Pluralist, with the greatest respect to your views and you make no secret of where you are coming from and I admire your courage in posting in what is notionally, a non-heterodox  christian website.  Nonetheless, the conclusion I draw from from your prolific writings ( and I suspect others may also), is that the only thing you are truly religiously certain about is your own religious uncertainty.

In that you are in good company with large sections of the Anglican clergy.....

And laity, user 1364.

….written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope:

(Elijah) came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. "I have had enough, LORD," he said. "Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors."

And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.

He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law.

But what can I say?

       He has spoken to me, and he himself has done this.

       I will walk humbly all my years

       because of this anguish of my soul.

We might add…

Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!"

No, it is not unbelief, it is called learning. You can top up your beliefs as much as you wish, in whatever direction you wish, or according to how you have been told. I believe an awful lot, it is just that they are not listed on your particular scorecard.

This I extend from my own blog, following the Archbishop's own quip.

The Archbishop's Donald Rumsfeld Questions

In this ongoing spirit of avoiding unclarities (note the use of a double negative here) here are some questions regarding the Anglican Communion:

1. What don't Anglicans know that they can disagree about?
2. What don't Anglicans know that they must agree about?
3. What do Anglicans know that they can disagree about?
4. What do Anglicans know that they must agree about?

• The first is an unknown unknown
• The second is an unknown known
• The third is an known unknown
• The fourth is a known known

http://pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com

As I see things it is infinitely more important than anything else that we all believe in submit to and obey the God of the Bible and his Christ.

I’m wondering, Pluralist and liddon, whether you are going to respond to and agree with the point I tried to make about the Old Testament in my posting of 12 February, that

……the early Church would not have agreed with liddon’s assertion

 ‘the bible was created by the church and stands under the authority of the church’(11 February 2008)

nor with Pluralist’s assertion

‘It was the Church communities that in effect wrote these scriptures and so the Church is perfectly entitled to have an ongoing relationship with them in terms of the present day, culture, and the rest’ (9 February 2008).

Phil Almond

sorry, phil. i thought your comment was a joke, as it was exactly the early church that created the bible. the very idea of a canon means that there has to be a body (the church) to create it. i'm sure you are also well aware that the pseudopigraphal and apocyphal books are a continuing source of disagreement.

in a festschrift (i think for christopher evans) published years ago now, claire drury examined this problem in a very amusing and convincing way in her essay 'who's in? who's out'. i write this from memory, without the text in front of me, so forgive me if there is some detail wrong in the quotation.

Phil Almond,

Doubtless Pluralist (and Liddon) will correct me if I am wrong in my estimation of their approach to scripture, but my impression is that they take the view that the real subject matter of theology is not divinely revealed truths but  rather that of human religious experience that  is negotiable  and subject to change.  To them, scripture  is thus a record not so much of what God has done, but what humans  thought He said and did. Thus in the liberal view, it comes down to subjectivism informed by contemporary culture and ideas . Pluralist's  'scorecard' is thus a subjective one --  'liberal and thoughtful' as he puts it himself on his own blog which I recommend reading BTW  if you want to understand his standpoint (do you do the sketches yourself Pluralist? - they are really quite good).

The distinction between the Bible as the fallible word of man as opposed to the infallible Word of God is in my view,  the principal fault line that  divides orthodox and  liberals. It is all to easy to get sidetracked  by excesses  on both sides e.g. Spong's theology or extreme literal  interpretations of scriptual texts without recourse to proper hermenuetics, but the fact remains that if you are looking at the same thing from two totally different approaches when you don't even agree on fundamental definitions,  then it is hard to see how there  can be any meaningful reapproachment,  less conversation between liberals and orthodox - a pessimistic view perhaps, but one that I am increasingly persuaded of.

This is what I think the Bishop of Rochester meant when said he stated that he thought there were "two religions" in the Church of England. Both liberals and orthodox use similar spiritual jargon  but attach different meaning to the words.  In the past, differences of theological opinion in the Cof E were rather cosily accommodated as a continuous spectrum with liberalism on one side and conservatism on the other. One could 'blend in' as it were , going through the motions despite your own theological predilections. However in reality it is much more highly polarised than that.

