10-2-10 The Bible Our Guide

Chairman

Thank you. I hope that answers a rather difficult question, I thought, with the connotations there. Now there’s one here that I would like to put to Duncan. I won’t read it all out but I am sure the questioner will recognise it.

It concerns the Roman Catholic Church in which the questioner says they pray constantly for vocations, and the point’s being made, do you agree or disagree Duncan: “How dare we presume to know what God thinks, who God consecrates, when we are but the created and not the Creator, and when God’s desire wholly and moral. . . ’ I can’t quite read this I’m afraid. I think perhaps you get the point. How dare we presume to know what God thinks and who God consecrates when we are but the created?

Mr Duncan Heaster

Well the Bible is our guide, as we say, the Bible is our authority. If we didn’t have the Bible, if we didn’t have this guidance, I would absolutely agree with that. I mean, we wouldn’t be able to say anything about who was called, or we wouldn’t know anything. And yet all we can say is that the Bible lays down certain guidelines, and those guidelines are quite clear that a woman should not teach in the church.

So the question seems to be saying, well how can you turn round and say that a woman can’t teach in the church?” Well we of ourselves cannot say that. All we can do is to say what the Bible says. And as ordinary human beings, the created not the Creator, we can only go by what the Creator says he wants us to do, and applying a bit of logic to that, we can say, “Well if the Creator tells us consistently that he does not want women to teach in the church but instead he wants us to live out this sort of dynamic typology of the relationship between Christ and the church, between God and Christ, within our male/female relationships, well that’s all we can do.”

So this issue of praying for vocations, I mean, we do not believe in doing that. We believe in reading the Scriptures, which we believe is the spirit of God speaking to us, and we don’t think that God is going to speak to us outside the Bible. So again, that question raises this issue, which seems to be a very important one in this discussion, how do you know when God speaks to you? How does God speak

to us? And we submit that if we think that be speaks to us through the Bible and through certain other methods, well we are just open to tremendous confusion, because we don’t know, as the questioner rightly says, whether God has spoken to us or whether he has spoken to anybody else, or not. Therefore we put all that to one side and say this (the Bible) is our guide, we will be motivated by what we read in the Scriptures, and that will motivate our response and our behaviour.