An edited version of keynote address given at the recent
‘Radical Love: being an inclusive evangelical’ conference,
hosted by the churches of St James and Emmanuel, Didsbury, Manchester.
It began on the beach. Two children sifting the shoreline for shells and fossils to sell – everything helps for a family always on the edge of poverty. That day they stumble on something extraordinary. Buried in the sand is the large, fossilised skull of a creature with huge eyes, powerful jaws and dozens of sharp teeth. It had fallen from the cliffs above. The boy leaves. His twelve year old sister begins a long search for the rest of the fossil in the cliffs. At last she uncovers it. It was seventeen feet long. The local newspaper called it a crocodile, but it was clear this was a creature that no one had ever seen before. It was eventually named Ichthyosaurus ('fish lizard’), a marine reptile that we now know lived around 200 million years ago. It caused a sensation far and wide. Even the Madras Courier reported it.
The year is 1812. This is Lyme Bay, Dorset. The girl’s name was Mary Anning. It was the first of a series of discoveries she made. She became a widely sought out, self-taught, expert on fossils and palaeontology, though the public credit was routinely claimed by men. In March, over 200 years later, on International Women’s Day, the Royal Mail produced stamps to commemorate her - only slightly slower in arriving, I observe, than first class post these days.
Though fossil finds were not new, the nineteenth century discoveries triggered the development of the first properly scientific theories to explain them. They asked wholly new questions about the world. Worryingly, for Christians of that time the answers appeared to contradict what the bible was thought to teach.
Previous centuries had all contained discoveries that overturned inherited beliefs and understandings. In 1492Columbus simply sailed off the edge of the known maps of his day. Europe then had no idea of the true size of the planet or even that any land existed south of the equator. The impact of the stories of new worlds he returned with was immense. It was one of the triggers for the imaginative transformation that was The Renaissance. The response was exploratory, adventurous, outward looking.
Other findings met with fierce opposition though. In the 1600’s when the scientist and astronomer Galileo challenged the ‘orthodox’ belief that the sun and stars revolved around the earth he was excommunicated for contradicting the Bible and the teachings of the church. He spent the latter part of his life under house arrest.
Now, nineteenth century Britain found itself faced with discoveries that triggered a similar mix of excitement, anxiety, and often fierce opposition by the Christian world. Those unearthing these ‘impossible monsters’ (as local Dorset novelist and clergyman, Charles Kingsley, called them) quickly learned to be very cautious about where they shared their findings. Once under suspicion the consequences could be dire. Patrons withdrew funding. Publishers were threatened with prison. Teaching careers were terminated. Charles Darwin is one of the best known in that era, sailing on the Beagle in 1831 and publishing the Origin of the Species in 1859. But he kept his most controversial theories hidden in a secret diary for twenty years.
Why was there such resistance? We look back rather baffled, for what they were uncovering has long since become so much common knowledge. It centres on what it means to be biblical. Nineteenth century Britain was a devoutly Christian nation. The Bible was the authority at its foundations. All claims to human understanding and knowledge must conform to the holy texts and be judged by them.
Anning’s discovery was problematic because her findings appeared to contradict the creation stories in Genesis, which were believed to be literal accounts.
Genesis chapter one clearly states that God separated land from water on day three. Creatures were not created until day five. So what is a marine mammal doing on dry land at all? And why is it deep under the ground and not lying on the surface?
Furthermore, these creatures were no longer in existence. But did not God tell Noah to bring two of every kindinto the ark to survive the flood (and marine mammals would have been untroubled by water anyway). Extinction was a hitherto unknown possibility. The very idea seemed to be a blasphemous denial of God’s creating work and the Biblical record.
The Genesis account states that God made all creatures ‘according to their kinds’. This was understood to mean each species was distinct and fixed. The emerging theories of transmutation or evolution of species - particularly of primates into humans - shocked faithful believers.
One further factor was the belief about the age of the earth. In 1650 Archbishop Ussher had published his life’s work using the bible record to date creation back to its very beginning. His conclusion was that world began on the night of October 22nd/23rd, 4004 BC. The King James Bible versions began to incorporated Ussher’s chronology into the margins alongside the bible text. This chronology became part of ‘orthodox’ belief everywhere. To challenge it was to question biblical revelation itself and attack the very faith of the church.
Here was society and church facing amazing new discoveries about the world but with an understanding of the scripture texts that meant the emerging conclusions had to be resisted as attacks on the Bible and Christian civilisation as a whole. One of Charles Darwin’s most public supporters was nicknamed the ‘devil’s disciple’.
