can almost feel his bewilderment that celebrations for this most influential piece of English literature doesn’t include the reading of it. It’s truly bizarre.

Thanks for pointing us to that article, Karen; and for illustrating our ironic behaviour, Anthony.

I used to just find that kind of thing kind of amusing (I confess, I still do, albeit mixed with sadness). But the more I go on, while I still find it amusing (it is just bizarre), I now also hope to take care to use such things as a mirror rather than a foil. [ie, Romans 2 ... You who condemn others, do you do the very same thing yourself?]

It is foolish, to celebrate and promote the Bible while implicitly undermining it; but I am a fool too, and I shudder to think of the inconsistencies that abound in my life that I have no idea about.

This in many ways undergirds this whole series. I doubt that most, if any, people who read these posts have a low view of Scripture or would deny the clarity of Scripture. But what if we have deceived ourselves? What if our enemies (be it the evil one or otherwise) are laughing at the ironic, tragic, self-deception that we labour under? That what we claim as our practice is so far from being testified to by that selfsame practice? Hence the subtitle of the first post: a mirror held up before our eyes.

Self examination is something that we’re going to need to learn to do, and, as this series keeps coming back to, we need to do that with the Bible in our ears, and publicly / corporately. We are too good at self-deception.

And this could probably be extended to not just a individual in church context, but churches in a ‘college of churches’ context (trying to avoid denominational tags, but confessional instead), and culture of churches in a cross-culture of churches context (eg, what do African evangelicals do?)

Sydney anglicans are generally known to be very good at fighting enemies. But part of our problem is that we have become very good only at adversatorial critiquing. As a result, we are sometimes so good at fighting enemies that we sometimes make enemies as we fight.

But what happens when we need to critique our colleagues? And we do, and we will, need to do this, as they to us. We either stay silent (because we only know how to ‘fight enemies’ rather than critique friends), or we run the danger of creating enemies of our friends.

The general inability of the world we live in to intelligently, graciously, interact with and debate different ideas is not helping us here either.

We need to promote a generation of people who can both critique adversatorially when needed (Titus 1 springs to mind), critique collegiately where needed, and be able to discern the difference.

There’s much more to say on this, and the issues that bar this from happening effectively. But that’s perhaps for another time

But to return to our issue at hand: given the majesty of PRS, it would be tragic for me to think I was devoted to it, when actually I’m just deluded.

Scott Newling

Tom – thanks for the encouragement re: boredom. For those who missed it, I reflected at length on boredom in the comments to a previous post (post 2?).

Luke, likewise, there was some discussion re: translations and readability in one of the earlier posts, that you may find helpful.

Scott Newling

Hi Ellen,

Yes, the generational aspect is very important. Which is largely why I put the first generalisation first: some of us have just never thought about this before. The first generalisation is broader than just those who’ve never experienced it, but forms a large part.

But it’s with a view to the long-term that we need to look also, and the lack of this forms a fairly significant part of my distress in current church practice at the moment. It’s those who fall under the second generalisation (shedding liturgy) that has in part created the first category. And I include myself here as a perpetrator of that!

I can’t help but wonder if anyone seriously thought of future generations when they started shedding the prayer book. Whatever the good reasons or otherwise for moving on from it, I don’t think anyone thought about unintentional fall-out from such a decision. And that impacts not just in the present (which is the general issue here: of practice / theology of church being bound up together), but in the future for our children and grandchildren.

Let me generalise this to more than just Bible reading:

I know by heart the Lord’s prayer and the creeds, I know how to confess my sins and verses from scripture that speak of full assurance to those who repent and truly believe the gospel. In times of dire need (the sinfulness of my sin, or help in times of trouble), my heart and mind can pray usefully because of what I’ve been taught.

I know that sometimes I needs a big kick up the pants (commination against sinners), I know the seriousness of childbirth and the wonder that God would preserve my wife through it, I know the high office of the ministry of the Word, I have a doctrinal statement, and some fairly special creedal articulations of the Trinity in the nicene and Athanasian creeds (which, incidentally, the latter was due to be read monthly in church).

But unless I give this to my children at home, they will never have any of this because churches increasinly don’t teach this to them. When exactly do our churches teach our people to confess sins, and that the basis of church interaction is only by the grace of God (confession is first in prayer book services)? When will church ever teach children the creeds? When therefore will they ever have a good articulation of the incarnation and trinity, etc etc?

And when we leave the creeds behind, here we depart not from evangelical or reformed Christianity, but any stream altogether – Catholic (Roman or Protestant) or Orthodox. And how feeble we will become because of it?

A friend put it like this to me this week: ‘if we fail to say the creeds in one generation, we become unitarians in the next’.

On what legitimately grounds do I remove these things from church life, and deny my children the access to them that I once enjoyed and still have access to in my time of need? What will they turn to in their time of need? Memorable singing could probably fall into this too.

As you can see, this kind of thing distresses me more than a little! It distresses me for my children’s sake, but I know I can do something about it with them. But what about the children of my neighbour, who hasn’t the first clue about how to teach the creeds to their children?

Scott Newling

What to cut from our current services, or whether to increase their length, I guess is a hard one to reflect on generally, since every church and church service is different.

