THE BIBLE in Australia

No. 240, July 2017 (2) stmarks.edu.au

ST MARK’SREVIEWA JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT & OPINION

St Mark’s ReviewNo. 240, July 2017 (2)

The Bible in Australia

Editorial v

I. THE BIBLE IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

Poison, panadol, placebo 1Is the Bible good for society’s health?

Greg Clarke

The Bible in Australian history and culture 12Meredith Lake

II. READING THE BIBLE IN AUSTRALIA

The glory of kings 34Dialogical practices of Bible engagement with teenagers in a culture of expressive individualism

Graham Stanton

Bible-reading patterns among Australian church attenders 54Twenty years of survey results (1991–2011)

Ruth Powell and John Bellamy

John Harris’s Bibles 76Meredith Lake interviews John Harris

III. THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION AND THE BIBLE ACROSS CULTURES

Reflections on the evangelical challenge of reading Scripture in culturally diverse contexts 93

Nathan Lovell

Growing an Acacia tree 108Towards an African model of theological education

Simon Gillham

Epistemology and the practice of cross-cultural theological education 128Michael Roe

IV. 2017 BURGMANN LECTURE

“A most meddlesome God”: A Christian future for the church 151Stephen Pickard

Book reviews 170

Abba, Father 170

Has there been an Islamic Enlightenment? 173

Shooting an elephant (in the room) 176

Relating biblical vision to public life 178

Editorial

The Bible is the most printed book in English and the most widely dis-seminated book in Australia. While it is probably the most influential single book in Australia’s cultural life, it is also the text most intricately bound up with the European encounter with Indigenous Australians and their lan-guages. It is only recently, however, that scholars have begun to assess the Bible’s immense influence on just about sphere of Australian life—and, on a broader view, the Bible’s immeasurable impact on Western civilization. In this year that marks the bicentenary of the Bible Society of Australia, this edition of St Mark’s Review explores the role and influence of the Bible in Australian life, past and present, as well as ways in which it is being read and interpreted by Australians today.

Like other sacred writings such as the Jewish scriptures and the Qur’an, the Bible’s history and impact has been shaped by its sacred status. This is what makes the influence of the Bible different from, say, the works of Shakespeare (its nearest rival for historical circulation in Australia). Shakespeare’s words and phrases have become part of ordinary language. His plots and characters have infiltrated common culture. His insights into human nature have also been mulled over and valued. But here’s the rub: Shakespeare’s plays have not been routinely read in a devotional manner as a means of hearing God’s voice or as a guide to eternal salvation. Readers have neither tried to bend their lives to Shakespeare’s teaching, nor taken on his stories as a framework for understanding the universe. It is significant, too, that theatre companies (and even English teachers!) have not matched the reach of religious and missionary organisations. And there is no Shakespearean equivalent to the churches as institutions lending their full weight to particular ways of engaging with the Bible, interpreting it, and drawing out its meaning for social and personal life.

But there is more to the story than the Bible’s sacred status. Its influence has also been defined by the particular beliefs and attitudes of its interpret-ers and adherents. In particular, Christians have held that God’s word was a word that was possible to translate. Christians have usually recognised their Scriptures as irreducibly multilingual in both form and content. This is partly related to that challenging and endlessly stimulating idea of God’s word as living, dynamic and embodied (John 1:1–18). This of course stands in stark contrast to later sacred texts such as the Qur’an, which Muslims

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hold to be the eternal word of God, perfectly revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in Arabic.1

Of course, history shows major fluctuations in Christians’ attitudes towards translation. Some versions, such as the Latin Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible that was the Catholic Church’s standard translation between AD 500 and 1500), have had a hegemonic place within the largest tradition of Christianity. Several of the Bibles in the celebrated library col-lection of St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra testify to the great risk and cost of vernacular translation and dissemination. There is, for example, the Tyndale New Testament. Tyndale famously paid with his life for his English translation. So many of the books themselves were burned that there is only one surviving copy of the very first edition (1525)—now among the most precious treasures of the British Library in London. Even that book was bound incomplete because the print shop in Cologne was raided by police in the midst of printing, prompting Tyndale to flee to Worms (in what is now Germany) with the unfinished pages so that he could prepare a second edition.

