June 2025
by James Woodward
As I was leaving the College recently I overheard a couple of visitors in conversation. They were looking at the Saint John’s Bible which sits proudly near the College’s main staircase. Once you move beyond the reception area at the front of the building through the inner door, it is the first thing that you see.
“Look at the colour and detail,” said one of the visitors to her friend, “a great deal of care and love has gone into this”. “It is beautiful, very beautiful,” replied her companion. “I wonder where it came from and what does it mean do you think?”
This gave me the opportunity to share with them something of the story of this Bible and indeed to explain as best I could why the Bible was important in Sarum, for education and learning and particularly within the context of working within a short distance of the magnificent Cathedral. Too often we make assumptions about what people understand and how much they know of some of the things that we take for granted. Showing and explaining and bringing to life what is important to us here is part of our task.
As I reflect on this encounter, two things remain with me. The first was the immediate and overwhelming sense of wonder that this open book ignited in the two visitors. The second was the curiosity it stimulated about the origins and purpose of this Bible.
Certainly, these are troubled times within which we consider whether theology has any future in a church set within a wider society that seems to be liberating itself from organised religion. War, injustice, inequality and pain are real and universal. Displaying a Bible at the heart of our college buildings may attract the curious but we live in a world where many believe that religious faith is a distraction and even dangerous. I remember someone telling me after a large church service in my previous ministry that she had come for the music not for the practises of worship and words of faith. So, we might ask ourselves: is religious faith inspired as it is by scripture some sort of reality-denying fantasy of make-believe?
It is within this context that we ought to be aware that for many the Bible is utterly irrelevant – a book or books closed, ancient, incomprehensible and worst of all no use or importance to lives lived in 2025.
You can read a little bit about the Saint John’s Bible and its origins on our news pages. In October 2023 when we received this gift, I wrote this about the Bible:
“These holy words have been the source of conflict down the centuries. They have also inspired imagination in art, music, politics and social change. The text is never neutral. It can highlight our deepest differences but also unite us in vocation, learning and spiritual growth. This is an ancient text for a modern world. We shall cherish it and use it.”
At Sarum College we certainly want to make sure that our visitors see this great work of art, but we also want to put it to use in our teaching, in our worship and through the ways in which we excite imagination for those who come here to be formed for ministry. We hope that through the carefully crafted text and imaginative illustrations we might connect with a radical and unique revelation. The Bible provides a perspective and a story that remakes the past, the present and the future in an extraordinary and exciting way.
The Bible can take us on a journey in the present moment. The stories it tells from the past are an inherent part of how we understand what it is to be human and free, made as we are in the image of God. Above all perhaps the Bible offers us a new language in which God reorientates our lives and engages us as inheritors of eternity. In the world full of function and outcomes the language of scripture invites us into a reorientation of our life and the life of the world as we explore what it might mean to be inheritors of eternity.
It never offers us easy or simple answers but rather these pages and volumes explore in poetry, story, image and history the mystery of our human condition and how God shares in it for our holiness and redemption.
I am conscious as I write this of the pace we set ourselves and is set by others as we journey through the geography of our lives.
St. John’s Bible took over 15 years to produce. Like those visitors who stopped and gazed and wondered, I hope this gift will help us to glimpse something of its Christian beauty as a mode of peaceful persuasion that can draw us in to a deeper sense of the nature of divine beauty. It may be that a greater understanding and appreciation of the transformative power of beauty can aid us here in tuning human souls to divine harmony, to participating in the Kingdom of God.
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The Saint John’s Bible is on permanent display at Sarum College and occasionally the full set of volumes are displayed in special exhibitions. The Saint John’s Bible will feature in an autumn exhibition of bible illustrations through the centuries. Various bibles from the Sarum College Library collection, dating from 1605 to the present day, will be on display from 8 to 13 September 2025.
James Woodward is Principal of Sarum College. View his bio
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