Freeing the Bible - the authority of the Bible today

Hugh Dawes

Paper given at a meeting of the Cambridge Group of the MCU by the Revd Hugh Dawes. Hugh Dawes is vicar of St Faith's North Dulwich, a member of the Committee of the Centre for Progressive Christianity and former director of the Forum Christian Institute, Cambridge. He is the author of Freeing the Faith: Credible Christianity for Today.

It's very good to be back here in Cambridge; not simply in Cambridge indeed, but in this parish whose ministry I shared in for twelve and a half years, and in this church building where I both worshipped, and also learned a very great deal, during that period. This room carries many memories for me - so that I'm grateful to Alison and Rosalind and others in MCU's Cambridge Group, some of whom heard me say something about the Authority of Scripture during last year's annual conference of the Union, grateful to them for inviting me to do this with you today.

Good to be here therefore. But also strange to be here as well, three years on from moving to inner South London. The saying 'you can't go back again' gets uttered so often that I searched in vain in the dictionaries of quotations and on the internet for its original. It crops up again and again in songs, poems, newspaper columns, and a host of other setting, including even sermons! No clue, however, as to who might have said it first.

It probably doesn't matter, except that it would be fitting to attribute its good sense to someone. 'You can't go back again', because nothing and nowhere remains the same - so returns are always to somewhere else. Being driven here this morning, I saw new tall buildings being erected where once there was low-level sheltered housing; bungalows in a sorry state when I was here now very elegantly refurbished, and at least one new trader at the local shops. We cannot return to the past, for it is always shifting, changing and developing as it becomes the present - before it moves on again (moving the whole time) into the future. 'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there', as Hartley writes in his preface to The Go-between.

The process is often a difficult one for humans to handle. Especially so at a time when the pace of change seems so rapid and insistent, and when it concerns things which we're not caught up in ourselves - 'What's happened to Wulfstan Court?' was my initial rather hurt question when I approached this road today, though I don't bat an eyelid at the constant refurbishment of properties all around where I live now.

It that situation, there's a temptation for many of us to profess a special love and regard for things which allegedly do not change. For those of my generation or older it's something which people sometimes like to say about the royal family, for instance. But of course it is a fantasy, however harmless. Fantasy because the particular style of being royal which we applaud was only invented in the nineteenth century (before that there were a succession of different styles and understandings of monarchy), and has in any case itself already changed and developed in massive ways over the last 150 years. And it's fantasy also because even where allegedly things derive from the past, they resonate in a quite different manner in each particular present. The funerals of Queen Victoria, Queen Mary and Elizabeth the Queen Mother may - may - in style and ceremonial have been quite similar. But they carried different meanings, evoked different responses, impacted in different ways on other people's lives, because the times and a whole host of cultural presuppositions linked to them were different in each particular case. My mother - a fan of the royal family - nonetheless speaks of it today in a very different way from how she did even 20 years ago.

Religion too is an area of human existence and human creativity which many people like to think is unchanging; a place to which you can go back and find it the same. And it can suit religions - some of them very obviously - to be perceived in this way. Claims to changelessness in a world of flux implies things that are above the flux, superior to it, and things therefore to which those caught in the flux should submit themselves to, in order to be able themselves then to rise above it. When the author of Hebrews says that 'Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday and today and forever', he is wanting to make a high claim for Jesus as Christ, and saying that we should attend to him.

And that particular passage, of course, is one that Christians of a certain understanding will still today point you to, in order to make claims for Jesus. To do that, they are no less required to make claims for the letter to the Hebrews, and for that considerable volume of other first and second century writings of several different kinds with which it is almost always bound up (what Christians call the new testament); and usually they make pretty similar claims also for the far larger volume of even more varied texts which we call the old testament, but which are actually, first and foremost, the sacred writings of the Jewish people. And the claims are very like those of the author of Hebrews for Jesus. That this rather arbitrarily assembled collection (though that is not said!) also stands above time and flux, is also somehow 'the same' across time, and as such has authority in every time and place. And they do more, of course, than affirm this personally. They try to say that this is the authority that the bible claims for itself - and that God has given it.

