What do I believe about the Bible?

Not far from where I live is a thriving independent Evangelical church, with a large noticeboard outside which states: “We are a Bible-believing church”. I feel like painting over the board the words: “And I am a Jesus-believing Christian!”

Surely it is our faith in Jesus which counts and not our theories of inspiration? The Apostle Paul, for instance, did not preach the Bible, instead he preached Christ crucified and risen. It is through Jesus Christ that we are put right with God. The Bible calls me to put my trust in Jesus. It does not call me to put my trust in Scripture. This does not mean that I do not believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God. Far from it! I have spent a lifetime preaching and teaching the Scriptures. I begin every day reading the Bible for my personal edification and guidance. However, whereas I worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, I do not worship the Bible.

So what do I believe about the Bible? Firstly I believe that it contains the living oracles of God.  At the coronation of King Charles III a Bible was given to the new sovereign. “We present you with this book” declared the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, “the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is wisdom, this is the Royal Law; these are the lively oracles of God.”

That last phrase is a quotation from the Authorized Version and was used by Stephen in his defence before the Sanhedrin to describe the 10 Commandments, if not the Torah as a whole (Acts 7.38). What later versions call “the living oracles of God” (NRSV), “the living utterances of God” (REB) or “God’s living messages” (GNB), has been rightly applied to Scripture as a whole. God’s Word is ‘living’ in the sense that it is ‘life-giving’ and ‘life determining’. Tom Torrance, Scotland’s greatest theologian of the 20^th century, wrote:

It was through the word of God that the world came into being; it was through the word incarnate in Jesus Christ that the powers of darkness were vanquished and the barriers of the grave torn away; and it will be through that same word, read and heard in the Holy Scriptures and ministered faithfully, that Jesus Christ clothed with the same Spirit by whose power he rose again from the dead, will surely transform life and society.

As the Scriptures are read and expounded, God’s word comes alive to us. J.B. Philipps described his experience of translating the Bible as being like an electrician re-wiring an ancient house without being able to ‘turn the mains off’.

Secondly, I believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Writing to Timothy, Paul described the Scriptures as “inspired” (2 Timothy 3.16) – literally ‘God-breathed’. Although Paul had in mind the Old Testament Scriptures, for the New Testament had yet to come into being, we can apply this expression to the Bible as a whole. Paul here used a term which was familiar in the ancient world. In the words of Thomas Oden, an American theologian:

As our breath is in our language and mixes with our words, so does the breath of the Spirit enter into the language of Scripture and enable its very words to be a means of grace. When we say God breathes or God writes or God speaks, we are speaking metaphorically, but confidently, of the way the heart of God becomes for us thoughts expressed in words.

Paul, however, was not enunciating a particular theory of the inspiration of Scripture. He believed that God was active in the composition of Scripture. The late Howard Marshall, a Methodist New Testament scholar, expressed it in this way:

Just as in the case of the creation and preservation of the universe we can observe points where God intervened in unusual ways for specific purposes, so too we can say that alongside and within this general concursive action of the Spirit in inspiring normal human forms of composition in the biblical books, we can trace special actions of the Spirit in bringing special revelation.

Thirdly, God’s word came through men and women. Unlike the Book of Mormon, the word of God did not fall from heaven. In the words of 2 Peter 1.27: “Men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God”. God did not literally push the pen as the prophet or apostle wrote. Time and again the Bible bears eloquent testimony to the fact that God spoke through people’s personalities as also through the very individual pattern in which He arranged their lives. We only have to think of Jeremiah and Hosea to see how much their experience and their message were bound together. Nor is it without significance that we have four Gospels and not just one – the differences between them indicate differences of perspective and context.

Finally, I believe that God’s word is trustworthy and therefore it has authority. Precisely because of the human dimension, I find it difficult to use of the Bible such terms as ‘inerrant’ and ‘infallible’. Instead, on the basis of 2 Timothy 3.16, I prefer to speak of the Bible as being trustworthy and therefore authoritative for the purposes for which God inspired it, namely, to guide people to salvation and the way God expects us to live.