Looking Back: Enjoying, exploring, and understanding the Bible.

From 1973

Enjoying, exploring, and understanding the Bible

By Victor Pogue

The Rev V.C. Pogue is Baird Research Fellow in Education

“The Bible virtually seems to have ceased to be the food of the Church. Even for those who are regular Church members the Bible seems to have lost its relevance for their daily lives.” This is how a survey of religion in Britain in recent years sums up the matter and many ministers would agree.

Why is this the case? The Bible is still read every Sunday in the Church service; indeed the reading is mostly introduced by some such formula as, ‘Hear the Word of God’, or ‘Let us read the Word of God’. Yet here is the statement that for most of those in the pews it is not in any real sense the Word of God for them. At the same time the widespread sales of new translations seem to indicate that there is a desire to find some word of God and the hope that it may be possible.

There are those in the Church who have a ready answer for the feeling of irrelevance of the Bible on the part of many Christians: they have been led to doubt its truth by scholars and those in the pulpits who listen to them. Whereas at one time everyone was told clearly that all was to be found within the covers of the Bible was factually true and all its teachings a safe guide to living, this is now often not the case. Adam and Eve as historical characters have been bowed out the door; parts of the accounts of the departure from Egypt have been described as legendary; the miracles of Jesus are described as ‘heightened’ in their miraculous content. So the ordinary reader is lost. He doesn’t know where he is and gives up.

Almost the direct opposite view for the felt irrelevance of the Bible is also offered. A young person from Shetland raises a question whose implications reveal this line of thought: “Are the Bible’s moral teachings any help to us when it is often immoral itself? Are the words too strong? What about Deut.20:16,17: “In the cities of those nations whose land the Lord your God is giving you as a patrimony, you shall not leave any creature alive. You shall annihilate them …..as the Lord your God commanded you…..?”

In a question like this a procedure is indicated which is like food sampling. A sample is taken and found to be contaminated, with the result that the whole consignment has to be destroyed as unfit for construction. What is being said is more or less, “You have said this book is the Word of God. Well, here is a sample of it. We must reject a God like this. This Word is not for us.”

This would be a fair enough judgement – perhaps, indeed the only possible one – where the Church was standing by the presentation of the Bible as a book that contained only true factual statements and all of those whose teaching was to be followed today. But the situation is different where concentration is on “the heart of the matter” or – as the Shorter Catechism put it – what the Scriptures principally teach.

A judgement on a man’s life is not fairly made when one of his acts is singled out as an example of neglect of all the rest. It may, it must also be granted, be necessary to say that this act is also part of the man but not characteristic of him, a regrettable departure from his normal conduct. To bring it to light would be a perfect answer to anyone who claimed perfection for him but might have no relevance at all when all that was being said was that he was of outstanding worth. On this analogy it may be said that Christians have been failing to discover “the heart of the Bible” and perhaps partly because they believe that somehow the Church is officially committed to everything within its covers and they are frightened to admit, sometimes even to themselves, that they cannot take that position. Safer then not to think too much and to leave theology and all that goes with it to ministers.

-        Extract from a longer piece

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