As I’ve tried to write this concluding section, it’s become longer and longer and harder and harder! Not surprising really. I’ve been constantly reminded of a favourite sentence that I came across in Keats’ letters many years ago and have never forgotten: “I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive – and yet I think I perceive it …” There is so much that is deep and moving and meaningful, which is beyond our, and certainly my, ability to express.

I have deliberately unpicked some of the threads and revealed some of the joints in the Bible. I have stressed the fact that multiple human processes and agendas, over a long period of history, have gone into recording, writing, and bringing together the amazing collection of writings in the Bible. This very human process by which the Bible has been created, must affect how we arrive at ‘biblical teaching’.

Perhaps because it continues to be the most important and the best-selling book of all time, the Bible may also be the most abused book of all time: badly used by individuals, churches, political movements and even governments to justify their actions and their prejudices.

The nature of truth is at stake. There are answers to life’s big questions and mysteries which are simple, easy to understand and woefully inadequate or just wrong! Fundamental to truth is honest seeking – an unblinkered consideration of everything we know, in the attempt to achieve understanding. It is no different when we seek truth in the Bible.

This is NOT to deny the immediacy of truth, even the accessibility of truth in a story such as Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son or the precious statement “God is love”. Such stories and statements move us at many levels, and if we engage well with them, they will reward every stage of that engagement from an initial hearing to a prolonged in-depth study.

My experience of teaching and preaching on scripture in many contexts in this country and abroad, over many years, is that the time and the place is always important. The word must take flesh and live among us. One cannot simply take out a sermon and preach it verbatim in a different context. Sometimes the heart of the teaching may be challenged by the context, which calls for new thinking about assumptions too easily made.

Teaching needs to be applied, incarnated – and that process of asking: “what does this mean for us here today?”, mirrors the process by which biblical documents are written, and draws us into the dynamics of ‘God’s word’ being taught and received in different times and places.

I totally believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, but I don’t understand exactly what that means. Nobody does. It is a mystery. It’s not God dictating, but God at work bringing the scriptures into being and speaking to us through them. To acknowledge the mystery of this process does not undermine the Bible’s power to speak to us and to shape our lives. Rather, that power is enhanced when we refuse to allow God’s message to be curtailed by narrow biblical interpretation, or turned into an idol which takes the place of the living God. So, far from being afraid of critical study of the Bible, we welcome the enlightenment it brings to faith seeking understanding.

WHAT CAN WE GET AWAY WITH?

When I was a youth worker in Dublin, I was responsible for a lovely group of church-linked teenagers. One topic that always got them groaning, but also interested and asking questions, was boy/girl relationships (I don’t mean to exclude other relationships but that was all we discussed in 1983).

• The questions and discussions seemed always to focus on what couples were ‘allowed’ to do. How far they could go in their physical relationship. Touching, kissing, petting, etc! many of the questions were really: what can we get away with? It seems to me that while God was at some level acknowledged as the creator of love and of the attraction between the sexes, his main role was to tell them what they could or couldn’t do – mediated through the Bible and a rather dodgy youth worker!
• Sadly, the question ‘what is allowed’ or even ‘what can we get away with’ is behind far too much of Christian teaching. And it reduces our faith so easily into a narrow and very unattractive legalism which loses sight of God as the loving parent of the Prodigal Son story, who runs to meet us when we turn back to him.
• The ‘limits’ that God gives are always there to help us create a thriving community of faith, at the heart of which is love, where everyone is valued and can offer their gifts for the common good.
• In Jesus, we make a huge step into adulthood, the freedom of the Gospel and the God who desires mercy not sacrifice. Jesus asks us to look to the main principles and act on them with the help of his Spirit. Jesus castigates the teachers of the law and the Pharisees for insisting on tithing everything, even herbs, “but you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former.” (Matthew 23:23)
• This coming of age which Jesus leads us into actually makes us go back to the most child-like but important question of all. WHY? Back to first principles and big issues.
• For example, the fourth commandment is “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” (Exodus 20:8) We have noted elsewhere Jesus’ teaching on the Sabbath, including “the Sabbath is made for man”. To work out how to live out the important principle of Sabbath, we cannot be legalistic, but need to go back to first principles – why there is a Sabbath, what it is for and then how to live out that priority in today’s world which is very different from its original context in the Old Testament.

CATCH THE VISION. SEE THE BIG PICTURE

• I remember vividly an interview with my headteacher when I was about 12. I had been messing about with marbles and dropped them noisily on the floor during the brief end-of-day prayers. I came ready with all sorts of excuses, but I remember him looking at me with kindness. He waved away my explanations and spoke briefly about his vision for the school. He said he wanted young leaders to help him, and he hoped I could become one. He wanted me to share his vision, be the person, and set an example.
• It was a huge growing-up moment for me. A commitment to the big picture and helping create that school community, put everything else into perspective.  I felt both very stupid for not seeing what the real priorities were, but also very affirmed and inspired to play a positive role thereafter (though I’m sure I did that very patchily!).
• God, as we have come to know him in Jesus, calls us to share his vision and his mission to bring about the kingdom of God here and now and as our future hope. The Bible, the Spirit and the Christian community are all there to help us do that together. We need to concentrate a great deal more on the vision of what can be, allowing that to capture our imagination and shape our hearts. It’s our biblical priority.
• I still remember, as a child at that school, being fascinated when I was taught how to draw a reasonably straight line freehand. Make two dots – one at the beginning of your planned straight line, and one where you want it to end. Place your pencil on the first dot, then keep looking at the end dot and draw. Up to then, I’d thought I should look at the pencil, at the place where I was making the mark, but the line would always go skewwhiff.

