Is the word of God the word of God?
“Is the word of God the word of God?” That was the striking question put by Dr Peter Jensen, General Secretary of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, at the start of the second Global Anglican Future Conference recently held in Nairobi. (Sorry about all the long names – I want to be accurate!). That is precisely the issue facing the Anglican Communion throughout the world, especially in the West, and the issue we are facing ourselves here in the Church of England.
Dr Jensen added that Bishop Nazir-Ali, formerly Bishop of Rochester, had said more specifically that our debate is over the clarity of Scripture. In other words, can we make sense of the Bible, or does it mean something other than what it appears to say? Will we let the word of God function as the word of God in our churches and in our lives, or will we endlessly debate and discuss what it says, relativising and sidelining it, rather than simply teaching and obeying it?
As Dr Jensen says, “Is the word of God the word of God? … Is the Bible the Bible for everybody, that all can read, in a way in which it interprets itself? Is it the Bible for the lay people as much as it is the Bible for the clergy and anyone else?” What does the clarity of Scripture mean? It means, for every single one of us, that, “we can read the Bible too; and we can understand what it is saying to us.” (See gafcon.org/news).