Faced with the evidence of these discoveries nineteenth century believers reacted in different ways. Philip Gosse was a leading naturalist in his day. Darwin consulted him. He agreed that the visible evidence pointed to evolutionary processes and a world of great age. But, for him, the bible was a higher authority. He believed it taught that God made the world complete, in a moment, but with all the appearance of age – such as rock strata, tree rings and even a navel for Adam. He decided God must be testing our faith by making it look otherwise.
Others felt they could no longer believe the bible in the light of what they were uncovering. Surely the bible was wrong? What they were rejecting though was not the bible so much as a certain way of reading it - perhaps the only one on offer to them. This may have contributed to Darwin’s personal loss of faith. Only very slowly and unevenly did the necessary discussions begin about whether the bible was ever actually doing history, and pronouncing factually, on these issues in the way so long believed. But by time he died in 1882, the agnostic, Charles Darwin, was granted a final resting place in Westminster Abbey, just around the corner from Archbishop Ussher. Four thousand years is now four thousand million years and counting.
I find here a parable for faith and church today, facing new questions of its own around issues of human identity, relationships and belonging. The lessons to be learned are very similar. So are the consequences of resisting them.
The Church of England regularly affirms its mission as being to ‘proclaim afresh in each generation’. This is not simply finding ever new ways of communicating inherited beliefs, though. That is where the nineteenth century church was stuck. Faith must engage with the challenges of fresh questions and discoveries around us. Unless we are willing to do this it we will end up trapped like our Victorian forebears. The questioning is mutual.
So what happens with doctrine means dinosaurs? Or to put it another way, how does the Christian church, in any age, in every tradition and expression within it, avoid such defensiveness, using the bible to barricade faith, rather than be trustingly and adventurously open to the new?
For St Paul biblical faith was always something unfinished and incomplete. ‘Now we see in part’, said Paul - partially, imperfectly. ‘Now we see dimly’, he continued - obscurely (1Cor 13.9-12). Biblical faith does not yet see all this clearly or in its completeness. It never has. Being biblical involves a trusting not knowing.Christian faith is forward looking. There is always more to learn, to discover. This means the unsettling process of allowing the inherited boundaries of faith and understanding to be tested and challenged afresh. Christians need to be very careful about claiming certainty when it comes to the bible text.
The Living in Love and Faith project reflected this in its quite new way of exploring faith and understanding. It replaced the blocks of theological knowing, of inherited faith and its outworkings, with an approach ‘marked by provisionality and humility, recognising that we are in a time of corporate not-knowing, where mystery remains as to our humanity and how we are to live our lives in a world that we do not always understand, and where God often acts in surprising ways’. (1)
Being biblical requires the work of ‘double listening’.
The great evangelical teacher John Stott constantly urged this. What we need, he said, are Christian minds that are humbly “shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity and also fully immersed in the realities of the contemporary world.” (2). They must meet and talk to each other and be willing to learn from each other. Neither can say of the other, `I have no need of you’.
We have long had a developing understanding of scripture, in fact. The process of re-visiting previously unquestioned biblical convictions in the light of new questions, is not unfamiliar to us. Often fiercely resisted at first, on the basis of what ‘the bible says’, the list includes creation/evolution, cosmology, science, biology, race, women and men, and divorce and re-marriage.
- if we don’t call divorced and remarried people adulterers and stone them.
- if we do not expect women to be silent in church and to learn theology from their husbands at home.
- if we borrow and lend money on interest.
- if disabled people are not excluded from worship or ministry.
- if we think slavery is evil.
- if we use artificial contraception and make love without intending to conceive life …
we have already moved significantly beyond what the bible teaches, even commands – and never revokes. Not denying divine revelation, but asking afresh what kind of revelation it is. Not denying its authority, but discerning the nature of its authority, and therefore how it speaks and guides us into the new challenges we are encountering. Each challenge requiring the faithful to revisit their understanding of scripture.
The revered evangelical theologian, I Howard Marshall urged the need to move beyond scripture, that is, beyond the immediate surface reading of the texts. He knew there were risks involved in this, but he was clear the greater risk was being misled by only reading the Bible in an ancient time warp and refusing to go beyond the letter of scripture (3). When this happens, faith becomes inflexible and fossilized. The nineteenth church offers an example of this. Our twenty-first century church is facing similar challenges as we explore the holy mystery of human identity and belonging.
Being biblical requires us to read the bible responsibly.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes there are 613 commands in the Torah but ancient Hebrew had no word for ‘obey’. Modern Hebrew had to create a word for absolute obedience. The Hebrew words shema and lishmoa express a call to hear, listen, attend, understand. ‘Hear O Israel’. Sacks suggests, therefore, that God seeks something more from us than just obedience in the face of the commands – more than just submission and compliance. He seeks our responsibility (4). To discern what ‘following’ and ‘obeying’ means we must first hear, listen, attend and understand. English translations miss this by nearly always translating those words ‘obey’.