But just what does authority mean? What is it about? The Oxford English Dictionary suggests two rather different understandings. The first, and undoubtedly the dominant one, is an authority very much, indeed, about domination. Authority here has to do with power, the power to enforce obedience. When authority resides in people, therefore, this model is about the right to command; and linked to that is also about those with authority possessing the clout to make it to work. When it comes to texts or documents, then this model of authority refers to things like enforceable rules, laws and codes of conduct. Authority in this mode is at heart something imposed upon others. It is the authority of those who are in a position to control others. The authority of rulers and governments, and in many situations - and not just in times past - the authority of religious institutions as well.

But the dictionary also offers another rather different use of the word. Authority, in this second form, is not something imposed in some way upon people from above (whatever quite above might mean there), but is instead something people themselves grant and bestow. The nature of authority in this model is an ability to influence or inspire, rather than power to command. So when it comes to the authority of people, what we are talking about here are people whose opinions, knowledge, or judgements we trust and respect.

And when it's documents or texts, then it is about recognising them as sources of wisdom and guidance. I'm in a bookshop, and cast my eye over the table of newly published titles, and see a new novel by Carol Shields. I look inside the dust jacket to note the price and may turn over a few pages just to check it out. But in reality from the moment I saw it I knew I would buy it, because time and again her stories have inspired and moved me, as well as entertained me. Authority bestowed. Gladly I grant authority to Shields as a writer.

Both models of authority can be traced well back. Indeed, the theologian Graham Shaw has observed things very similar to each to be at work in the texts of the New Testament itself. The power model can be observed when appeal is made to Jesus as Lord, or Christ, or Son of God - so giving his words the ultimate imprimatur, and diverting attention away either from his own humanity, or that of the particular New Testament writer. Even more is it done when the writer portrays God as intervening directly, as in scenes like the accounts of Jesus' baptism in the Gospels, or the Pentecost story in Acts, or the prologue of John. Shaw also sees in the New Testament many of the illusions which are used to reinforce power authorities not in reality as confident as they want to appear. Into that category he puts Jesus Christ is 'the same yesterday and today or forever', and also 'Jesus lives', and 'Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words shall not pass away' Shaw says that these proud claims actually reveal the anxiety lurking beneath most power authority systems. The damning of the opponents of Jesus in the gospels and other New Testament writings, which the best modern scholarship now believes to be very unjust, are also indicative of this. Yet alongside of that there can also been seen evidence in the New Testament of another sort of authority, close at least to what I have identified as that freely granted to what inspires and influences. So besides the power stuff, the gospels also show us the Jesus who cries out in dereliction and knows all the anxiety and torment of Gethsemane. And there are times when people surprise him - like the Syro-Phoenician woman - and he learns from them. Again, the gospels show us a Jesus who regularly questions power authorities both religious and secular, which should at least give cause to wonder whether he would want to set himself up in the same way. And there are the invitations ' Who do you say that I am?' 'Come and see,' which suggest a willingness to let others determine if he is useful to them. So we have two quite different versions of authority. What does the dictionary have to say about 'the bible'? Once again there are several and varied meanings. So it's the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; it's a copy of those Scriptures; it's a sacred book more widely; and it is, figuratively, any authoritative book - as in say 'Wisden's was my cricket-loving uncle's bible.'

But the dictionary also makes clear that in Greek, Bible, 'ta biblia', is plural and not singular. It means the books, rather than the book, and so holds open the possibility that within the single cover there may be diversity and perhaps even difference between the writings in it. In Latin too 'biblia' is plural. But when the word came into romantic languages it came is as feminine singular, and so 'the books' became 'the book'. The bible was no longer a library, a collection of books - which is another meaning the dictionary offers for the word - but is seen and treated increasingly as a single book. One volume. And so, for some, one message too.

The processes by which that shift of naming and understanding came about was not rapid: any more than the gathering together centuries before of just some from a much larger corpus of early Christian writings into the new testament had been rapid. The ascription to some of those writings of a status as scripture, as being sacred and holy books - the process underlying the emergence of what becomes a canon of scripture for the Christian church or churches - took a long time. 'Christian existence, as Robert Carroll - who is actually an old testament scholar - reminds us, 'predates the bible by a number of centuries.' The church appears to have found no difficulty in existing for quite a long time without its own distinctive scriptures, and without the authority which they then came to acquire. It's a useful reminder that such authority has not been timeless. Christians have not always been people of the book, and a part of their originally becoming that may have owed as much to anxieties about the absence of practical ethical teaching in the stories of Jesus or in early Christian writers, than to a desire for a more general scripture type authority. Certainly it's the case that when the Christian bible did finally take shape, its authority slotted in alongside of others already in existence; the authority of Christian leaders and institutions, of tradition, including the creeds, and the whole thing of natural law as well.