Tyndale’s work was a product of the sixteenth-century European Reformations, which were notable for new affirmations of the possibility (as well as desirability) of vernacular translation. The value and impor-tance of ordinary people reading the Bible for themselves is critical to the long backstory of the Bible’s presence and influence in Australia. These impulses were channelled after the 1730s through evangelicalism. During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries this dynamic movement produced a number of organisations that dramatically increased the Bible’s availability and influence among virtually every class of society in the English-speaking world. There were new missionary organisations, tract societies, Sunday schools, and all manner of groups devoted to moral reformism and philanthropy, all founded within a couple of decades of the initial British colonisation of Australia. Perhaps the most significant of these evangelical groups was the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), established in 1804 with extraordinary ambitions: “to make these Holy Writings known, in every nation and in every tongue” and “to render them the actual possession of every individual on the face of the whole earth.”2

If the goal was audacious, the scale of the enterprise was staggering. In the hundred years to 1904, the BFBS circulated 186 million scriptures in more than 370 languages around the world, at an eventual dispatch rate of

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one every five seconds. A little more than a century later in 2014, the world’s United Bible Societies (including Australia’s) claimed an annual circulation of around 428 million Scriptures, confirming the Bible as still the most published book in the world.

Its presence and potency endures, but questions remain about the Bible’s place in Australian life and culture. What difference has the Bible made to Australia? What relevance does it have for Australian life today? And, given the multiple readings and interpretations of the Bible on offer today, how might it be read wisely and faithfully? These are huge questions that are difficult to answer, but they are worth attempting at a time when the value—even the legitimacy—of Christianity’s role in Australian public life is much debated.

In an effort to begin answering these questions, this edition of St Mark’s Review is organised into three parts. The first part opens with two “big picture” interpretations of the Bible’s contribution to Australian culture and society. Greg Clarke, current CEO of the Bible Society of Australia, considers whether the Bible has been a panacea, a placebo, or a poison for Australian cultural life. He acknowledges that the Bible’s professed adherents have had a mixed record and a chequered history—witness recent public debate in Australia about the relationship between domestic violence and interpretations of Scripture that advocate the submission of women to men—and that even now many people do not have a good or even safe experience of those individuals and institutions who come to them with Bible in hand. Clarke contends, however, that there are distinctions to be made between the Bible and those who propagate it, as well as between harmful and authentic interpretations. He argues that at its best the Bible has had a predominantly positive influence on Western society: in the final equation it is the “good book” that has nourished countless beneficial aspects of Australian life and culture.

Meredith Lake takes a more specifically historical approach to the Bible’s influence in Australia. She canvasses its relationship to European colonisation and the emergence of Australian civil society, paying atten-tion not only to the ideals of middle-class whites but to the experiences of poor workers and Indigenous Australians. She explores the fraught issue of whether Australia might be considered a Christian nation, and how the Bible might help us grapple with such a question in the present.

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A second set of articles draw out out the Bible’s place in the life of faith, particularly its role as a devotional text to which Australians have bent their lives and worldviews. Graham Stanton considers how young Australians engage with the Bible in contemporary Australia. This engagement, he argues, is profoundly shaped by a surrounding culture of “expressive individualism,” by which he refers to a pervasive emphasis on individual choice and an impatience with external authorities. The dominant mode of spirituality in this context is a “spirituality of quest” where “each individual has the right and responsibility to explore what might be their own path to wholeness and spiritual depth.” Stanton considers how the church might help young people to read the biblical text creatively—but also faithfully—in such a Zeitgeist. Here Stanton brings theology into conversation with educational psychology to advocate “dialogical” approaches to Bible engagement.

Ruth Powell and John Bellamy also clarify some of the challenges facing churches as they seek to help Australians grapple with the Bible. Distilling twenty years of data from the National Church Life Survey (Australia’s second largest survey after the national census), their article tracks changing habits of personal Bible reading among churchgoing Australians. One of their more remarkable findings is that the level of regular Bible reading has not declined in the last two decades, but the proportion of churchgoers who read it daily (not just several times a week) has declined appreciably. The place of the Bible in the life of the individual believer, as in corporate worship, appears to be changing. This raises important questions about what kind of Bible, and what kind of biblical literacy, will mark twenty-first-century Christians in Australia.

