Normally I use this Sunday each year to reflect on the character of the Bible, and some of the questions relating to how we study it.
This year look following the Reuilly Agreement celebrations, I thought I would reflect on how the Bible has been viewed since the Reformation. I have in mind our sister Church the French Protestant Church, a church we have a long history of association going back to their Royal Charter of 1550.
The group celebrating the 25 years since the Reuilly Agreement, which came here the week before last went on a pilgrimage which started at the London Church and their library. The first things they showed us were two Bibles: the first Bible translated into French, and a 1611 KJB. This starting point revealed something about their foundations as a Church.
Permit me an overview of 16th c Church history. One of the fundamental debates in the Reformation was the place of the Bible. Sola scriptura — Scripture alone as the supreme norm of Christian doctrine was the defining principle of Protestantism.
François I initially supported humanist scholarship, exemplified by Erasmus. French Protestants began to meet in small groups reading the Bible together, not exactly as a Church.
Enter the scene Jean Calvin, born at Noyon in 1509. Calvin became the most influential theologian of the French Reformed tradition. Although he spent much of his life in Geneva, his writings and correspondence were directed in towards French-speaking Christians.
His Institutes of the Christian Religion of 1536, first published in Latin and subsequently revised and expanded, gave Protestant theology a systematic account of the Christian faith and many were open to his thought.
Like Luther before him, Calvin insisted that the Bible is authoritative because it is God’s Word. His distinctive view was that the Church receives and proclaims Scripture; it does not stand above it.
Calvin recognised the Fathers, the ancient creeds and councils. He valued their witness, but insisted that their teaching must remain accountable to Scripture. Antiquity alone could not guarantee truth.
Here the differences of emphases between the early English Reformers and Calvin begin to become evident, and divergence begins.
Calvin’s Geneva, not a place I would have wanted to spend time, developed a disciplined, educated ministry and a system of church government in which pastors, teachers, elders and deacons had distinct responsibilities. This differed significantly from the episcopal structures retained by the Church of England.
Representatives of Reformed congregations from across France met clandestinely to establish a common confession of faith and ecclesiastical discipline in 1559. Calvin’s influence was decisive.
The death of Henri II, father-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots and wife of Francis II in 1559, left the young king vulnerable to competing factions. The Catholic Guise family and Protestant leaders among the Bourbons and the Colignys became increasingly entangled in the struggle for political power.
The Wars of Religion soon began. One of its most infamous episodes was the massacre of St Bartholomew, 1572. The killing of Huguenots (the term for French Protestants) in Paris and elsewhere, following the marriage of Henri of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, devastated the Reformed community. It also deepened Protestant suspicion of royal promises of religious reconciliation.
Henri succeeded as Henri IV in 1589. His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1593 – with his famous dictum “Paris is worth a mass” – which helped secure wider acceptance of his reign in Catholic France. An early act was the passing of the Edict of Nantes in 1598 which established a settlement that granted Huguenots specified rights of worship which brought a measure of peace after decades of bloodshed.
In a later chapter of French history, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 under Louis XIV, saw successive waves of French Protestants leaving France, many coming to London where they became a significant presence and economic force. Their church in London welcomed them warmly and their protected status under the Royal Charter of 1550 gave them asylum.
The French Reformed tradition was shaped by persecution, exile and the determination to preserve a Church ordered by the Word of God – the Bible. This history reminds us that the Bible has not simply been a text to interpret, but a source of consolation, courage and Christian identity.
The Church of England and the French Reformed Churches do not share identical understandings of Church Governance, particularly we are divided over understandings of the apostolic succession. Nor is the Church of England simply a sola scriptura Church: we read the Bible in dialogue with Tradition and Reason. Nevertheless, both traditions affirm the central place of Holy Scripture in the Church’s life and proclamation.
The Reuilly Agreement of 2001, and its twenty-fifth anniversary which brought our French visitors over, represents a serious attempt to deepen communion.
Crucially our shared Biblical inheritance remains at the heart of all endeavours towards unity, as with our dealings with all Christian denominations.
In today’s Gospel, in the days of Holy Week, Jesus is quizzed by the Pharisees on the greatest commandment. Are they trying to trip him up or are they engaged in characteristic Theological to and fro? His seemingly cryptic answer refers them to the basis of all the commandments and the Law. It echoes Moses’s call in the first lesson “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy.”
Biblical truth stems from the truth of who God is, who reveals himself in word and sacrament in our worship and common life. Sola scriptura is a partial truth – solus Deus, God alone, is perhaps more true.