Only with the reformation did this change, the Bible becoming both the book and a single book to boot, with the individual writings within it seen now as far less important than its unified function as a coherent guide to the Christian life. As such it was most certainly authoritative, in the first of the two senses offered earlier. It supplied rules, beliefs, laws and codes of conduct, which were enforceable, and to which the subjects of a Christian kingdom must submit themselves.

For those of us here who belong to churches of the reformation, this understanding is the one which remains firmly rooted in our foundation documents. In the Church of England, Article 6 of the 39 Articles of Religion, 'Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation', has this to say: 'Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.'

What is read therein, however, is to be believed as an article of the Faith. And the believing is to be seen as something demanded of loyal subjects. The frontispiece of the English Great Bible, ordered by Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Chancellor, to be set up in all churches in the kingdom in 1538, though not actually published till 1539, shows Henry VIII receiving God's blessing as he hands on copies of the book not just to Thomas Cranmer, but also to Cromwell. The faithful believer is also the honest subject, accepting the biblical authority upheld by the Christian prince, alongside the secular authority given by bible to the prince.

Commenting on this, Robert Carroll describes as 'the outstanding Protestant heresy of the Reformation that it elevated the Bible to a position of authority that it had never had before the sixteenth century. This biblicism has subsequently distorted the way many Christians read the history of the churches, by reading back into it views about the Bible which belong more to post-Reformation thought than to earlier notions of scripture.' At one level, that may seem an extreme and over-dramatic statement. For of course, it would not really be terribly long before that new authority was radically challenged. 'You can't go back again.' Part of the history of the Modern Churchpeople's Union, our sponsors today, over more than a hundred years has been to promote and advance the theological propriety of a much more critical approach to biblical texts. An approach which treats seriously the historical context of each individual writing, and the particular concerns of the authors in the situations and settings in which they wrote. A view of the Bible which sees it therefore not as a Christian handbook potentially holding answers to whatever question or problem we present it with. But rather an assortment of texts loosely linked only in the sense that all were in some way responding to 'that which we name as God'; and, in the case of the New Testament, saw the prophet Jesus from Nazareth as having an important part to play in that response.

Such an understanding, does not, I am saying, fly in the face of any traditional, long-standing 'higher' view of the Bible. 'Fundamentalism', which makes such claims for its being the true appreciation of scripture, in reality postdates and does not predate the critical understanding of the biblical books which is so deplores. Indeed, the term was unknown and not used until around the year 1910. Which is just as well if you ponder what its view on scriptural authority might result in if it was really believed by Christians! When I teach ethics and am trying to demonstrate how little in fact the bible helps us in ethical debate in the twenty-first century, I like to quote Simon Blackburn, who in his little book Being Good refers to a letter going the rounds of the Internet, purporting to be written to Doctor Laura, a fundamentalist agony aunt. Let me share lighten the morning a little and share it with you.

Dear Dr Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. l have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18: 22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. l do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

a. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1: 9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

b. l would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21: 7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c. l know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15: 19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking but most women take offense.

d. Leviticus 25: 44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?

e. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

f. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

g. Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

It's delightfully witty and amusing. And it ought in theory to knock on the head any handbook type approach to the bible on anything. And yet when you look at the Anglican House of Bishops Issues in Human Sexuality, what do you find but pages chewing over the biblical stuff on this as if it somehow mattered. What surely the biblical writings shows us about sexuality - heterosexual, homosexual, whatever - is that people can hold civilised and caring views on it, and barbaric, uncaring, non-respectful and oppressive ones on it as well. And behave in manners that fit with each. But quite frankly, we don't have to go to the bible and trawl the pages of a concordance to discover that. Half an hour listening to conversations in my local pub will tell me exactly the same thing.

And it's not just sexuality. Last year the working party chaired by Bishop Nazir Ali on women in the episcopate reported for the first time to General Synod. It took the group nearly a year to manage its first meeting, and after two years had only produced a 10-page progress report. I quote a report on Synod: 'After the bishop had painstakingly outlined the committee's consideration of the position of early Christians mentioned in the Bible and St Paul's contention that women could minister in public worship so long as it did not bring shame or dishonour the Lord, several women synod members could barely conceal their impatience.' 'But the bishop told them: "This is such an important matter that we cannot afford to get it wrong. If you want a chairman who will go with speed, I am not that person."'