Being biblical means engaging responsibly in careful discussion and dialogue with the text, with God, with our world and with each other – a work of continuing, communal discernment. When the Living in Love and Faith process put story and dialogue at the centre of its approach it could not be more biblical.
This dialogue is found within scripture itself. For example, the way the wisdom tradition challenges the confident certainties of the dominant Deuteronomic voices - ‘Do good and you will be blessed, do bad and it will go bad’. Excuse me, says Job and others, life is not that simple. Bad things happen to good people and many evil people seem to live a long time with their health and wealth intact! Another example would be the way the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles offer very contrasting and sometimes contradictory assessments on the same era of Israel’s history. A critically discerning conversation or even argument is going on. Whenever the New Testament quotes from or alludes to Old Testament texts they are changed, conceptually or literally, in nearly every case. Jesus reading and preaching from Isaiah at Nazareth is a striking example of this.
Here is a continuing revelation, in and through the scriptures, under the Lordship of Christ and the compelling of the Spirit, engaged with this emerging world. The scriptures reflect the character of the God who inspired them. Karen Keen called her book about the inspiration and authority of the bible - ‘The Word of a Humble God’ (5). A humble God speaks a humble word to us.
‘The Bible says ….’
The argument for inclusion and welcome from scripture is an accumulative one. There are no explicit texts and examples on offer. ‘Show me one text’. ‘Give me one example of blessed gay couples in scripture’. There aren’t any. It means on social media and elsewhere we can quickly sound hopelessly vague and attempting to avoid the plain meaning of the text – what ‘the bible says’. ‘Did God say?’ But this is not actually how scripture reveals, teaches and guides.
To state the obvious - the bible is not a divine encyclopaedia with a text and example for every life question - so if ‘Blessed Gay Couples’ are not found in the index, well, they are obviously not biblical.
Nor do we literally obey every place in the bible where there are explicit texts and examples. There are no bible texts anywhere condemning slavery, or any condemnation of polygyny, and not one example of a blessed slave-free church in the New Testament. But we would claim our opposition to slavery today is utterly scriptural. There are no examples in the bible of artificial contraception and family planning. There are no stories anywhere in the bible of blessed couples who are divorced and re-married. But in our lifetime the church has believed all this to be consistent with scripture. We have moved beyond the text of scripture believing this to be a faithful, pastoral development of orthodox, biblical doctrine.
Finally, the church has never been a place where people all believe the same thing - least of all my own evangelical tradition. It has always been a place where there are strong differences and debates going on. It was so in the New Testament where Jew/Gentile divisions run through church life like an unresolved fault line. It was their version of our sexuality debates.
The christian church is on a journey of understanding, and we are all in different places on the way. In 1997 Richard Hays, published The Moral Vision of the New Testament. He was already a widely respected and influential theologian. The book included a chapter on homosexuality that quickly became the definitive statement for conservative believers about the bible’s opposition to same sex relationships.
In April this year he announced his understanding had changed and he had written a book explaining why and saying sorry. This sent shock waves through the evangelical world. Within a week two long reviews had appeared explaining why he was wrong. This was quite an achievement in itself because the book was still six months from being published at all. ‘The widening of God’s mercy’ was published last month (6). God’s mercy is always wide but here was a man humbly confessing that on this subject it is wider than he ever knew. We, like Hays, have yet to reach the end of it.
The challenge to faith in every age is to be open to the new. To walk humbly with our God in this emerging world. For now, we see in part.
It is a journey of understanding in which
doctrine must meet dinosaurs
texts must be tested afresh
certainties must be questioned anew
where bibles are no longer barricades
It is a journey of faith together,
from anxiety to adventure,
beyond entrenchment to transformation,
from regression to renewal
from hostility to hospitality
as we explore the ever widening revelation of God’s creating life and love.
It is a biblical journey.
This is Orthodox faith.
Most gloriously of all, it is where we meet Christ, in the ever-widening community of his radical love.
1. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/gs-2328-llf-nov-2023.pdf. Annex H p4.
3. I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the bible - Moving from Scripture to Theology
STL. 2004. P78.
4. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, OUP, 2010, p45.
5. Karen Keen, Eerdmans. 2023.
6. Richard B Hays. ‘The widening of God’s mercy - Sexuality Within the Biblical Story. Yale. 2024.
David Runcorn is a convenor of the Inclusive Evangelicals network, author of Love means love – same-sex relationships and the bible (SPCK) and the forthcoming Playing in the dust – a pilgrimage with the creation stories (Canterbury).
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