In Depth:  Lee Gatiss

This month I am looking at the apparently controversial idea that ministers in the Church of England should submit to their bishops.

Ministers in the Church of England have to take an oath of obedience to a bishop. It’s true. And this has been seen recently – even by some non-Anglican commentators in this very paper! — as such an obviously bad thing that all Anglican Evangelicals should now immediately become ex-Anglican Evangelicals. But is that really necessary?

Can a book be dangerous? Can it carry Covid-19 on its pages? Can it provide fuel to start a forest fire? Can you hit someone over the head with it?

The Bible may be dangerous in these ways – it’s certainly a big book if you use it to bash someone on the head – but that’s probably not the way most people think of it as a dangerous book. In one way, it’s more like The Communist Manifesto. That’s a dangerous book. It tells us that a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. And that through class struggle, we can have a revolution, and freedom. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

There have been many complaints about the government’s insistence that we should not sing in church.

My youngest daughter is in one of the Cambridge college choirs, and it really isn’t the same hearing them do Evensong on Zoom. There’s nothing quite like choral harmony, or listening to the Gettys doing ‘O Church Arise’ at full volume on YouTube. But hearing my family screech and strain our way through a song with the online church service as the background on Sunday is not the most inspiring thing. I miss congregational singing with our church family.

Like many of us, I have been pondering the question of Covid-19 and God’s judgment.

The Anglican Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is clear in its prayers for such occasions that natural disasters are something ‘we for our iniquities have worthily deserved’ and that ‘we do most justly suffer for our iniquity.’ Death, famine, plague and sickness are all instruments of God’s ‘wrath’ through which we are ‘for our sins punished’ and ‘justly humbled’.

There are some great examples of church reforming in the Bible.

In the days of Nehemiah, we’re told, ‘the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads. And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. And they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the LORD their God for a quarter of the day; for another quarter of it they made confession and worshipped the LORD their God’ (Neh. 9:1-3). That must have been quite a day! They listened intently to God, and deeply lamented their own sin. What followed was pretty amazing too – they began to reform themselves in response to what they heard from God’s word.

I’m sure we’ve all heard it, or maybe even done it ourselves. The person leading the service on Sunday says, ‘And after x comes to read the Bible, y is going to come and explain it.’

These days, if people say this before I enter the pulpit, I’m always tempted to blurt out, ‘No, I’m not! I’m going to preach!’ Because preaching is not just ‘explaining the Bible.’ Nor is it lecturing or simply ‘giving a talk’ (consisting of our exegetical notes and a few bolted-on applications).

I’ve been visiting Athens annually for the last eight years to speak in various Greek Evangelical churches and lecture at the Greek Bible College.

It’s always a fascinating cross-cultural experience, and it’s not unwelcome that the weather in Autumn is always much nicer there than it is in Cambridge. My last trip was the strangest yet, however, as I had also been invited to give a lecture to a large audience containing the Papal Nuncio, the Catholic Archbishop, Jesuit priests, lots of nuns, some Reformed Presbyterians, and the odd Anglican.

One of my favourite bits of 16th-century canon law speaks about how ‘the condition of the state is ruined when it is governed by people who are stupid, demanding, and burning with ambition.’

At the same time, it continues: ‘The church of God is struggling, since it is committed to the care of those who are totally incompetent to assume so important a task. In this respect it has fallen very far short indeed of those rules of the blessed Paul, which he prescribed to Timothy and Titus. Therefore we must find an appropriate remedy for so serious a plague on our churches.’

To recite the Creed is a counter-cultural, revolutionary act.

To some it may appear mundane, merely reciting some old words in a church along with others in the congregation. But what we are doing if we join in this public profession of faith is taking a stand against all that is evil in this world.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

I’ve never understood it when people say that the Bible seems irrelevant ‘because it was written so long ago’. God hasn’t changed, and neither (I am sad to say) have we.

‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’ So says Inigo Montoya in the movie, The Princess Bride, about someone’s overuse of the word ‘inconceivable.’ It’s a mistake we Christians often make with some of our jargon.

For example, ‘contending for the faith’ – it’s a phrase we regularly use, but we don’t always bother to check that it means what we assume it means.