Mind the Gap! Reflections on the “Bible in the Life of the Church” Project

The Challenge It is no secret that the Anglican Communion has been living under considerable strain for over a decade. As with most complex relational situations, we must deal with more than just the presenting issue of how we understand homosexuality. Other areas of belief and behavior are being “fought out” in this debate, and while many in the Communion recognize this fact, we have not come to a consensus as to exacdy what these underlying issues are. Over time it has become clear, however, that our understanding of the place of the Bible in the life of the church is one of these issues. As we have grappled with the challenges raised by the sexuality debate within the Communion, and as people on all sides talk about how they have come to their particular conclusions, we see one element that has repeatedly recurred in their thinking: the Bible is important to them. For example, for tiiose on the “conservative” wing of the church passages like Romans 1.18-32 are seen as offering clear teaching on die incompatibility of same-sex relationships with Christian profession. On the other hand, those of a more “liberal” theological stance suggest that this passage is far less clear about todays context, as it is rooted in a Hellenistic society tiiat viewed homosexuality very differentiy. Both perspectives take Scripture seriously, so it seems clear that we are all engaging with, interpreting, and using the Bible in different ways in our desire to seek its wisdom on the way we should five and behave but, in the process, are coming to differing conclusions. The Project In an attempt to understand these differences better, the Anglican Communion decided in 2009 to embark on a project seeking an answer to the question: “How do we actually engage with and interpret the Bible in the Anglican Communion?”1 The overall aims of the project are: * to explore how we, as Anglicans, actually use the Bible by sharing experiences of using the Bible to explore two major contemporary issues; * to distil and develop from these explorations the principles of Anglican hermeneutics; * to produce resource materials for use at all levels of Christian education; * to provide a guide to significant literature on this topic; * to offer a report and make recommendations to ACC-15. The project is designed to run up to the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in late 2012, so at present it is at the halfway stage.2 The Process In deciding on a process for undertaking this task, the project’s Steering Group rejected a method often used in the past to ascertain an answer to this kind of question, which was to write to every Primate in the Communion asking how they, in their province, engage with and interpret the Bible. Had we done that, in all probability, the Primate would have asked a respected biblical scholar to draft a response, to which the Primate and other provincial leaders would have added their names. We would then have a detailed account of how different parts of the Communion believe they should engage with and interpret the Bible, but we would not know what was happening in practice across the Communion. In order to try to get in touch with how ordinary Anglicans actually engage with and interpret the Bible, the Steering Group decided to design a process in which groups of Anglicans would engage with Scripture and then reflect on how they approached and undertook the task. Two specific case study scriptural engagements have been set up in order to offer the raw materials needed to reflect on the ways we actually engage with and interpret the Bible. In doing this we wanted to ensure that the project engaged with a good cross-section of the Communion both geographically and theologically, and that the engagement took place in areas where there were likely to be differences of opinion, but along fines that were perhaps different from those exposed by the debates on sexuality, since the differences exposed by the sexuality debate are so emotive in many places across the Communion.