I’ve been in church services in the past where no one cared if things went overtime, or regularly over-time even: a ‘let’s do what we need to do and if it takes that long then that’s fine’ mentality. ie, there was no set length / overtime.

Those who run according to the constraints of parallel children’s ministries will not find it as easy to do that, of course. And early morning services perhaps suffer the most, since they have the next service knocking on the door.

But if a church chooses to adopt a ‘let it run for however long it needs to’ approach, my tip would be to keep the morning and evening services early enough that people don’t start feeling the pinch (“it’s getting on to lunch-time / bedtime”). As someone who inherited a 7pm service, it’s harder to justify something finishing 15mins late than it is at 6pm, especially if you have youth with curfews.

Scott Newling

As for what to cut from our gatherings themselves? Here are a few thoughts:

First, if your church regularly starts 10mins late (for whatever good or bad reason), we could cut this habit. Again, 10 minutes lost to whatever at the beginning of a service doesn’t feel like much, but it feels like a lot when it comes back to bite at the end.

Second, announcements are black holes of time, especially if you let anyone make announcements themselves on the spot. Guard the microphone zealously. My tip is to keep them short (3mins tops in total), done all by one person, and strict about what can be announced (ie, announcements relevant to 5 people in the congregation probably don’t need to be said).

Does this retard community? I don’t think so. It does make us ask: what is the purpose of announcements in church? Is it to notify, or is it to edify? If the former, how effective is it, and how many other avenues for communication do we have that means we can keep it to a minimum?

If it is the latter (announcements are a form of edification), what are we trying to edify someone in? Maybe this is overstating the case, but I’m much more interested in what God has done at youth group than in the fact that youth group is doing something next week. One teaches church as community (when done poorly), the other teaches God at work with his ‘community’. Again, it depends on what sort of ‘community’ we think we are.

Does reducing who gets to use the microphone reduce corporate service? Not at all. Again, it all depends on what we think we’re doing at church.

What I’m about to observe (anecdotally) ties-in in part both with a right observation that someone can be in the building but their heart far from God (‘pew-warmers’ as they are sometimes known), and also with the somewhat unhealthy obsession with ‘ministry’ (this was touched on a bit in Mark Baddeley’s stuff on depression last year: that we make it worse for the depressed because we tie their church identity to their ministry identity – Mark did I get that right?).

The observation is this: we tend to think that unless an individual is doing something that can be distinguished individually, they are not being active in church.

What do I mean? I mean that an individual can be very active in church even though no one will ever be able to distinguish that activity as an individual activity.

- I mean that, listening to the PRS, or Bible teaching is not a passive activity, but an active one.

- When someone prays out loud in church, they are leading in prayer, and we pray with them as we voice our agreement with them (‘Amen’).

- That when we sing songs to one another we are ‘letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly’

[Ironically, again, when we take away creeds, and corporate verbal prayer (confession, lord’s prayer, etc), we lose some of this reality.]

- And so on.

Scott Newling

Third, we don’t need to do everything all at once. I’m a bit like this (I can’t help myself: if someone asks a question in Bible-study, I have to answer it, and can’t defer it for another day).

We don’t need to have 2 or 3 segments every week.

I remember being in various churches on numerous ocassions where in a 75-90min service, the readings and preacher get up about 70 minutes through. As one visitor put it many years ago ‘It’s all nice what we did, but when am I going to get some meat with my sandwich’? Or, most recently in my experience ‘why do I feel like I just had three talks this morning?’.

I think I’m trying to say that, just because both missionaries are back in town that particular week, we don’t need to hear extensively from both missionaries – as wonderful as that is. Or just because someone wants to have segment in church, we therefore run 2-3 segments. It’s okay to take our time, or even miss a few opportunities now then, trusting God’s sovereignty. We have a tendency to overfill our services. Or, I know of a church in the states that has nights that are devoted to the sharing of what God is doing in various ministries: ie, setting aside a separate time for this type of edification and prayer.

My first minister pointed out to me when I first started leading, very graciously, that I had to contextualise everything … every week! It really is okay just to introduce a creed with ‘let’s encourage one another as we confess our faith to each other with the Nicene creed’. But I felt the need to give explanations for everything all the time … which is just tedious in the end.

Fourth, and this ties right back to some comments Gordon Cheng made to the first post: we fill our services with a lot of fluff. Or, as another friend put it a while back ‘I feel like the morning church I go to has become a youth group’.

Why can’t we just pray? Why does there need to be some gimmick each week, as if the wonder and majesty of approaching the throne of grace with confidence weren’t enough? In fact, by insisting on gimmicks each week, I teach people that it isn’t enough. But for what we’re talking about here, when we insist on gimmicks, the time usually blows out vastly.

Fifth, returning to the microphone issue. Time gets taken up with interchange of people. If we sang in blocks rather than interspersed, and let the service leader do most speaking (which, as mentioned, is not a denial of corporate service), we save a fair bit of time lost in shuffling.

Sixth, and the one we’ll all have a different answer to: how much singing do we need / should we do in church? 3 songs? 6 songs? A song averages 5 mins …

These are all fairly random, spur of the moment thoughts. Does anyone have any others?

Luke Isham

Hi Scott,

I see, in part three you mention the issue of translations.