The more I read about liberal/ orthodox fault lines such as homosexuality, women's ordination and universalism,  he more I think that the best thing to happen is for a split to take place and for liberals and orthodox to go their separate ways. It would be much more humane than watching  the painful long drawn out process we are witnessing at the moment. If it can be achieved amicably (which is not happening in TEC BTW), then so much the better.  The person in the street would then at least be able to get a clearer idea of what was on offer when he or she walked into a church. 

IMHO if God is at work in the Cof E then one will then be able to see which will wither on  the vine and which will flourish.

Everyone lives in a culture, a world view of some kind or other, a general one and a particular one. Jesus's world view was Judaism and all that of foreign import and domination - the power of which was ever present, the ideology of which was other. His particular viewpoint was that of end of time Judaism, the messianic, and of course he will have had this on the various scrolls available of the Hebrew Scriptures. His emphasis was not that of the majority Jews: he was close (if not one) to rabbis, but like other itinerant preachers went about preaching an end liberation so close you could taste it.

We do not know whether he was preaching about himself transformed as the Son of Man coming to herald in the New Age, or whether another figure. My guess is that he was speaking of another, but that he came to see what he did as central to the coming of the Son of Man - the transforming, heralding one. He spoke of what the Kingdom would be like and he healed those with demons to be prepared - illness and sin seen as connected.

What we have in the gospels and starting with Paul is a selective view about all of this through a salvation scheme of death and resurrection - based, must be, on the fact that once Jesus was dead either he was the Messiah or no one. It is interesting how a tiny Kanai movement that failed as a result of the Jewish war attached itself to the Jesus movement that was not of itself violent -  a great deal shifts around 70 CE, but the Jewish Christian movement was always going to be marginal. It was never a resurrection centred movement in the sense that Paul and the central strand turned it into a salvation scheme.

It is this sense, then, that the Church wrote the New Testament. Of course they took cues and legitimacy by matching with the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, but it was the communities in various localities that wrote the central salvation religion.

So it is the Church that wrote the Bible, and the Church has the right to add to its understanding and even revise how the Bible is understood. The Bible is an inheritance, not the be all and end all. The key, in my mind, is the community, but the community from the very beginning was diverse, and goes in several directions and different emphases in each.

Liddon

To recognise a canon is not the same as creating it.

Perhaps if I set out the limited case I was trying to make again :

1.  The passages I gave in my 10 February post make it clear that the writers of those passages believed that God had a big influence on the parts (or the whole) of the Old Testament referred to in those passages.

2.  The general attitude of the writers of the New Testament to the Old Testament is one of appeal to its authority, submission to its authority, and understanding many of its prophecies as fulfilled in Christ.

3.  Therefore the early church would not have agreed that

‘the bible was created by the church and stands under the authority of the church’

is true of the Old Testament, since according to points 1 and 2 above the early church thought exactly the opposite: that the church stands under the authority of the Old Testament, because the Old Testament is recognized as the word of God.

Do you agree with points 1, 2 and 3? If not perhaps you could say which bits you don’t agree with and why.

Phil Almond

Liddon and Phil Almond both have a point.

The church decided which books it accepted as authoritative: effectively this was the whole LXX canon. Notions of "the word of God" and still less "the infallible word of God" are unhistorical in the context of this decision, which was not a conciliar decision but a matter of general acceptance. Probably the chief criterion was that it (the whole LXX) was "prophetic" - and that included the books of Torah, a good deal of which was understood typologically. (Today's Gospel contains a good example). Remember too that the OT was regarded by some as the fount of all human wisdom, and it was even argued by some that Plato got his best ideas from Moses!

But the church did not decide to exclude some books - or at least, not until the Reformation, and then only on the spurious grounds of their presumed linguistic origin, which presumptions have subsequently been shown to be incorrect. That some of these texts were also used to establish doctrines rejected by the Reformers was of course totally irrelevant (not!). Nor did the church decide to include other writings which were sometimes seen as prophetic (which would fall within the Romans 15:4/2Tim 3:16 canon). I think of such things as some of the Pseudepigrapha, and works such as the Sybilline Oracles.

In the matter of the New Testament the church did of course make the decision. One of the principles seems to have been apostolicity, and I would suspect that liturgical use came into it somewhere too.

sorry, phil. if you don't recognise a circular, self-justifying argument when you see one then there's nothing more i can say.

recognising a butterfly is not the same as creating it, but choosing which books make a canon and which books don't isn't the same as recognising it. you're making a category error.