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Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope by which God has called you.
Ephesians 1:18

Some years ago, at a conference here in Toronto, the keynote speaker was the retired Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, Bishop Richard Holloway, who had caused a furor back home with his book Godless Morality, in which he argued that the use of “God” in moral debate is so problematic as to be almost useless. 
            Considering the emphasis that is placed on do’s and don’ts in both testaments, starting with the Ten Commandments, such a position might seem rather bizarre, especially coming from a senior churchman.  Bishop Holloway acknowledges that he is ending up his life as the kind of bishop he despised when he was a priest in his 30’s, but this, of course, does not invalidate his present position. 
            Although  the Bible says a great deal about sin, it does not have a coherent doctrine of sin.  Its message does not include an unambiguous identification of evil; rather, it reflects the shifting experience of evil throughout Biblical history.  T.S. Eliot once observed, “Christianity is always adapting itself into something which can be believed.”  I would agree with the bishop that continuing to use the Bible as a means of sanctioning a particular code of morality only serves to make Christianity unbelievable. 
            But at the same time that certain moral positions seem to be becoming irrelevant, certain archaic images of sin are helping us interpret our experience.  The Hebrew Bible’s connection between sin and ritual uncleanness, contracted through normal biological processes, such as menstruation or seminal ejaculation, or through disease, such as leprosy, corresponds to the contemporary experience of being “stained” by circumstances for which we are not personally responsible, such as the perception of the West by the Muslim world. 
            The doctrine of original sin poses an insoluable problem for the rational mind: how can God count me guilty because of another’s sin?  But this strange doctrine helps us realize that evil includes not only what we do but also what we undergo. 
            Bishop Hollway does not consider himself an atheist or an agnostic.  Rather, he finds himself encountered by a depth in life that religions call the sacred or the transcendent, and he believes that Jesus of Nazareth was possessed by that mystery with a force that still reverberates today. 
            The Bible, then, I would suggest, is used most profitably today not as a manual of doctrine or morality but as a guide to that mystery which lies at the heart of creation.  In the words of Ephesians, it enlightens our eyes so that we may know the hope to which we are called, and appreciate the riches of our glorious inheritance in the saints. 
            Through the Bible God tells us, in the words of Isaiah,

Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.Behold, I am doing a new thing.  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, that theymight declare my praise. 
Chapter 44:18-19

January 14, 2007

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