Essay
Scripture in the Church
In my opening essay on the Anglican tradition, I suggested that Anglicanism is best understood as a way of receiving the apostolic and catholic faith rather than inventing a distinctive Christianity of its own. That claim immediately raises a further question. If the faith is received, how does the Church know whether what it has received is truly the apostolic faith? How is inherited teaching tested, corrected, nourished, and handed on without becoming either private opinion or institutional self-protection?
The Anglican answer begins with Holy Scripture, not as a denominational badge, but as the pattern of the gospel itself.
When the risen Christ meets the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he does not merely give them a new religious experience. “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:27). Later, he tells the gathered disciples that “everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). The Scriptures are not treated as religious material from which the Church may draw illustrations. They are the witness through which Christ teaches his people to recognize him, receive his gospel, and understand their mission.
The same pattern continues in the apostolic Church. Paul reminds the Corinthians that he handed on what he had received: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures”, was buried, and was raised “in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). In Berea, the hearers receive the apostolic message eagerly, while examining the Scriptures to see whether these things are so (Acts 17:11). Paul tells Timothy that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). Scripture’s authority is not abstract. It teaches, corrects, trains, and equips the people of God for faithful life.
For this reason, it can be useful to describe Anglicanism as a prima scriptura tradition. The phrase is not one of the classical Anglican formularies, and it should not be made to carry more historical weight than it can bear. Nevertheless, it names something important. Scripture is first: the norming authority by which doctrine is tested and the Church is corrected. Yet Scripture’s primacy does not mean that the Christian stands alone over the Bible, as though the faith had to be reconstructed from nothing in each generation. The Scriptures are read in the Church, with the Church, and for the Church. They are proclaimed in worship, summarized in the Creeds, prayed in the Psalms, enacted in the sacraments, and handed on through teaching.
This is the balance classical Anglicanism has tried to preserve. Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles says that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation”, so that nothing may be required as an article of faith or as necessary to salvation unless it is read in Scripture or may be proved from Scripture. The Church may teach, order, admonish, and discern, but it may not bind the conscience with doctrines necessary to salvation that cannot be grounded in God’s written Word.
At the same time, the Articles do not imagine a Church without authority, form, or memory. Article XX says that the Church has authority in rites and ceremonies and in controversies of faith, while also insisting that it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything contrary to God’s Word written. The Church is described there as “a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ”. A witness does not create the truth to which it testifies. A keeper does not own the treasure as a private possession. The Church receives, guards, proclaims, and serves the Word that judges and sustains her.
Holding these claims together helps us avoid two opposite mistakes. On one side, Scripture can be treated as though it were given to isolated individuals rather than to the people of God. In that case, “biblical” faith can become less a matter of obedience to the Word than of confidence in my own reading or the assumptions of my own community. On the other side, the Church can be spoken of as though its authority somehow stands above Scripture, managing or supplementing the Word rather than hearing and obeying it. Anglicanism should be uneasy with both errors. The Bible is not a private possession, but neither is it an ecclesiastical possession. It is God’s Word written for the Church’s faith, worship, correction, and life.
This kind of bounded discernment is already visible in Scripture itself. Acts 15 gives us a picture of the Church discerning in council: the apostles and elders gather, debate, listen to testimony, attend to the work of God among the Gentiles, reason from the prophets, and send a pastoral judgment to the churches. The decision is neither private interpretation nor mere administrative decree. It is ecclesial discernment under the Word and in the life of the Spirit.
The Creeds belong within the same pattern. Article VIII says that the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed “ought thoroughly to be received and believed” because they may be proved by Scripture. This does not make the Creeds disposable. It tells us what they are for. They are not a second gospel beside the Bible, nor a rival source of revelation. They are the Church’s scriptural grammar, a disciplined summary of the biblical witness to the triune God and to the saving work of Jesus Christ.
