Here is the text of the Bishop of Chichester's address to his Diocesan Synod on 15th November 2008. It can also be accessed on the Diocese of Chichester website here.3 John 5-8; Luke 18.1-8
This morning’s first reading is from the third letter of John.
It is the shortest book in the Bible, with just 15 verses, in only 2 of which God is mentioned, and Jesus not at all. Of all the epistles, this one conforms most closely to the contemporary patterns of secular letter writing and feels most like a personal note. Not, you might think, a very promising candidate either for reading in church or for inclusion in the canon.
Hardly surprisingly then it is often overlooked, together with its “twin”, John’s second letter, with which it should be closely read. It would be going too far to say that there was a lively debate in the early Church about these two letters and their authorship, but there certainly was long standing uncertainty about them with many of the early fathers and the Reformers agonising about them.
None of that is or course relevant to their authority. They are part of the canon and regardless of the hesitations of this or that Church Father or later writer our starting point is not whether we would have put them in the Bible, what Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Martin Luther or Cardinal Cajetan thought, but the fact that, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they are in the Bible.
That being the case, the question of why these strange, somewhat difficult and ephemeral letters should be part of Holy Scripture is actually part of their authority.
By “why” I do not mean “what was the process by which they came to be part of the Bible?” but “what do they tell us about the Gospel?” and “what light do they shed on Christian living today?”
This is not going to be an exposition of both epistles or even of the rest of 3 John beyond what we heard in the reading, but I do want you to take these questions seriously as guides to how to approach Scripture. I say this because in the present turmoil of Christianity (which is far wider than the situation in the Anglican Communion) what is at stake is not just Scripture as “the ultimate standard of faith” but also what that means.
Of course there are those who, while still claiming to be Christians, think they can either reject the Bible or use it as a mere guide or even historical document.
We do not need to spend time on such notions.
But even among those who assert the authority of the Bible and who would not dream of proclaiming anything that “is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby” there are sharp differences. Indeed some of those differences are or are seen to be church-dividing. What this means of course is not that all too often it is not Scripture itself but a particular approach to Scripture which is the real authority.
This is a serious question because it is clearly different on the one hand to honour Scripture and the fact and principle of the canon of Scripture from on the other to give priority to a particular way of using or interpreting Scripture.
Now this is a charge to a diocesan synod and not a lecture or dogmatic pronouncement about the authority and use of the Bible. I do however want to commend to you and the whole diocese the need for growing understanding about these matters. Indeed, having spent the past few years encouraging you to deeper study on the underlying issues behind our contemporary disagreements over women bishops and human nature, including sexuality, I want now to propose a programme of study of the whole issue of scripture and authority in the Church. This is timely not only because of the inherent importance of the theme but also in view of the upcoming celebration in 2011 of the 4th centenary of the translation we know as the Authorised Version of the Bible and the important role played in that translation by my predecessor Lancelot Andrewes.
4 years ago I quoted from this pulpit some words of Charles Simeon “God has not revealed his truth in a system; the Bible has no system as such. Lay aside system and fly to the Bible; receive its words with simple submission, and without an eye to any system. Be Bible Christians, not system Christians.” From this he argued “When two opposite principles are each clearly contained in the Bible, truth does not lie in taking what is called the golden mean, but in steadily adopting both extremes, and, as a pendulum, oscillating, but not vacillating between the two.” Simeon, you see, was insistent that it is God’s word in Scripture to which we should have recourse and not to any particular theory of scripture or its interpretation.
How contemporary those words and how necessary in our troubled Church of England today. Not the least important aspect of the issue is the way in which Scripture itself undergirds and witnesses to the supremacy of God and God’s revelation over any theories we may have about it.
With that as background, let me return to this morning’s first reading. Apart from Revelation, the Apocalypse, the third letter of John is the only NT book ascribed to John where the word “church” is used (one of which in this morning’s text) The word occurs three times, in verses 6, 9 and 10: the church is the assembled community of Christ’s faithful to whom testimony can be given, to whom letters can be written; which can welcome Christians from other churches, but in which the power hungry can take control and resist apostolic authority.
The church is thus both a healthy place in which the word of life can be proclaimed and celebrated in partnership with others who share the same faith and an unhealthy place from which sisters and brothers in Christ can all too easily be excluded by human vainglory.
Scripture is of course always contextual (the Bible is not a Christian Qu’ran) - so we should not imagine that 3John, any more than any other part of the Bible, is addressed simply and directly to our own circumstances, but we can ponder on why it was that John wrote as he did and what are the lasting lessons the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit has for us from this particular moment and text.
We do not know anything or anything very much for sure about the circumstances in which this letter was written or even by or to whom.
What is clear however is that the writer (who describes himself as “the Elder” and may or may not have been the apostle John) commends Gaius to whom he writes for the way his church had received some Christian visitors. Such hospitality is itself a witness to the truth. John asks for more, however - a positive (and probably financial) contribution to the onward journey of some other Christian travellers.
He claims, moreover, some authority in a particular church of which he is not a member; he suggests that hospitality is not just a consequence of Christian moral teaching but is itself a witness (that’s a strong word) to the truth, and also gives evidence of the way in which local leadership can go haywire unless it is part of the network of believers - no church is an island; its fellowship with all other churches is not just a consequence of but actually part of what it means to be a church.
That the Church is Catholic is of course an article of faith. What that means is therefore not an optional extra, but belongs to the very nature of the Church itself - indeed precisely one of the marks of catholicity is precisely the point I am urging in this sermon, our common acceptance of the Scriptures.
The central issues for 3John are hospitality and power. Just after the verses we heard this morning, the writer referred to the mysterious and sinister Diotrephes, a power-hungry local church dignitary, inhospitable to fellow Christians, a congregationalist, who would have well understood the present Anglican notion of provincial autonomy and probably the easy recourse in some places to litigation as a way of resolving essentially ecclesial or theological disputes.
All these were regarded by the highly orthodox writer of this epistle regarded as church-dividing issues. Hospitality - mutual acceptance - and the role of pastors in relation to this are possibly among the principles in this little letter which transcend the particular circumstances in and for which it was written and which may help us to reflect intelligently on wider questions of how to read the Bible.
I have touched in this sermon on some detailed, theological and even controversial items. These are not modern equivalents of calculating the number of angels who can dance on a pinhead, but are fundamental to our integrity, coherence and, I might say, survival, as a church.
I do not know what the future holds for the “Church of England as by law established” or for Anglicanism or the Anglican Communion. And I can actually be quite relaxed about such questions since as our own Archbishop put it so powerfully at the Lambeth Conference, in asking them we are not so much asking “is it Anglican?” as “is it Christian?”
Well, I do of course agree with Archbishop Rowan, but how we receive, understand, interpret and are bound by Scripture is precisely one of the matters we have to address in answering the question “is it Christian?” That could an agenda for the next few years, and I shall be interested to see if anyone picks up the challenge.
