What is the agenda behind this paragraph? If the agenda is to continue the dialogue between revisionists and orthodox, the "worldwide study" is another step in the subversion of the Anglican Communion. It is simply the normal revisionist tactic of seeking dialogue while relentlessly advancing their agenda with little or no hindrance. This has been going on for decades and there is no reason to expect it to stop.

On the other hand, if this paragraph reflects a desire on the part of the orthodox to clarify their understanding of Scripture, then the orthodox may certainly do so if they wish.

For my part, I find it difficult to believe that a communique issued by an ecclesiastical body composed of both orthodox and revisionist would be anything other that a dead end at best. The mere fact that Presiding Bishop Schori of TEC is a member of the Joint Standing Committee would clearly indicate that further "dialogue" is pointless if not pernicious. Be that as it may, let me clearly explain why a study of hermeneutics, carried out jointly by both revisionists and orthodox, would be a waste of time.

First, a dialogue between orthodox and revisionists is impossible. Both parties operate with completely different world views. Dialogue is only possible when contending parties share common presuppositions.

Theologically, revisionists and orthodox have nothing in common. They are oil and water, water and fire. They start at different points and they end at different points. They do not agree on anything fundamental, whether it be the nature of God, sin, Scripture, Jesus, ethics, the church, or anything of theological significance. Decades of fruitless dialogue have made this utterly clear.

At no point, and I have followed this debate closely, have I ever seen the orthodox and revisionists agree on anything substantial. They simply cannot and they will not. The final result of an endless stream of studies, pronouncements, books, papers, conferences, and press releases, during which the revisionists constantly called for more dialogue while relentlessly pursuing their agenda, is that the revisionists have now take over the Episcopal Church. It is obvious that the same process is occurring and will occur throughout the Anglican Communion if the orthodox grant legitimacy to the revisionists by agreeing to a further study on some point of difference.

Now, let me be more specific, addressing the issue of hermeneutics.

This is not a new topic. The revisionists have already produced a series of texts on hermeneutics, and I have made a study of some of the most important. Let me share with you some of the results of my work.

To begin with, any given hermeneutic presupposes a theological understanding of God and this theological perspective determines the hermeneutic. Let me give an example; Michael Johnston's, Engaging the Word.(1) As one reads this text, it becomes apparent that Johnson operates with a particular theological understanding that guides his interpretation of the Bible. Here is a quotation from Johnston;

I prefer to think that God's variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations. In this incarnational stance the divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation, so God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God. (p. 97).

Let us think about this for a moment. Johnston states that God's nature entails "variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction." In Johnston's view, God's will can never be defined in decisive statements. Or, to put it another way, God never sets forth any decisive, eternal truth, valid for all time. This is because God's nature is one of "variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction," and further, because the "divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation." Since life is continuously being created, past statements referring to past conditions are no longer valid. Further, by "incarnational stance," Johnston does not mean the incarnation of Jesus Christ as set forth in Scripture. Rather, he views Christ's incarnation as a symbol for God being incarnate in "concrete and diverse situations," that is, in experience. In this view, Scripture is only the first phase of an evolving revelation, a revelation which can never be decisively given because it is forever being updated.

These new formulations of evolving truth are so radical that it is legitimate to say that "God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God." From this one can easily conclude that the experience of homosexual persons, and the experience of the community receiving their gifts for ministry, constitutes a revelation of God, and further, conditions God himself.

Without going into great detail, this understanding of God is heresy. Nor is this surprising. From the beginning of the church's life, heretics have used alien theological perspectives to interpret Scripture and to subvert the faith. The early church countered this threat in a number of ways, but its main bulwark was the regula, the body of creed like statements and public confessions that provided the key to an orthodox reading of the Scripture. These rules of faith were eventually formulated into the Creeds, such as the Nicene or the Apostles' Creed. These Creeds did not give detailed interpretations of Scripture, but they set the pattern, the structure, the over arching framework by which Scripture must be interpreted. Patristic scholar Francis Young puts it this way,

Neither the Rule of Faith nor the creed was in fact a summary of the whole biblical narrative, as demonstrated earlier in The Art of Performance. They provided, rather, the proper reading of the beginning and the ending, the focus of the plot and the relations of the principal characters, so enabling the "middle" to be heard in bits as meaningful. They provided the "closure" which contemporary theory prefers to leave open. They articulated the essential hermeneutical key without which texts and community would disintegrate in incoherence.(2)

Johnston's hermeneutic differs from orthodoxy in several critical ways. First, he reads Scripture as the opening phase of an evolving revelation. For orthodoxy, however, Scripture begins with creation by God the Father, centers in the incarnation of the Son, and ends with the book of Revelation which portrays the "life of the world to come," to use a phrase from the article on the Spirit taken from the Nicene Creed. In the orthodox view, the church is within Scripture, between incarnation and eschaton, encompassed and determined by biblical truth.

For Johnston, the church is beyond Scripture since Scripture is only the opening phase of an on-going revelation. In other words, orthodoxy provides the "'closure' which contemporary theory prefers to leave open." Johnston's hermeneutic is open, not closed. He has no doctrine of the Trinity which sees Scripture as a beginning, middle and end, with the church within and determined by Scripture.

Johnston makes a second fatal error by claiming the incarnation as a symbol for God being incarnate in "concrete and diverse situations." This denies the incarnation. Orthodoxy insists that the second person of the Trinity became incarnate in Jesus Christ and only in Jesus Christ. He and he alone is "God from God, Light from Light, and true God from true God." No other earthly reality, no other "concrete and diverse situations" reveal the nature of God in a decisive and authoritative manner. Jesus Christ is the final decisive authority for faith. Of course, God is always working in the world, but all his works and words center in Jesus Christ, are judged by Jesus Christ, and only by Jesus Christ as known in Scripture. Johnston wants to deny this. He wants experience, not Jesus Christ, to have a decisive role in determining the content of faith, even the nature of God himself.