• It illustrates the importance of keeping one’s eye on where one wants to get to. On the big picture. The point of the journey. For Christians, the point of the journey of life is the kingdom of God – as in Jesus’ prayer “Your kingdom come”.
• In relation to daily situations and decisions about what we live and teach, we will get there by focusing on the big biblical themes, on what Jesus calls “the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23) Or simply focusing on loving God and our neighbours as ourselves.
• In the life of the Church, we tend to focus on the wrong place. On where we are now as opposed to where we want to get to.  On self-preservation. On maintenance rather than rather than mission. On disagreements that are important but secondary. On inadequate human resources rather than on God with whom nothing is impossible.

UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE ACROSS DIFFERENT CULTURES AND DIFFERENT CHURCHES

• We are a long way from the times and cultures in which the writings of the Bible originated, were written down and reached their current form in the collection we now know as the Bible. This is especially true in the West. Other parts of the world may more closely reflect ‘biblical times’ not least by their dependence on agriculture and subsistence farming, and a much stronger sense of community.
• This distance has advantages as well as drawbacks. One advantage is that we bring a lot of understanding about the writing of the Bible from careful study of the writings and our growing knowledge of the backgrounds from which they emerged.
• In the Bible, we see different priorities, different teaching and even different histories, emerging from different situations. So, we ask the question: why was that message given to those people at that time? What were the human priorities, and why might God have wanted it said or written? It enables us to reflect on big themes applied in different situations.
• How we interpret the Bible in radically different cultures and settings today is certainly difficult. It is causing huge divisions in world-wide Churches. Most obviously (for me) in the Anglican Church which has very public disagreements and divisions. But it is just as present, say, in the Roman Catholic Church which keeps its conflicts a little more under wraps.
• So, what’s the future of the Church with so much difference in theology?
  • The first answer has to be that we are in God’s hands and the Holy Spirit will guide us, though we may hamper that by not having ‘ears to hear’. Christ is head of his Church and will shape it with us when we are open to his leading, and despite us when we are not. But it’s a long-term project and history and experience tells us that God takes his time to sort out our wrong-headedness and injustice!
  • Secondly, we need a lot more humility. Isaiah 55:8-9 is crucial: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” declares Yahweh. God enables us to know what we need to know, but we know so little in a universe so vast. We need bucketloads of faith and trust to find coherence and meaning in life, even with all that has been revealed to us in Christ, in the Bible and in creation.
  • Thirdly, Churches evolve. Churches everywhere evolve. And I think the speed of evolution in our ever-smaller world, is speeding up through ever-advancing means of communication and social change. Theology is always contextual, and contexts are always changing. Through these changing times we need to be constant in prayer, listening, study and reflection – with our hearts and minds open to God doing and revealing new things.
  • Fourthly, I think we will only remain united if we agree to loosen our requirements for theological unity (believing the same thing about everything) and become more deeply committed to loving relationships and mutual respect, focused on our shared mission to live in, and proclaim, Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. ‘Bearing with one another in love’ is utterly essential.
  • Finally, we will never avoid honest disagreement among Christians, not least because of the very nature of the Bible. But how we disagree is crucial. And how we behave towards each other when we disagree is crucial. Probably one of the most important things we can do in our divided world, as a witness to the Gospel, is to be an example of how to disagree and yet maintain loving relationships. We’re not often good at that!
    • We need a focus on the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians chapter 6) when there are disputes about Christian teaching.
    • Jesus tells his disciples, when warning them about false teachers, that a good tree will only bear good fruit and a bad tree will only bear bad fruit. So “by their fruit you will recognise them.” (Matthew 7: 14-20 and elsewhere).
    • In the same vein, James writes “I will show you my faith by what I do.” (James 2:18)
    • And at the heart of a story that is very challenging to St Peter and all faithful Jews (Acts chapters 10 and 11), Peter is recorded as saying: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Acts 10: 34) We need that kind of inclusive generosity.
• One of the greatest achievements of the Bible and the history it records, is that it keeps God’s people looking forward in hope. It keeps presenting a vision, which renews and adapts as the situation changes. In the Church, we need to model this dynamic and ‘proclaim afresh in every generation’, and across cultures, the good news of hope and healing in Christ. We should not expect this proclamation of hope to be exactly the same in every time and place, but we should expect our love for one another and our unity in Christ to be more important than our differences.