Parish of Llandudno North Wales, Rector's letter June 2011

August 2011

During 2011 many celebratory events are taking place up and down the land to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, usually known as the ‘Authorized Version’. You may indeed remember that I wrote about this in my letter earlier in the year. In the autumn we will have the opportunity to take part in a number of local events to celebrate this important anniversary.

I return to the subject now because recently we heard of a most bizarre event held in the parish of Pennal in our diocese to commemorate the AV’s 400th anniversary. During this event the Vicar of the parish cut up pages from the AV and stuck them up on a board and also burnt some of the remnants. His motive was to show that despite the beautiful language of the AV many parts of the Bible reflect in his words ‘a cruel and vile God’.

Now I am sure that most of us are very aware that there are parts of the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, which may seem difficult to square with the God of love we believe to be revealed in Our Lord Jesus Christ. In my view the way this was done in Pennal was very childish and offensive and in a way insulting to people’s intelligence.

For surely most of us are quite able to understand and accept that the more ‘bloodthirsty’ and violent parts of the scriptures, and those which appear to show God as angry and vengeful, came from a society very different from our own and that we have to read them in this context. As Anglicans we are not committed to a ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘literalist’ way of interpreting the Holy Scriptures. In other words we don’t have to accept that every word, dot and comma in the Bible is directly inspired by God. Rather, it is the Bible as a whole which is God’s word, and we have to understand the difficult passages with reference to the nature of the God revealed in Christ.

God can only reveal Himself to men and women to the extent that they are able to receive that revelation; and so in the pages of the Old Testament we can see a usually gradual, though occasionally sudden, development of their understanding of God which comes to a climax in the person and the teachings of Our Blessed Lord.

The process of understanding God and his demands on us have gone on developing even since New Testament times. For example, it took until the 19th century for Christians to realise that slavery was totally unacceptable. Our difficulties with some of the issues which bitterly divide Christians at the present time I believe to be part of this same process of growing in our understanding of the nature of God and his purposes for us.

If the Vicar of Pennal’s actions last month inspire us all to grapple more effectively with these issues then he has done us a service. However I cannot condone his rather juvenile stunt of tearing up and burning of pages of the Bible. As our Bishop said this is disrespectful and will give offense to many folk. Common sense too surely teaches us that you can’t simply cut out parts of the Bible you don’t like and sanitize it in your own image as it were, rather it is the process of discernment and interpretation I spoke of earlier which helps us to understand the ‘difficult’ bits and put them in their proper context. Then we can see more clearly the person of Christ shining out from the pages of scripture.

Fr. John

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