'We cannot afford to get it wrong.' We have to get it right. And by implication I think, Bishop Nazir Ali is saying that in order to get it right we must always defer to authorities which are commanding, defining, and beyond ourselves; including amongst them the bible. It's a view enshrined, presumably with some claim itself to be authoritative, in the Statement on the Doctrine of God which the Anglican Primates issued in April 2002, where they said that 'In Holy Scripture we have a unique, trustworthy record of the acts and promises of God. No other final criteria for Christian teaching can supplant this witness to the self consistency of God through the ages.'

But this is frankly nonsense. The bible is not a 'witness to the self consistency of God'. Not surprisingly, given the time span of the individual books in the bible and their very different purposes, the character and behaviour of God to be discovered in the pages of both Jewish and Christian bibles is highly varied and utterly inconsistent. Christopher Sykes in his biography of Evelyn Waugh referred to Waugh and a friend in the Second World War trying to silence a constantly talking Randolph Churchill by getting him to read the bible from end to end in a certain number of days, or otherwise forfeit £10. Churchill did, but could not remain silent. Not, one might think, the most morally squeamish of men, his repeated exclamation as a first time reader of the bible was clear and to the point. 'God! Isn't God a shit!'

It's from the mistaken deference that imagines that it honours the bible, advances the bible, to speak of it as 'a witness to the self consistency of God', that I think it should be freed. It's from the actual diminishing of it involved in trying to pretend that it all holds together, or that it's all inspirational or nice, or that it all has to be viewed as having reference to today, when most of it came into being for quite specific reasons at different points in the past, that I want to release it. In the process, of course, freeing Christianity from having always to defer to it, or try to defer to it, even when it is manifestly nonsense.

I suppose it is the feeling that the bible offers reinforcement to the views we have on a particular subject which tempts most of us sometimes to try and appeal to it for support, whether we are environmentalists, Marxists, feminists or whatever. But it is not very wise behaviour, because the bible can also be mined for texts which support quite contrary views to those we are wanting to support: that the earth is there for humans to use and plunder; that the poor are there to support the rich and powerful in the lifestyle they have become accustomed to; and that women are there - but never mind.

In one sense, the bible will support whatever you want it to support. But if you have even a modicum of capability for self-observation and self-understanding, you will know that of itself does not mean or demonstrate that you are right in whatever it is you seek to recruit it for. For myself the idea of a timeless, unconditional 'right' on any issue carries little meaning. But even if you want still to believe that possible, you will not find in the writings of biblical authors any straightforward 'right' answers to our questions. That because most of our questions would be meaningless to them and, even where they are not, our situation - to go back to my opening comments - is quite different to theirs.

You can't go back again, and if the Christian story is really to inform the present, never mind the future, we have to stop pretending that the past - and in particular this set of books - has given us all the answers we need. I'm a diabetic. I expect my doctor to keep up to date with the Lancet and the other medical journals. When I visit her with some problem, I want her to respond to it on the basis of knowledge derived from those - about which, as it happens, I may well know something myself. If instead she delves into a cupboard and emerges with some sixteenth century apothecary's writings, I politely take my leave and find another doctor.

So when it comes to the issues of our day, the bible should be let off the hook of being expected to be the first port of call for insights into them, never mind the source of answers to them. Nothing within its covers was written with any sense that it would be used in that way across not just centuries, but millennia. It is not a single volume, it does not have a unified message, nor should we read the authority of the writings which it comprises as being one to which we must submit ourselves.

But freed in that way, there is a sense, I believe, in which we then can then enter into a different sort of dialogue with those writings, and the people and communities lying behind them. I mentioned earlier on my pleasure in the novels and stories of Carol Shields. What I like about her writing is that she takes the lives of quite ordinary people and reveals their depths without trying to make them other than the ordinary people they are. It's something the historian Eric Hobsbawm is doing also when he calls a collection of his essays Uncommon People. Ordinary people are extraordinary. Common people are all of them uncommon.

