Some people will be disappointed in the report of the Uniting Church assembly task group on the understanding and use of the Bible, according to Dr Don Hopgood. Don is convenor of the task group as well as being the church’s SA ex-moderator and chairperson of the Assembly 2000 local arrangements committee.

The report will be presented to Assembly 2000 in Adelaide in July. It will be part of the pre-assembly papers which will be released soon.

"Some people have been looking for a report which gives an answer or even the answer," Don said. "They want something which says, in effect: ‘This is how you approach Scripture — and that's it. And everyone should stop being so silly and arguing. This is the way in which it’s to be done.’

"Now, we don’t do that," Don said. "We weren’t asked to do that. Even the concept of using a bible study really says: ‘Well, work through the study and draw your own conclusions from what you’ve been asked to work from.’ No good study says at the end: ‘These are the conclusions you should have reached.’

"A good study opens up the debate. It cites a number of texts, talks about how these texts work, how they operate, how they operated for the people to whom they were first read, and how they should operate to the people who are reading them today. And then the people can draw their own conclusions."

Don is not prepared to talk about specific points or recommendations from the report until it has been published. "What I can say is this ¾ that we have prepared, or are in the course of preparing, three documents." They are:

• The report, which will go to all members of assembly.

• A bible study, which will be available throughout the church.

• A collection of papers written by and for the task group.

"The Bible study is designed to illuminate how the Bible understands itself, what the Bible really is as a document — those sort of things," he said.

"The whole of the debate is, after all, about authority and how the Bible is authoritative for us. So the study looks at how the Bible sees itself exercising authority. It looks at debates that go on in the Bible — for example, between Jesus and religious authorities of his day about the food requirements in the Torah. It looks at the way in which the Bible reconciles these points of view, or plumps for one point of view over another.

"It looks at the ten commandments, and at the fact that there are two versions of the ten commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy — two versions of what some see as the foundational document for our morality and so on.

"Some people read the Bible in order that they will be better people or to increase their faith. I don’t in any way discourage that approach to Scripture. This study will help people to better understand the Bible, so that they can then read the Bible to become better people.

"We see as foundational the understanding of what this book, the bible, really is. So that is what the study is intended to address.

"The basic ideas were put down by a couple of the biblical scholars in the group. Now it has now been handed over to the educators, who will put it into a palatable form so groups of people in a local congregation can sit down on a Tuesday night and go though study one, study two, study three."

The third document is a collection of reports prepared for the task group. "This may not be ready in time for the assembly. I don’t see that as a great tragedy. It will still be able to inform the ongoing debate. We've commissioned papers which look at how the early church viewed the Bible, how the church in the Middle Ages and through the Reformation viewed the Bible, and how the Bible has been used in the church in modern days.

"We’ve looked at the way in which evangelicals — I prefer the term neo-evangelicals — use the Bible. We’ve looked at some of the aspects of modern biblical criticisms and a number of other topics like that. A sub-committee has been put together to determine which of these papers are suitable for publication."

Don said that, in the report to assembly the task group has tried to identify the range of approaches to Scripture which exist within the Uniting Church. It has also "put together a number of recommendations which will assist the church to work through some of these differences of emphasis, and to value the Bible as our foundational document, notwithstanding those differences.

"Other than Scripture, our basic document is the Basis of union. We would want to value any approach to Scripture, other than a strictly fundamentalist approach, even though some of us would not agree altogether with some of those approaches.

"I don’t see how anybody who was required to give an allegiance to the Basis of union — as are ordained people, for example — could be a strict fundamentalist. A strict fundamentalist would not subscribe to article 11 of the Basis of union, which talks about the importance of scholarly approaches to Scripture and the ‘literary, historical and scientific enquiry which has characterised recent centuries’.

"Article 5 of the Basis of union, which deals with biblical witnesses, is also something on which everyone in the church would agree. We stress the importance of that. The bible is foundational for the life and work of our church.

"The range of opinions on Scripture within the church were reflected in the membership of the task group itself. In some ways the task group became the microcosm of the church. That was done quite deliberately."