And this leads me to reflect on what is meant by the phrase "the authority of Scripture", because some of Scripture seems, to me at least, to be quite wrong in the conclusions it reaches about God, what He is like, and what he is doing.

Scripture was written and revised over a period of several thousand years, by a host of different people, with various beliefs and experiences of God. As well as the most obvious divisions between what we Christians call the Old and New Testaments, there are also different types or genres of book within the Bible, and also the Apocrypha – those books which some Christians include in the Old Testament, and others do not.

However, the most fundamental point is that all of the Bible was written by God’s people as they tried to understand, through prayer and worship and thought, what it was that God was doing with them and to them, and what He had done to their ancestors, and why. The Bible is our faithful ancestors’ search for the meaning of all creation – it contains their answers to those questions. The process of writing it helped our ancestors reach those answers, and the process of reading it in worship helped their descendants answer their questions, but also threw up new and different ones that they in turn had to think and write about to answer.

This process only stopped when God sent Jesus: He is the answer to all of our questions about the meaning of the world. All we have to do now is to discover what Jesus means - much harder than it looks! We could really say that our Creeds are the last chapter of the Bible: because they tell us the most important things about God, they are the key to understanding the rest of the Bible. Although you can read the Bible without knowing about the Christian faith, if you do, you probably won’?t understand the meaning of the Bible fully (if Jesus was who we believe Him to be).

The Bible, then, is inspired by God because the people who wrote it were inspired by a belief in Him and by the need to explain His actions. The Bible was not dictated by God, nor did He write it Himself. It is a record of how God inspired His people to worship and think about Him, and to recognize Him acting, and in each generation it inspires His people to worship and love Him afresh.

And the Bible is able to do this, not because it is a kind of rule book: if it were, it would not be inspiring. Rather, the Bible still lives, precisely because it is a collection of stories, all of them trying to show the wonderful, marvellous things God has done. And this in turn tells us, that the best way to read the Bible is not as though it were a text book or an Instruction Manual, but with our creative imaginations, and in the context of our prayer and worship.

We believe that the Bible contains the stories which, over thousands of years or only a few generations, God’s Chosen People recognized as being those which said true things about how and why God has acted. We are best able to listen and understand those stories when we pray about them, and think about them, and imagine them. When we do that, the Holy Spirit leads us into prayer with God, and leads us to discover fresh things about God, perfecting us in the image of His glory.