That said, none of the central characters in the stories by Shields that I have read have lives that in any obvious way overlap with my own. The key experiences of theirs are not duplicated in mine. Yet I find in the reading that I enter into their lives and understand them - whatever quite that means - and in that process find I am helped in my understanding of others, and my self-understanding as well. They don't solve problems for me, nor do they tell me how I should live my life. And yet, in reading them, the living of life and my being a human person is illuminated. I give them, as it were, an authority of respect. (Which goes not only for books; art, the encounter with history in place and setting, an encounter with other cultures, faiths or communities can all have a similar effect.)

Now it's that sort of authority that a Christian accustomed to a critical approach to the biblical texts, and grateful for it, may find herself wanting to give to some of the biblical writings, or to some sections of them. They will not tell her, or me, how to live life as a Christian in the twenty-first century in any obvious, straightforward way. They will not solve the great questions of our day - either the real ones of the actual world of men and women, or the ecclesiastical ones. Yet they still play on us and move us.

Let me try and turn the theory into practice with a couple of rather different illustrations. For the first from the jewish bible, I draw on John Barton, who writes beautifully in his little book Ethics and the Old Testament with regard to the story of King David and Bathsheba the wife of Uriah. The story flows on from chapter 11 in 2 Samuel, the opening paragraph of which, with hindsight, can be seen to say it all. 'In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.'

But David remained in Jerusalem. And from that all that follows flows:- his lusting after Bathsheba; his sleeping with her; her conceiving a son; and David's desire to divert Uriah from his military duties to get him to sleep with Bathsheba himself and so be deceived into thinking the child is his. But Uriah is more aware of duty than is the king, and so refuses to do that. That leaves David seeing no option but to conspire to get him killed in battle. Uriah is killed. David marries Bathsheba. The child then dies. And then later, in this now cursed house, we get the incest between David's son Amnon and his sister Tamar.

In the middle of the sequence of events, you will remember, you get Nathan coming to David and telling him the parable of the rich man who robs the poor man of his cherished lamb and serves it up as dinner to an unwanted visiting traveller. David is outraged. 'Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man…. "because he had no pity." Nathan said to David "you are the man!"'

Now at the immediate level the story is pretty unlikely to apply directly to most who read it. Whatever the Sunday tabloids may suggest about Christian frailties, few of us are going to commit either rape, murder, or incest. But as Barton properly says, the story still speaks to us, and speaks to us ethically. Be on one's guard, it certainly says, for actions can have unforeseen and unintended consequences. One lapse from grace and we can become caught up in a whirlwind. In any obvious sense, the world of David's royal court is a world away. But even across millennia and cultures there is a humanity which is shared, and so the story provides insights into ourselves. Not least perhaps it reassures us of the fact that, even after great crises, hurt and suffering we remain human persons.

For a second example of this different approach to biblical authority, let me go to the New Testament, and to the gospel stories of resurrection. For all the church's attempts to tidy them up and reconcile them, are gloriously untidy and diverse. They are also full of symbolism, and defy our attempts to simplify them into history.

This year, for Anglicans and others who use the RCL, it is Mark's account which we shall hear both on Palm Sunday for the Passion story, and on Easter Day for that of the resurrection. So let's anticipate Easter Day, and look at Mark 16.1-8.

Mark has no story of the risen Jesus actually appearing to people. People's later dissatisfaction with this may well have been a key element in the other gospels getting to be written. But Mark, I think, would have said that he had given us plenty of ideas to be getting on with. And that spelling it out would turn poetry into prose, as it certainly does in Matthew's ghastly attempt to 'improve' Mark's story with earthquakes and an angel and his invented guards at the tomb becoming like dead men.

'And very early, on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb', Mark says. So resurrection is about sunrise and a new day dawning. It's about light illuminating the darkness, about the women having the courage to say 'we start a new week', even after one of great sadness. They are involved in that already, before any formal announcement of resurrection is made to them by the young man in white at the tomb, simply in what they are doing. In paying a last respect to their friend, in seeking to anoint his body, they prepare themselves then to get on with living. Resurrection involves beginning anew.

(I find it interesting, let me say in parenthesis, that in many of the counties from which a theology of liberation has emerged in recent years - countries where so many people's lives involve so much suffering that you might expect 'life after this life' versions of Christianity to have appeal - it is the more this-worldly vision that a new day and a fresh sunrise is possible which is the one that actually gets taken up. It is more costly and fragile, to be sure; but also with the capacity to mean so much more, and to achieve so much more.)

