Reflections on a recent colloquium in Cardiff
Baptists have a great attachment to the Bible. This is a historical commitment rooted in our beginnings in the Reformation which recovered the importance of the Bible. I’m not sure I would go as far as Alister McGrath who says, “If the reformers dethroned the pope, they enthroned Scripture,” but you get the idea. But our reverence for the Bible, our ambition to live under its teaching and authority has meant that Baptists sometimes fight over the Bible. Why is this?
Last week I was in Cardiff at the South Wales Baptist College to be part of a conversation among Baptist teachers from the UK, Europe and the USA about how Baptists have in the past, do in the present and should according to our founding principles, interpret the Bible. We do not believe there is an utterly unique approach to the Bible that Baptist alone have access to, but the Baptist vision of faith is very Scripture oriented and this is worth exploring. We were agreed that the authority of Scripture is fundamental for Baptists yet what this authority means and how it works in practice often differs from person to person and place to place. The majority of Baptists prefer to speak of the trustworthiness and reliability of Scripture rather than its inerrancy or infallibility. We do not worship the Bible, we worship the God who is revealed in and through the Bible.
So, over a couple of days we discussed a series of questions and proposals that each of us had prepared about the way Baptists understand and use the Bible. For example, how do Baptists study the Bible in home groups, and how we can improve our practice of “searching the Scriptures.” We considered the issue of how the community to which we belong shapes our interpretation of the Bible. We looked at how our devotion to Christ is both the reason for reading Scripture and also the lens through which we understand the meaning of the Bible. We discovered how some of our Baptist forefathers made major contributions to biblical studies, especially in regard to the Old Testament. We asked, what is the future for a biblically formed church when our culture is inherently suspicious of the authority of the text. And there was more.
The colloquium was a step toward the production of a book that will be published early in 2010. I will write again over the next few weeks in more detail about some of the topics we discussed as a taster for the full meal to be served at a later date.
Ian Birch
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