Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am Morning Prayer
“With thee is wisdom”
The grey month of November is not only the month of remembering but also of wisdom. In the pattern of the readings for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we begin on this Sunday to read from the Apocrypha, from those books which stand between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and which have a special sort of status, wonderfully captured in the sixth article of our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion which articulate an Anglican understanding of the Catholic Faith.
The article does not provide actually give a generic term for these books, such as Apocrypha or Deutero-canonical. It simply and in a wonderfully economical way refers to them as “other books” before actually naming them individually; it doesn’t even clearly state that they are or are not canonical.
They are an interesting and intriguing collection. At issue is how they are read and understood. This is the point of the article: having listed the Old Testament books, it goes on to say, “And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” (BCP, p. 700). The appeal here is to the Patristic period which worked out both the essential doctrines of the Christian Faith ultimately creedally expressed and the canonical texts of the Bible. The reference to Hierome means Jerome, the outstanding translator of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin Vulgate which was the defining text for 1500 years and more for the cultures of the West.
The Psalms in the Prayer Book bear quiet but eloquent testimony to the influence of Jerome’s translation: Latin titles derived from the first words of each psalm remain part of the Prayer Book Psalter and have since Coverdale’s 1535 translation. They remind us of the greater legacy and lineage of scriptural doctrine and introduce an important qualifier about the rightly celebrated reformation claim, sola scriptura, ‘scripture alone’. Yes, but in and through a tradition of translation and reception. In this case, the reformed elements of classical Anglicanism defer knowingly to the received understanding of the Patristic period, referring, after all, to Jerome, the Prince of Translators, and specifically to his understanding about the nature of these “other books.”
