SERMON IN SHADOW OF DURHAM CATHEDRAL

Cranmer's Curate had a very pleasant few days on his study leave last week at Cranmer Hall, the Anglican evangelical theological college in Durham. The college, as its website points out, is 'in the shadow' of the great and ancient Cathedral of Durham.

It became clear to your curate, however, that such an illustrious location does not guarantee good preaching.

At a service of Holy Communion presided over by a Ugandan bishop in St John's, the Durham University college that incorporates Cranmer Hall, cc heard a sermon by a Methodist minister which was sadly not a good model for future Anglican preachers. It was on Jesus' cleansing of the Temple in John 2.

The preacher, who lectures in the New Testament to ordinands, was a very eloquent, even mesmerising orator. He began by talking about the difficulty of the passage in view of the difference between John and the Synoptic Gospels. We struggle to locate Jesus' cleansing of the Temple, to understand it, and to apply it, he said.

He then emerged from the dust-cloud of difficulty with an impassioned homily about the need to 'take the whip' to injustice, having alluded to the anti-capitalist protests on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral. He also spoke of the need to be rigorous with ourselves in our own discipleship. That is a biblical sentiment to be fair but not one taught by the passage, which is about Jesus, God's authoritative Messiah enforcing the divine will for the Temple, whose spiritual purpose the Word made flesh has come to fulfill through his redemptive death and resurrection.

As a village preacher and one-time trade hack, Cranmer's Curate would make no claim to be a heavy-weight biblical expositor. But he has read the Church of England's 39 Articles of the Religion. The Anglican way of interpreting the Word of God written is clearly set out in Article 20, which states that the Church must not 'so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another'.

The right approach to preaching under the authority of God's written Word, therefore, is to treat John's account of the cleansing of the Temple as historical and to teach what the apostolic witness was inspired by the Holy Spirit to reveal.

Those present for the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in St John's would have been much better served by a proper explanation of the significance of Jesus' statement in 2v19 in the dispute following the cleansing, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up' (RSV), which the disciples grasped after his resurrection.

One of course must not be naive here. Preaching that is not dazzled by the critical approach to Scripture will struggle to find a platform within the academy of an English university. One must also be aware that the term 'evangelical' has become much more elastic in recent years, so a theological college with an evangelical label does not guarantee the right presuppositions regarding the authority and inspiration of Holy Scripture.

Nevertheless, because good biblical preaching is so vital to the spiritual future of the Church of the nation youth group prayers are sorely needed for our foundationally evangelical theological colleges, that they would turn out faithful and capable ministers to preach the Word.

This piece - St Paul's fiasco symptomatic of Anglican confusion - appeared on Christian Today.

This about Stonewall voting Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips Bigot of the Year appeared on Archbishop Cranmer.