The Authority of the Bible (a lecture given Feb. 24, 2011)

… the highest proof of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks in it. … Yes, if we turn pure eyes and upright senses toward it, the majesty of God will immediately come to view, subdue our bold rejection, and compel us to obey.

Since for unbelieving men religion seems to stand by opinion alone, they, in order not to believe anything foolishly or lightly, both wish and demand rational proof that Moses and the prophets spoke divinely. But I reply: the testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.7.4 (pp. 78, 79)

This is why we believe the Bible. The Holy Spirit has so worked on our hearts and minds that we hear “God in person” speaking in it. This is also why we continue to believe the Bible, why we go back to it again and again, why we respect and maybe even fear the Bible a little.

To define more tightly what it is that we believe about the Bible, we ask what is the over-all message and gist of the Bible, or does it even have one?

Yes, the Bible does have very strong themes common to every book in it. The strongest theme, and the one that ties together the whole book, is the message of God with us. The Old Testament has a great variety, containing law, history, lyric poetry, erotic poetry, moral tracts, and love stories. And all of them depend on the theme that God is with his people, providing for them both materially and spiritually. The book of Exodus, for example, describes God’s deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt. Psalm 23 describes God’s care for the individual believer. Even Job, who cries out, “Why have you made my your target, so that I am a burden to myself?” (7:20), is troubled precisely because he knows God to be good and just and loving: “But as for me, I would seek God, and I would place my cause before God, who does great and unsearchable things, wonders without number” (5:8). God’s message in the Old Testament is that he makes for himself a people, that he is with his people, and that he rescues them from their trouble.

When we get to the New Testament we find much the same message, but it centers on the person Jesus the Messiah, who is God with us. The author of the book of Hebrews begins ,

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:1-3a).

The apostles in the New Testament bear witness to us that God himself has appeared in Jesus the Messiah, that this Jesus is the “God with us” and the fulfillment of all the Old Testament promises.

We have in our hands the writings of the prophets and apostles as their testimony that God has indeed appeared to them, and that, as St. John writes, “

what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ” (I John 1:3).

The really peculiar thing about reading the Bible is that our reading involves us in that fellowship. Karl Barth wrote that when we read the Bible we hear the living voices of the prophets and apostles. What we have in reading this book is not just a transfer of information, but a real and living fellowship. Here we encounter God in a unique way, and here he shows himself to us.

Because of the way this encounter with God takes place when we read the Bible, God acts so that the Book itself has an active role towards us. Other books, when we pick them up, are things that we examine. But when we read the Bible, we find that it examines us. It becomes Canon, which is an ancient word for yard-stick or standard. It is the measure by which we are measured. Barth calls it the “marching orders” that God has given the Church.

Because the authors of the Bible focus so thoroughly on Jesus Christ, they don’t write very much about themselves or about their writing. But they do occasionally address the issue of what the scriptures are.

II Tim. 3:16-17—All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

II Pet. 1:20-21—But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Luke 1:70—As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from of old—Salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.

Jer. 1:9—Then the LORD stretched out His hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me, “Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.”

These verses are not proofs, but rather descriptions of how God worked in the lives of the Bible’s human authors to assure the faithfulness of their writings. Because the Bible is the writings of God’s prophets and apostles, giving us faithful accounts of the work and message of God, and because, as Calvin says, “God in person speaks in it,” we believe that the Bible has authority over what we believe and how we act.

How does this authority work? Donald Bloesch describes three general models for understanding biblical authority (Bloesch, Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration & Interpretation, pp. 40 ff.).

The first, the “sacramental” model, sees the Bible to be a “divinely appointed” instrument through which God reveals himself. The Bible is the sign, and God’s revelation of himself in Christ is the thing signified. They are not the same, but we do not have the one without the other. The Bible is both the word of God as well as the words of men, and this model affirms these in a kind of paradoxical or mystical tension.

The second model he calls the scholastic. It holds that our finite minds do have access to the infinite, and it sees the Bible chiefly as a book of revealed truths or propositions. It is the revelation of God written down, and we can gain certainty of it by our reason. It does not tend to distinguish revelation from the Bible. We can grasp the truth of Scripture by scientific or historical examination of it, although salvation requires that we also have faith.

The third model, which he calls the liberal or modernist, focuses on God’s existence within the world rather than his transcendence above it. It wants to make Christian faith understandable and believable to the culture around us. It is more interested in the effect of God on humanity rather than in God’s own nature. It holds that faith needs help and clarity from philosophical concepts. The Bible is a record of human religious experience, but it is useful because it examines important moral values and principles of the spiritual life.

