Thoughts on Theology: Scripture and Revelation in The United Church of Canada

The United Church of Canada has always looked to the Bible for spiritual encouragement and strength, for moral and ethical guidance, and for insight into the nature and purposes of God. Reflection on scripture within worship, whether in a sermon or through the hymns and songs, read aloud or embedded in our prayers, is essential to our tradition and to our ongoing connection with the Holy Spirit.

There is no single approach to the Bible in the United Church that everyone is required to follow. However, there are some important commonalities. The first thing to note is that we understand the Bible within the broader theological category of revelation—that is, all the ways in which God is self-revealing, all the ways we come to know or experience God. United Church documents refer to inward revelation, whereby God addresses or moves us in our hearts, minds, or imaginations; and to outward revelation, those means that God uses external to us, such as nature, history, the Bible, and the person of Jesus Christ. Along with most Christians through history and across the globe, we especially see the Bible as helping us discern and make sense of what we learn of God through other sources, like nature or the stirrings of our hearts. And it is Jesus Christ, above all, who shows us best what God is like (Colossians 1:15). As the Report of the Committee on Christian Faith said in 1966, “Our knowledge of this revelation in Jesus Christ comes through the Bible in the ongoing life of the Church as it is guided by the Spirit.”

Well, then, what will we do with the Bible? It is extremely old, and was written in times and places very different from our own, and some passages can be hard to understand. We say it’s important to us and we read it in weekly worship, and preach on it, and sing words inspired by it—but what does it all mean? A good starting place is that idea of revelation: God’s self-disclosure. Reading and reflecting on the Bible is a key way that we get in touch with the reality of God and God’s purposes. Beyond that first step, the United Church has adopted some interpretive principles that are extremely helpful as we open this strange and wonderful book together and learn from it:

1)    Wesley’s quadrilateral: we read the Bible in relationship to three other sources of knowledge: tradition, reason, and experience.

2)    Christocentrism: the person and work of Jesus Christ is the crucial lens through which the text must be assessed and understood.

3)    Arcing toward justice: we are eager to see how our reading of the Bible can be part of God’s work of liberation of creation and all people.

4)    Scripture interprets scripture: each portion of scripture is understood in light of the whole of scripture, not in little separated fragments.

5)    Pneumatic reading: we try to read the Bible under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

6)    Experiential and contextual interpretation: we read with an awareness of our biases, needs, and experiences, as well as of the times and places in which we live.

7)    Communal testing: we are not satisfied to proclaim private, personal views about the Bible, but come together to test the truth of what we understand with one another.

All of this is to say that our engagement with the Bible is ongoing, deep, and important. As A Song of Faith put it in 2006, through the witness of the Bible, we “wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era.”* Because it has distinctive revelatory power to disclose God, the Bible continues to inform Christian practices profoundly. The United Church has not relegated the Bible to the status of “mere myth,” or just one more curious document in the vast smorgasbord of spirituality. Indeed, it remains central for the denomination, its life, and its work.

Rob Fennell serves as Academic Dean and Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology and wrote the chapter entitled “Scripture and Revelation in The United Church of Canada” for the book The Theology of The United Church of Canada, edited by Don Schweitzer, Robert C. Fennell, and Michael Bourgeois (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019). This brief summary of the chapter is the final in a series featuring contributors to the book. Purchase the book to explore in greater depth.

*from A Song of Faith: A Statement of Faith of The United Church of Canada/L’Église Unie du Canada © 2006. Used with permission.