ACR Journal

Australian Church Record – Issue June 2007

The Australian Church Record, number 1892, June 2007, has been released.

Public Bible reading has always been at the heart of Christianity. Given the commitments of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the Reformation period, this has especially been true for Anglican Christianity.

On 16 April 2007, at a joint convocation of Trinity and Wycliffe Colleges in Toronto, our Bible reading practice was the point of departure for Cranmer’s presentday successor, Archbishop Rowan Williams, as he delivered his Larkin-Stuart lecture ‘The Bible Today: Reading and Hearing’.

The lecture spoke of public Bible reading bringing a summons to be the people of God. This summons seeks to bring change from the audience in a certain direction. Careful attention to this desired direction of change should guard contemporary Bible readers from imposing our contemporary issues on the text, instead of listening to the text for its own summons.

In his explanation of this summons as being a summons to gather as the ‘Eucharistic community’ here on earth, Archbishop Williams reveals the kind of ecclesiastical paradigm within which he operates. As an alternative, any talk of ‘summons’ should be set…

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