Invited to reflect on my last six years as CTE chair, I have found myself remembering much further back, to the very first time I was asked to represent the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in an ecumenical role. This was on the ‘Joint Committee’ which had been at work since 1971 on the Revised English Bible. It was eventually published in 1989, the year before the inauguration of CTE and the other ecumenical instruments. I joined during the later stages, for the process we would today call ‘reception’ – the biblical scholars had already done the hard graft. But to be working on a translation of the Bible in the very spot, the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, where King James’ translators had met in 1611, was awesome indeed.
In many ways we have come a long way since then. Everyone except me was male –particularly ironic since one of the aims of the REB was to correct the gendered language of its predecessor, the New English Bible. The Roman Catholic Church was represented – a welcome improvement on the previous committee – but there were no representatives from the Pentecostal, Charismatic and Orthodox churches. But in one aspect of inclusivity it could not be faulted: W. D. McHardy, emeritus professor of Hebrew from Oxford, led the project from his wheelchair.
The committee’s maxim was ‘God hath yet more light and truth to bring forth from his Word’. The phrase resonated with me because Quakers talk a lot about continuing revelation. Our Advices and Queries open with the injunction ‘Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your heart. Trust them as the leadings of God’. I was surprised to discover that other churches understood Scripture in this future-orientated way. I suppose you would call it my first experience of receptive ecumenism.
The Quakers push it further, of course. George Fox asked ‘What had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit which gave them forth’ and Robert Barclay, in his Apology, called the Scriptures ‘a declaration of the fountain, and not the fountain itself.’ But they never discounted their authority, and when I read that Karl Barth too made a similar point, that we should ask, not ‘what the apostles and prophets said, but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets,’ I thought that maybe George Fox was simply anticipating modern biblical scholarship.
Different understandings of how we read the Bible are currently playing a large part as the churches struggle with issues of human sexuality. CTE has been through its own painful experience of this, in our four-year period of an ‘empty chair’ among our Presidents. We are trying, and need to try harder, to learn from this experience. It would be good if greater knowledge and greater frankness about how our churches understand the Bible could be part of the healing process. Especially as we are able now to draw on the Pentecostal and Orthodox voices which were lacking forty years ago.
As we await (at time of writing) or absorb (at time of reading) the results of the US election, the maxim ‘God hath yet more light and truth…’ has a particular poignancy. It is a quote from the farewell sermon given in 1620 by pastor John Robinson to the English Puritans, known as the Pilgrims, as they embarked on their journey to the New World. He set it in a firmly ecumenical context, upbraiding the churches of his day, Lutherans and Calvinists alike, for having come to a full stop in religion. ‘For though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them’. Let us pray that this will be true too of Churches Together in England.
Rowena Loverance was the Chair of the Churches Together in England Trustees from 2018 to 2024 and previously served as a President of CTE from 1998 to 2001. A life-long Quaker, Rowena studied History and Archaeology at Oxford and was Head of e-learning at the British Museum and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London. She is a freelance writer and e-learning consultant and has written several books on the relationship between religion and the visual arts, including Byzantium and Christian Art and The British Museum Christ (British Museum Press, 2004). Rowena also wrote the section on Quaker Art in Variations in Christian Art Mennonite, Mormon, Quaker, and Swedenborgian. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.