As far as we know, Jesus, like Socrates, never wrote anything. He committed his teaching to a body of people whom he had attracted to himself, at the center of which were the apostles. But even had he written, the writings of Jesus would not be enough, for what is important about Jesus (unlike Socrates) is not only what he said, but what he did, and what happened to him. And the most important thing that happened to him happened after he died (and thus could not have been written by him): Jesus rose from the dead. This is the heart of the message of the apostles, and thus the message of the Scriptures: Jesus of Nazareth was raised from death to life by the God of Israel.

The Scriptures are written witness of what God has done in Christ. That is the core. Out from that flows everything else: development of the implications of the resurrection, in the deeds and teaching of the early church, and also backwards: who the God is that raised Jesus from the dead. I’d like to say a bit more about each part of that.

The Bible comes in two parts. The New Testament contains the concrete witness to the resurrection of Christ. It is composed of some 27 books. Four of them are "gospels": a literary genre whose purpose is not to give a biography of Jesus of Nazareth but a witness to what he said, what he did, and who he is. Then there is the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which tells some of the story of the early church. Then there is a whole bunch of letters, many of them written by Saint Paul, a few by others, most of them directed to particular congregations and addressing their specific questions and circumstances. Finally is the book of the Revelation to Saint John the Divine, a vision of God’s glory and ultimate triumph over all wickedness and evil. In this final book of the Bible, Jesus says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end." So the New Testament takes us from Jesus’ humble beginnings as the nearly-illegitimate son of a young girl of no particular consequence to his cosmic throne as the king of the universe.

The Old Testament, which is about three times as long as the New, was the Bible in Jesus’ time. It consists of 39 books, divided by Jews into three groups: the Law or Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Old Testament tells the story of God’s choosing a people to be his own and his gradual education of them into the entailments of being God’s people. It contains law (this morning we read the core of the law, the Ten Words that God wrote for his people). It contains history, and Psalms of praise and lament and every other spiritual emotion. It contains wisdom and prophecy (which is best understood not as predicting the future but speaking the truth: forth-telling, rather than fore-telling; often, however, speaking the truth amounts to saying if you don’t do this, God is going to do that).

Christians believe that it was precisely the God of Israel, the God revealed in the Old Testament, who raised Jesus from the dead. That’s why they have rejected, and condemned as heresy, any proposition which would shrink the Scriptures to the New Testament alone. We should not use such expressions as "the God of the Old Testament." And we should read the Old Testament with a good deal more care and sympathy than many Christians do. I will pick out one example of a statement which falls short of Christian truth. It is this: "The God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance and cruelty; the God of Jesus is a God of love." The Bible comes to us as a unity: the Old Testament and the New cannot be separated; to interpret either requires reading it as part of a single whole, the Bible. That’s the general statement of what’s wrong with the purported distinction of Old-Testament-God-cruel and New-Testament-God-love. But even the specifics do not hold up. God in the Old Testament is described as a lover (for instance, in Hosea). And Jesus (we need look no further than today’s Gospel from John 2 of the overturning of the money-changers in the temple) could be furious with the wrath of God’s judgment.

For Episcopalians, the Holy Scriptures are authoritative. The sixth of the Articles of Religion states: "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." The Article goes on to state that by "Holy Scripture" is here meant "those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church." The so-called Apocrypha, those "other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners," are not used "to establish any doctrine." So it has been the custom of the Episcopal Church to read from the Apocrypha in public worship: one book, "The Song of the Three Children," being the source of two of the beloved traditional canticles of Morning Prayer ("O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord," and "Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers," BCP pp. 47 and 49, or 88 and 90). Yet the Apocrypha is distinguished from the Holy Scriptures proper, as only the Holy Scriptures can be used to establish articles of Faith, requirements of saving belief.

In every ordination service, the ordinand, whether deacon, priest, or bishop, publicly declares as follows: "I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God" [BCP pp. 513, 526, and 538]. This declaration is then directed to be signed "in the sight of all present."

To say that the Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation is not to say that everything in the Scriptures is necessary to salvation. There may be obscure parts of Scripture, or human elements which pertain to the specific time of their composition and are not of enduring truth. So we do not claim that the human authors of Scripture were put in a trance, lifted out of their historical context, and taken over by the Holy Spirit. We do believe they were inspired, but inspired to write so that the result contains all things necessary to salvation. We also believe that the Church was inspired to recognize these books, and not others, as writings containing the saving truth.

A stronger point is that the Scriptures contain the fullness of God’s saving revelation. You don’t need anything added to them. We aren’t waiting for another book of Scripture. So-called "hidden books of the Bible" aren’t hidden—they were known to the Church, and rejected as falling short. So-called "gnostic gospels" aren’t. And since the Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation, the Church cannot claim that you have to believe X in order to be saved, unless it can be proven from Scripture that X is a requirement of salvation. This has been the traditional Anglican objection to a couple of modern Roman Catholic dogmas, the Immaculate Conception of Mary and her bodily Assumption into heaven. Many, many Anglicans privately believe these doctrines, but the churches of the Anglican Communion do not have the authority to elevate them to the same level as belief in the articles of the Creed (for instance, the Virgin Birth), for the reason that these two dogmas cannot be proven from Scripture. The customary Anglican attitude is that reticence in such matters is more seemly than (what seems to us as) an exaggerated and unprovable exactitude.

There are two Creeds which the Episcopal Church uses. The Apostles’ Creed is a succinct summary of faith, used at Baptism and in the daily office of Morning and Evening Prayer. The Nicene Creed is longer, and is used at the Eucharist on Sundays and on Major Feasts. (See BCP pp. 304 [baptism], 53, 66, 96, 120 [Morning and Evening Prayer], 326, 358 [Eucharist].) The Nicene Creed is named for the council of Nicaea 325, but was actually completed in its present form at the second ecumenical council (Chalcedon, 381). The Apostles’ Creed has a more obscure history, probably originated earlier (although probably not with the Apostles themselves) but reached its present form a century or two later than the Nicene Creed.

The Creeds are trinitarian in structure. They each have a paragraph on the Father, a paragraph on the Son, and a paragraph on the Holy Spirit. In the paragraph on the Son there is included a summary of the key saving events of Jesus’ historical existence. And in the paragraph on the Spirit there are included various affirmations about the Church, which is understood as animated by the Holy Spirit.

In a sense, the Creeds are the Church’s summary guidelines for reading the Bible. Here in a few lines are the key beliefs of Christians, from the time of Jesus until today. The Bible is long; to read it with understanding, read it with the Creed in your mind.

Creeds do not have "escape clauses": they are to be believed, every line, by every Christian. If you do not know what a particular line of a Creed means, please use the discussion time today to ask. You should know what you are saying, for the simple reason that any member of the Episcopal Church is supposed to believe.

The scope of the Creeds is cosmic. They begin with God who, freely and generously, brought the world into being. Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, as the second person of the Trinity one with the Father before all worlds, as a human being born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead, buried, raised, ascended, enthroned in heaven—this Jesus will come again at the end to judge every person. The Holy Spirit, like the Son one with the Father from all time, spoke through the prophets, animates the Church and bestows holiness upon it, makes the sacraments be what they are, conveys to us the forgiveness of sins and all grace, so that we too may rise from the dead, and live forever, God willing, with God. From the being of God, to the beginning of the universe, through the history of Christ, through the Church, to the end of time, to life everlasting with God. This is our story. This is what we Episcopalians believe.