Nor is this only a Reformation concern. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus writes against teachers who claimed secret knowledge and distorted the apostolic witness by appealing to the public faith handed down in the churches. In the Commonitory, Vincent of Lérins insists that Scripture is sufficient, while recognizing that Scripture is often interpreted in conflicting ways and therefore must be read according to the Church’s catholic rule of faith. These early witnesses do not solve our interpretive problems, and they should not be flattened into slogans. But they remind us that the Church’s task has never been simply to possess biblical texts. It has been to read them faithfully, publicly, and in continuity with the apostolic gospel.
The Prayer Book gives this conviction practical form. Anglicanism’s reverence for Scripture is not only found in doctrinal statements about biblical authority. It is built into the Church’s prayer. In “Concerning the Service of the Church”, the Prayer Book says that the ancient ordering of worship intended that “all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over every year”. Scripture, in this vision, is not occasional decoration for worship. It is the atmosphere in which the Church learns to pray.
Morning and Evening Prayer place the people of God under the repeated discipline of psalms, lessons, canticles, confession, absolution, intercession, and praise. The Psalter gives us words to pray, and the lectionary carries us beyond the passages we would have chosen for ourselves. Over time, this kind of reading can correct our narrowness, making us receive hard words as well as consoling ones, judgment as well as promise, command as well as comfort.
The collect for the Second Sunday in Advent expresses this Anglican spirituality of Scripture with particular force. We ask God, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning, to grant that we may “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them”. Scripture is heard in the assembly and read by the believer. It is marked and learned by attention. It is inwardly digested, not merely consulted. The point is not that the Bible should be admired as an authority from a distance, but that the Word of God should be received deeply enough to form patience, hope, repentance, and obedience.
The 1547 First Book of Homilies presses the same point in its sermon “A fruitful exhortation to the reading of Holy Scripture”. The Scriptures are not only for clergy, scholars, or ecclesiastical controversy. They are given for the instruction and amendment of the whole people of God. To read Scripture ecclesially is not to outsource attention, prayer, and obedience to authorized teachers. It is to receive help in reading rightly, so that the Church may be more deeply conformed to the Word it hears.
Richard Hooker is useful here, though he is often invoked too quickly. His value is not that he gives Anglicanism a simple “three-legged stool” of Scripture, reason, and tradition, as though these were equal authorities. Hooker’s account is more careful. Scripture has “the first place both of credit and obedience”, while the Church’s voice has real, though subordinate, significance in ordering common life where Scripture does not prescribe every detail. Reason, in this pattern, is not a rival to revelation. It is the faculty by which the Church attends, distinguishes, applies, and orders its life under God.
This accountability is essential because the Church is always capable of confusing its own habits with faithfulness. Traditions can become distortions. Institutions can protect themselves. Local communities can mistake familiarity for truth. Individual readers can mistake intensity for obedience. None of these dangers is solved simply by appealing to Scripture in the abstract, since Scripture itself can be misread or made to serve conclusions we have already chosen. But the answer to misuse is not to loosen the Church’s dependence on Scripture. It is to return again, with humility, to the Word that stands over us: read in the communion of the Church, tested by the rule of faith, prayed in common, and received with repentance.
Anglicans, then, should read Scripture personally, but not privately. We should read with real expectation that God speaks through his Word, and with real humility about our own limitations. We should read with the Creeds in our mouths, the Psalms in our prayers, the sacraments before our eyes, and the whole Church as our company. We should read eagerly, like the Bereans, but not suspiciously; obediently, but not anxiously; gratefully, but not uncritically of every inherited interpretation. The Church does not live by its own memory alone. It lives by the Word of God.
If Anglicanism is a way of receiving the faith once entrusted to the saints, Scripture is the first gift by which that reception remains faithful. The Bible is not one Anglican possession among others. It is the Word by which Christ teaches his Church to recognize him, the measure by which the Church’s teaching is judged, and the means by which the people of God are corrected, nourished, and sent. We receive Scripture in the Church because we need more than private insight. We receive Scripture over the Church because the Church needs continual correction. And we receive Scripture for the world because the Word that forms us is never meant to end with us.
Next in the series: The faith we pray, on common, liturgical prayer as a way the Church expresses and inhabits its faith.