Rowan Williams, the Archbiship of Cantebury was at Wycliffe & Trinity College, UfT almost a month ago. I was not able to be there, but I read through the essay he presented, and there were a number of amazing thoughts that came from it. You can read about his visit as well as the whole article here.
“One of the things that most clearly and universally identifies Christians as Christians is that they habitually read the Bible – or have the Bible read to them.”
“To begin with the simplest point: before Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public. Those of us who assume that the normative image of Scripture reading is the solitary individual poring over a bound volume, one of the great icons of classical Protestantism, may need to be reminded that for most Christians throughout the ages and probably most in the world at present, the norm is listening. Very few early or mediaeval Christians could possibly have owned a Bible; not many in the rapidly growing churches of the developing world today are likely to either. And this underlines the fact that the Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.”
“…the celebration of the Eucharist and the reading of the Bible are the most universal ways in which the Church ‘represents’ what it is; and both sow the Church as a community committed to listening afresh to its foundational call. The gathering of the assembly for worship is not simply a human routine, however much it may come to look like that. It is, theologically speaking, a moment in which the present activity of God is assumed and responded to.”
This is probably what resonated with me the most…
“The Spirit, according to John’s gospel, is the remembrancer, the divine agency that makes the words of Christ contemporary. It is the Spirit that incorporates us into one community with the disciples at the Last Supper and indeed with the Deuteronomically imagined people of Israel. It is the Spirit that enables the mutual self-offering that builds up the Body and that unites the members in the prayer of the glorified Christ. It is the Spirit that connects the periods of God’s communicative action towards humanity and thus connects the diverse texts that make up the one manifold text that we call Holy Scripture. The Spirit’s work as ‘breathing’ God’s wisdom into the text of Scripture is not a magical process that removes biblical writing from the realm of actual human writing; it is the work of creating one ‘movement’ out of the diverse historical narratives and textual deposits that represent Israel’s and the Church’s efforts to find words to communicate God’s communication of summons and invitation. The Spirit through the events of God’s initiative stirs up those words and makes sense of them for the reader/hearer in the Spirit-sustained community. As Karl Barth insisted, this leaves no ground for breaking up Scripture into the parts we can ‘approve’ as God-inspired and the parts that are merely human; the whole is human and the whole is offered by God in and through the life of the Body, always shaping and determining the form of that life.”
Lastly…
“Reading Scripture theologically and understanding theologically the process of reading – all this is essentially about seeing Scripture as the vehicle of God’s act to bring about conversion. Ultimately, Scripture brings us back to the uniquely creative moment of God’s freedom – to the grace of a free self-bestowal that can create what is other and then, by love and welcome, transform that other into a sharer and communicator of the same joyful, generative act. ‘The word of life…[that] we have seen and heard we declare to you, so that you and we together may share in a common life, that life which we share with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ’ (I Jn.1.1-3).”
A week or so following Williams’ visit to Canada, the Anglican church here in Canada decided to not follow their American counterparts and voted against same-sex marriage allowance for the whole Diocese. I was very relieved to read that (The Star a few Saturday’s ago), because last year it looked like they may make the change. The Bishop also addressed sam-sex relationships as is referenced in the first few chapters in Romans in his essay.