Further, just as Johnston believes that God and humanity mutually condition each other, he believes that Jesus is "ultimately assembled out of the lives and hopes of believing communities and faithful individuals. (3) This is the logical conclusion of believing that Scripture is open, that revelation is evolving, and that God and the church make each other up as they go along. Johnston's theology and his hermeneutic spell the end of the Christian faith.

As the early church reflected on the biblical revelation and developed its doctrines of trinity and incarnation, it came to an understanding that the language for God relevant to creation is different than that of incarnation. With regard to incarnation, the church formulated the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum.(4) According to this doctrine, the attributes of the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ can be attributed to each other because of the unity of the one person Jesus Christ.

The classic example was the theotokos which stated that it was appropriate to say that the Virgin Mary was the mother of God. Mary as the mother of Jesus was an attribute of Jesus' human nature. By the communicatio idiomatum, she is also the mother of his divine nature, and therefore, the mother of God. The words and deeds of Jesus as revealed in Scripture are human words and deeds. By the communicatio idiomatum, they are also divine words and deeds, that is, the words and deeds of God. Further, orthodoxy has always claimed that the whole of Scripture refers to Jesus Christ (see Article VII of the Articles of Religion). From this perspective, the whole of Scripture is the Word of God (its unity) and also the words of God. Scripture constantly portrays God as speaking specific, concrete, definite words. Jesus states, "Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will never pass away."

For this reason, faithful biblical exegesis begins with the plain meaning of the words. This plain meaning is genre related, but nonetheless, exegesis begins with the literal meaning of the very words themselves. (5)

Other factors are of course relevant, but one must begin with the plain sense. Revisionists, and Johnston is typical, want to avoid the concrete, specific, actual meanings of the biblical words because they know very well that these words deny the liberal agenda, above all, homosexual relations.

As a result, they adopt a heretical notion of God the Word, claiming that God is mystically known, that he never speaks specific words that his revelation is relative, evolving, and capable of further elucidations which can contradict and superseded previous formulations including Scripture itself.

The orthodox and the revisionists cannot discuss hermeneutics together because their respective hermeneutics will flow logically out of their theological perspectives, and their theological perspectives can never, have never, and will never, be reconciled.

What must we do next? First and foremost, the orthodox must meet together and draft a covenant. This covenant cannot be formulated by a committee of orthodox and revisionists. It simply will not work. The orthodox must stand alone for the Truth and ask others to join with them. With one addition, I agree with an idea from Dr. John Rodgers' response to the Primates' communique. He counsels us to use the covenant we already have.

Now the answer, here is a far more excellent way! We already have an Anglican Communion Covenant. It consists of the Anglican Formularies: the Holy Scriptures, the 3 Catholic Creeds, The 39 Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal. You can't beat them. They have bound us orthodox Anglicans together for centuries; they are brief and they state the core doctrines. They are gracious and full of Good News. Using elucidations, they can be applied by Lambeth Conferences to current issues.

The one idea I would add is that all true covenants, significant for their time, not only affirm Christian truth but deny false teaching. One need only read the Articles of Religion to see where the errors of both Rome and the Anabaptists are denied. We are not in the 16th century. We can begin with the Articles, the Creeds, the Formularies, and the Prayer Book, but we must also lay bare Christian Truth in contrast to contemporary error. We must, for example, deny sexual relations outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Further, there must be some statements on proper biblical interpretation. In addition to those commonly known, (6)I would like to see the following.

Faithful biblical interpretation is guided by the Creeds, the structure that relates whole to part, the concrete to the Transcendent.

We deny the false teaching that Scripture is the Word of God but not the words of God. Scripture is both God's Word and his words, God speaking as the words and deeds of Jesus Christ as the center and unity of all biblical words.

We deny the false teaching that Scripture is the first phase of an evolving revelation that can be reformulated according to "new" cultural and historical conditions.

For the liberals in the Anglican Consultative Council who want "a worldwide study of hermeneutics" in order to either delay, to further muddy the ecclesiastical waters, prevaricate, or show that cultural differences make a difference in how we view Scripture, especially on sexuality issues, we declare that that is a road down which orthodox Anglicans should not go. It is a dead end street.

I have written more on this vital topic. The reader can visit my web page (www.rsanders.org). and go to the section on Scripture and read my analyses of various hermeneutics. I have analyzed at least five revisionist hermeneutics in detail. In every case I show that they entail a theological perspective that violates classical Christian doctrine.

Endnotes

1. Michael Johnston, Engaging the Word. The New Church's Teaching Series, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1998.
2. Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 21.
3. Johnston, p. 141.
4. The communication idiomatum was proclaimed as orthodox doctrine against the Nestorians in the Council of Ephesus (431) and by the Council of Chalcedon (451).
5. See the section, "Reading the Bible as the Word of God," p. 133f, by Stephan F. Noll in Frederick H. Borsch (ed.), The Bible's Authority in Today's Church. Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1993, p. 133f.
6. See, for example, the "Solemn Declaration" of the Anglican Mission in American for a clear statement of orthodox hermeneutical principles.

---The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D. is VirtueOnline's resident cyber theologian. He lives in Jacksonville, Florida where he serves as Associate Rector at Christ Church Anglican. He is a former missionary, and holds a Ph.D. in systematic theology.