The three views, of course, see revelation differently. “The sacramental model understands revelation as God in action, God revealing the depth of his love and the mystery of his will to the eyes of faith. Revelation has a personal, a propositional, and an experiential pole. … God can be known only as he gives himself to be known (Barth)” (Bloesch, p. 42). The scholastic model, by contrast, takes the Bible to be a collection of God-given, and therefore true, propositions. Reason may not be able to get to the bottom of everything the Bible says, but reason can make sense of it. Last, the modernist views revelation as a kind of self-discovery, or the connection of oneself to the infinite or to God. “What is given in revelation is not information concerning the nature of God or the plan of salvation but a new awareness of ourselves in relation to the divine and to fellow humanity” (Bloesch, p. 43).

With this outline you can begin to predict what each view would say about the question of the infallibility of the scriptures. The sacramentalist looks for God’s action in and around and through the scriptures. Since God himself is faithful, both his past action in moving the authors of scripture and his present action moving us as the readers of scripture lead us into a true understanding of faith and life. “The Bible bears the stamp of infallibility through its unique inspiration and transmits infallible truth through the ongoing illumination of the Holy Spirit to people of faith.”

The scholastic looks for “absolute infallibility and total inerrancy” in the text itself. The authority of the Bible is a kind of deposit, residing there, the possession of the words written. The authority may be derivative, as a gift, but it is now a possession, as much “there” in the text as the information is.

The modernist or liberal does not view the Bible as infallible at all, but as the fallible records of human religious experiences.

Each of these views has its strengths and its problems. It is apparent from Bloesch’s presentation that he takes the sacramentalist view. Someone who takes a scholastic or modernist view might describe these options very differently, or reject this set of three models altogether.

This brings us to the question of inerrancy. That is, “Are there errors in the Scriptures?” Again, Bloesch helps us here:

One can say that the Bible is without error when its assertions are fully understood in the context in which they were made and are properly interpreted for the contemporary church, but this “full understanding” and “proper interpretation” are gifts of the Holy Spirit, not the necessary outcome of historical scholarship. (Bloesch, p. 367, fn. 57)

This statement can withstand some detailed unpacking.

“…when its assertions are fully understood…” Statements have nuance, flavor, bias, direction, particular focus, even a kind of literary tone of voice. Missing any of those can lead us to grotesque, laughable, disastrous, or simply sad misunderstanding of the text. When Jesus said to Judas, “The poor you have with you always,” he was not condemning efforts to eliminate poverty. I have heard that verse applied that way. We all have cultural pre-conceptions and quirks of mind that lead us to make interpretations as bad as that. And even scarier: often we don’t have any idea at the time that we are making such a huge mistake.

“…when its assertions are fully understood in the context in which they were made…” Statements either have no meaning or a completely indeterminate meaning without context. We can’t even make statements without context, because the very fact that we are making them embeds them in the context of our lives and circumstances. Further, our conversation continually refers to popular culture and current events, and we often use terms that we only half understand. For you and me, “Watergate” refers to a political scandal so big that we stick the word “-gate” onto the end of another word to mean another scandal. For people three thousand years ago, “water gate” was the opening in the city wall that led to the river or well. Today if I don’t have any bread, I go to the grocery store to buy a loaf. In the 1960’s, if I didn’t have any bread, it meant my wallet was empty. If we don’t understand the author’s context, we don’t understand what he said. The authors wrote in a world of jokes, current events, scandals, slang, landmark references, and clever turns of phrase. And there’s always the possibility that we know nothing whatever about the one he had in mind while writing.

“…when its assertions are fully understood in the context in which they were made and are properly interpreted for the contemporary church…” This is context taken in the other direction. Just as the writers wrote in their context, we can only understand within ours. And it may take a great deal of explaining to translate from their context into ours.

With all these difficulties you can see why historical scholarship is not enough, and we need the Holy Spirit to understand what God wants us to see in the Bible.

I close with two practical applications.

1) The views laid out in this lecture are complicated. Maybe they bring up problems you haven’t thought about, or maybe you have thought about them. Some people would ask, “Why bring up problems at all?” One answer is that looking at complications helps prepare for trouble. The believer who is content to say, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s enough for me,” may suffer a crisis of faith the first time someone makes a reasonable case that the Bible contains problems or contradictions.

2) Let’s suppose that your friend makes a huge, complex, and well-reasoned case to you that the Bible can’t be trusted. Let’s suppose that you can’t find arguments against that case or holes in its reasoning. Does that mean you should cease to believe the Bible? No, it does not. It may mean that the holes in your friend’s case are well-hidden. It may mean that you and he both make some big assumptions that are completely false. This does not mean that you should distrust reason, but remember the quotation from Calvin that we started with. We believe the Bible because “God in person speaks in it.” Because this is true, because God does speak to us in the Bible, then we can expect that our reason, little by little, will begin to see more of how it all fits together.