by the Rev. Jordan Haynie Ware
There are surprisingly few things the Anglican tradition requires its ordinands to believe. While Twitterati might go on about the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection (beliefs I personally hold dear), the only belief we hold strongly enough that we require those presenting themselves for ordination to actually sign a document that is kept on file – forever – is that the “Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments [are] the Word of God, and … contain all things necessary to salvation.”[1] Or, in the words of Article VI: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therin, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man[sic], that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”[2]
You might be forgiven for giving this assertion a quizzical look. The Episcopal Church (and, to a lesser extent, the Anglican Church of Canada) are not exactly known as Bible thumpers. We certainly could never be accused of inerrantism. We are well known for the phrase “we take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” But a literal reading, in addition to being literally impossible, is no prerequisite for the belief that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation. Neither does such a belief require us to chain ourselves to Iron Age theology or Bronze Age beliefs. Taking Scripture seriously doesn’t lead to Bible thumping or require us to disavow modernity. The promise that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation does not bind us into one rigid way of thinking, rather it frees us to engage with the very Word of God, secure in the promise that God has given us everything we need.
First, what does it mean to say that “Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation?” Surprisingly enough, it does not mean that “all things contained within Scripture are necessary to salvation.” Think of it this way: all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares; similarly, believing that everything essential to our understanding the love of God may be found within Scripture does not require us to, say, believe that the genocide order given to Joshua is essential to salvation. Martin Luther is supposed to have said, “The Bible is the manger which holds the Christ Child, and we should never confuse the straw with the baby.”[3] Just because there’s no documentation Luther’s the one who said this doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In the course of my three year journey through the Bible, cover to cover, as part of the Two Feminists Annotate the Bible podcast, we’ve uncovered a number of sections that I would call straw. The aforementioned genocide in Joshua. Laws requiring the stoning of rape victims if they don’t scream loud enough to be heard and rescued.[4] The adultery test in Numbers.[5] The household codes.[6] Believing that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation does not mean we believe all things within Scripture are necessary for salvation. This frees us up from the pressure of needing to believe in all of it or none of it, as the Fundamentalists would have us do.
And yet even this freedom is not enough for those of us who have experienced Scripture used against us as a weapon. The trauma that many women have experienced at the hands of those who quote 1 Timothy 2:11-15 at us when we dare to admit we might be called to preach. The trauma that the LGBTQ+ community has experienced at the hands of those who pull out Romans 1:25-27 to condemn them (ignoring, naturally, the very next words in Romans 2 which call upon the readers not to pass judgment on one another). While there may be freedom to be found in dispatching those strawy parts of the Bible, neither can we fall into the unfortunate habit of proof-texting. Proof-texting is the pulling of small snippets of the Bible out of context for the purpose of weaponizing them against one’s opponents.
Even within context, many Bible readers today struggle to understand the genre of Scripture. Most books of the Bible were never intended to serve as documentaries. The first readers of Genesis 1 never imagined a literal seven-day Creation; it was always intended to live in the genre of myth, of etiology, of explaining the care and order God put into place and the origin of the Sabbath.[7] Nor do many readers regard subtext. Paul’s letter to Philemon is positively dripping with sarcasm, but the 18th and 19th century slavetraders who used it to justify their perverse wickedness declined to notice it. Even today, one usually needs to lay out tens of thousands of dollars to attend a divinity school in order to discover the different audiences and purposes the four Gospel authors were addressing. Without careful guidance from experienced Bible scholars, many readers of John’s Gospel wind up expressing an anti-Semitism that lacks understanding of the circumstances under which the author was writing.[8]
The solution, however, is not to write off the Bible as outdated, implausible, no longer necessary for those who seek to follow Jesus. For we who believe that it contains all things necessary to salvation, continued wrestling with the text is required. In my years of study, I have found that the continual practice of reading, over and over again, constantly yields new insights. I read the Scriptures every day in praying the Daily Office. The canticles the app I use pairs with them opens new perspectives on the stories we’ve just read. Engaging in Lectio Divina encourages me to read short passages four times over, letting them wash over me. For Two Feminists Annotate the Bible, we divided the Bible up by narrative and engaged with each story on its own terms, as well as in dialogue with every story we’d heard before. Folks used to make fun of President George W. Bush for saying that he read the Bible every day. “Hasn’t he finished it yet?” smug liberals were known to joke. But Scripture invites us to read and re-read it, to examine it in fresh contexts, to set it in conversation with different voices, and consider its callings anew in every season.