Next is a transcript of an interview with John Harris, who spent many years living in Indigenous Australian communities both as an educator and a language consultant for the Bible Society of Australia. He offers a personal account of travelling through life with the Bible in the South Pacific, in Indigenous communities, and in the suburbs of Sydney and Canberra. His story is bound up with the story of the Bible Society itself, with translation into Aboriginal languages, and with the changing ways in which Australians have encountered the Bible through family, community, and churches.

The subsequent three articles return to issues relating to the author-ity and interpretation of Scripture, but they shift our focus away from the Australian setting. Written by three Australian theological educators and missionaries with experience teaching in African contexts, these articles

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offer an illuminating three-way conversation about how Christians from European cultural traditions might approach the tasks of theological educa-tion and Bible interpretation in non-European cultural sites and settings.

Nathan Lovell grapples with the question of whether reading the Bible is a culturally determined process. On what basis, he asks, might Christians claim the authority of Scripture? And whose reading should be regarded as authoritative? That question is all the more pressing amid the multiple and variegated theologies and readings of Scripture that are emerging from an increasingly self-confident, postcolonial Global South. No longer, it seems, may we speak of theology, but rather African theologies, European theolo-gies, or Asian theologies. In the final analysis, contends Lovell, “to question whether the interpretation of Scripture is relativised by culture is to question whether God’s purpose to reveal himself has been overcome by the limita-tions of our humanity.” Taking his cue from Kevin Vanhoozer, Lovell posits a hermeneutic grounded in doctrines of revelation and Scripture that are in turn shaped by a Trinitarian framework.

Simon Gillham considers the universal importance of “appropri-ate models of theological education and training for Christian pastors.” Here there is a perennial need to contextualise both subjects and teaching methods in cross-cultural settings. While noting the diverging paradigms within Western theological education (represented by Athens and Berlin), Gillham suggests several ways in which this task might be assisted: the use of pedagogical tools such as “field sensitive learning” to illuminate differ-ent learning styles; a commitment to integrating theory and practice; and attention to biblical examples of leadership can show how leaders might be trained in closer relationships with their teachers.

How, asks Michael Roe in his subsequent article, can cross-cultural theological education seek to avoid the twin dangers of cultural imperialism on the one hand, and cultural relativism on the other? How might Christians differentiate between what is “merely Western” in, say, Australian theology, from that which is the uniquely Australian contribution to the collective knowledge of God? And “what should be done about this as we teach in non-Western contexts?” Drawing on the epistemological accounts of John Frame and Esther Meek, Roe explores how a reformed epistemology can help to address some of these questions, and how it can help to shape the practice of cross-cultural theological education “in a way that not only maximizes its efficacy, but truly values cultural difference.”

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Finally, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bishop Ernest Burgmann, a visionary church leader, social critic, prophetic voice, theological educator, and the first Australian-born Anglican bishop in this country. In an article that was first delivered as the Burgmann Lecture in Canberra in May this year, Stephen Pickard reflects on Burgmann’s theological roots (in a kind of “sacramental socialism”) and his legacy for the Australian church today. At a time when the church has become an increasingly peripheral institution, argues Pickard, it must still strive to offer a “genuine wisdom for the common good.” The church must engage with the issues of the day and point to a “more encompassing and challenging horizon, informed by a robust and intelligent Christian faith.” In this way it can offer, among other things, “a more critical moral vision that challenges the predictable pragmatic utilitarianism that infects Australia society.”

Taken together, the following articles demonstrate the vast impact of the Bible on Australian cultural and social life, while pointing to the multiple ways in which the Bible has been—and is being—read and interpreted, whether by young people and churchgoers in Australia or by theological teachers and their students in Africa. A related theme that runs through these articles is the need for humility about what we know, as well as how we know it, alongside an enduring confidence that the word indeed reveals God to humanity.

Meredith Lake and Michael Gladwin

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Surah 43:3: “Verily, We have made it an Arabic Qur’an, haply ye will comprehend it.”

2. George Browne, The History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: Bible Society, 1859), I, 3.