The young man at the tomb - nothing about angels here - is an interesting detail of Mark's story, and one full of symbolism itself. But his words to the women, and their response, are what I want to pull out in terms of reclaiming this symbol into faith. "'He has been raised; he is not here… Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.' So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

The oddness of that ending long convinced many that Mark must have been interrupted in his writing. And quickly prompted others to supply his story with a more fitting end. Only reflect a little more, set aside later stories, and imagine. Galilee is where the mission and the teaching of Jesus had all taken place. A place full of heady memories, therefore, for those moved by him; but a place also where there had been endless misunderstanding and opposition on the part of most others - and on plenty of occasions by them as well. So resurrection life, if it is about returning there - though not as a going back, but going on with new responsibilities and tasks - is dangerous life, and involves staying in a hard place, and working with it, rather than running away from it.

No surprise then if the women are both amazed and terrified at the suggestion they should do this. The temptation for them and the other friends of Jesus would have been, surely, to return and pick up their old lives, yes, but to forget about the interruptions in them, which had arisen through meeting this fellow.

Only they are not to forget. The resurrection life will be an encountering with him if they persist in living according to his principles, and with his vision of the kingdom, in the company of others who have been touched as they have. Resurrection is not a tidy conclusion. It means persisting in a struggle, rather than having things signed and sealed, but doing so in the company of others.

Other gospel stories can also be read to pull resurrection language into the present, into the here and now. Luke's Emmaus Road, for instance. Beyond its early church stuff about the breaking of bread, important as that is, also shows resurrection language illuminating life now. It is the one who comes as a stranger who is eventually recognised as Jesus - a theme which comes out in some other stories as well. To be welcoming to the stranger, and open to that which is of God in her, is one of the things which the new life of the new day we live in asks of us. Against the tendency of communities - not least faith communities - to feel that they know all they need to know, resurrection suggests that we need to be open to the outsider, and ready to learn from her.

And it also asks us to be travellers. So again, resurrection life is not safe or secure life (even if most travelling for westerners did appear that until recently). It is risky. It exposes us constantly to novelty, change, discovery and uncertainty. It allows us only occasionally to stand still, and expects rather that we will be moving on. Only as we do will there be renewal, for ourselves and for those we seek to get alongside. Resurrection living is living on the move. It is in journeying, rather than arrival, that new days dawn.

The authority of the bible for today, I am saying, will lie not in its laying down the law for our believing, but in the capacity for some of its writings being able to interact in this kind of creative way with the life of a reader, and the life of a community. To some, I know, this will seem too banal for words, compared to that word of God delivered in mortal language before which even kings and emperors trembled, and which gave such power over others' lives to religious functionaries!

But I wonder. 'You can't go back again.' In our day the approach to authority in other spheres is going through a sea change. Increasingly we question all the things - be they individuals, institutions, texts - to whom or which in the past our forebears would simply have deferred on account of their alleged authority. I don't think this anarchic, as some claim, or that it means our society has lost all respect, or that we are trapped in a post-modern. It means simply that we consider authority something that must be earned, justified, and never simply claimed as of right. So we ask its grounds, the benefits it offers, the good it can provide. We're not interested in whether rulers, bishops, holy books or anything else are validated from on high. Are they valid for us, we ask instead? Can I learn from them? Can they illuminate and assist me in my living, without presuming to tell me how I have to do it? My own guess - pace the dignity of the peace march on 15th February is that this is democracy finally catching up on authority - and I am glad.

The bible deserves to be freed from the authority constraints of the centuries. In 1539 England was in the grip of Henry VIII's church reforms. It affected everyone, but we have little written record of its affects. In the little village of Morebath in Devon, however, the wardens recorded in 1539 the fact of their purchase of the Great Bible required of them by the king. They record it as being 'the church boke called the bybyll' - an indicator, presumably, that they had previously been unaware of it, despite the centuries of Christianity in their village. For too long the bible has been bound, by being a 'church boke'. It deserves to be freed from that, and from the silly and distorting assertion that it is 'the Word of God' - for it is not. That will free us to recognise that the human writings that it contains remain of great worth, precisely as human writings; capable of being authoritative in today's world - and deserving to be.