Not least, of course, because the Church Fathers taught a hermeneutic in which Scripture interprets Scripture. Not every passage bears equal weight. Rather, St. Augustine taught that when confronted with passages we do not understand, we ought to pair them up with passages we do understand, that are clear.[9] When we read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, we ought also to look at the words of Ezekiel that say, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy”[10] and the fact that when Jesus speaks of those cities, he speaks of lack of hospitality, welcome, and listening to his messengers, not sexual behaviour, as the sin he has in mind.[11] Ezra commands the divorce of Israelite and non-Israelite families, but Ruth the Moabite is the grandmother of King David and the ancestor of Jesus. “Women should be silent in the churches”[12] but also “I commend to you our sister Phoebe”[13] because she is the one appointed to read the letter to the Romans to the Roman community from the pulpit. These contradictions don’t invalidate the authority of Scripture, they guide our interpretation and invite us into a deeper relationship with the God who gave us this Word. And ultimately, as Augustine says, “Whoever … thinks that he[sic] understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.”[14]
In order to build up this twofold love, readers of Scripture must read it in community. When we read it on our own, we risk reading ourselves – our biases, our privileges, our sins – into the text. We look sympathetically on characters whose sin we find understandable or socially acceptable (massive side eye at David and his defenders) and excoriate those who threaten our established worldviews (I promise, it never says Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, and even if she was: that would affect her status as Apostle to the Apostles how, exactly?). We must read the Word together with other readers to help challenge those biases. This practice is most effective when engaging folks unlike us. C.S. Lewis encouraged us to read old books, because the assumptions of the ages long gone are different than those of our own time. “Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. ….. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”[15] Similarly, the Scriptures will be more fully opened to us when we engage with communities least like our own. If we are white, the work of the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney and other Womanists, Dr. James Cone and other Black Liberation scholars will open new doors for us. If we are cis and straight, Matthew Vines, the Rev. Broderick Greer, and the Rev. Pauli Murray will be valuable interlocutors. Men? We at Two Feminists Annotate the Bible have got your back. Indigenous authors opened my eyes to a new way of viewing the Canaanite conquest, which I had previously not looked at terribly hard. Non-Christians are also valuable conversation partners, not because we seek to be convinced by them out of the faith in which we stand, but because the assumptions they hold about our holy book are not our assumptions. Anyone who has ever held conversation with a child knows that sometimes “Why?” can be the most powerful question ever asked. By engaging the perspectives of those least like us, we get comfortable with asking why instead of rubbing along without questioning how things came to be the way that they are.
The Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation. But the responsibility is on us to find those things. And that responsibility is what demonstrates the holy freedom for which Christ has set us free. We are not straitjacketed into a party line, we are invited to share a story. And we are promised that that story, whatever else it may contain, contains all things necessary for salvation. There are no secret doors, no cheat codes necessary. God holds nothing back. It is that promise with which we are called to wrestle. It is that promise that we require our clergy to keep engaging with, even when it’s challenging. It is a promise expansive enough to allow for disagreement, as long as we stay at the table together. And so we never stop reading, until we meet the Word face to face.
The Rev. Jordan Haynie Ware is a priest, author, and podcaster whose passion for all things Anglican has led her to be characterized as “the Episcopal Leslie Knope.” She currently serves as rector at Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her husband, a science museum manager. You can find more of her opinions about the Bible on the podcast Two Feminists Annotate the Bible and all things church at jordanhaynieware.com.
[1] BCP 1979 p. 526
[2] BCP 1979 p. 868
[3] Hoad, Luci and Jordan Ware, Two Feminists Annotate the Bible. https://twofeministsblog.com/2016/10/23/2fab-bible-feminists-exodus-20-31/
[4] Deuteronomy 22:24
[5] Numbers 5:11-31
[6] Ephesians 5:22-6:9; Colossians 3:18-25
[7] Dolansky, Shawna, “Biblical Views: The Multiple Truths of Myths,” in Biblical Archaeology Review 42:1, January/February 2016. https://www.baslibrary.org/biblical-archaeology-review/42/1/10
[8] Zauzmer, Julie, “The alleged syngogue shooter was a churchgoer who talked Christian theology, raising tough questions for evangelical pastors,” in The Washington Post, 1 May 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/05/01/alleged-synagogue-shooter-was-churchgoer-who-articulated-christian-theology-prompting-tough-questions-evangelical-pastors/?utm_term=.c057085dccfe
[9] Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, book 2, chapter 6
[10] Ezekiel 16:49, NRSV.
[11] Matthew 10:14-15 and Luke 10:10-12.
[12] 1 Corinthians 14:34
[13] Romans 16:1
[14] Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, book 1, chapter 36
[15] Lewis, C.S., “On the Reading of Old Books,” Introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation