sermon 4 ’How do we understamd The Bible’
Over the past three weeks we have spent some time looking, in essence at certain aspects of the nature of God. Does God still punish us? Can God be limited by us? Is God in Control? And whilst doing this we made the important point that you cannot separate how we see Gods character from how we perceive him as acting within our lives or in other words that which we believe God does defines what sort of personality we believe God to have….for example if we believe that God is in control of all that happens in the world then we must by simple logic see God as someone who can be cruel at times for many things that do happen are truly awful.
The problem that we have of course in our quest to understand the nature of God, is that our sources are somewhat limited and at times apparently very different in their own understanding of God.
We have traditionally, what we call ‘General revelation’ that is that which we can determine about God from his creation.
Secondly, we have the writings of the Old Testament and of the Apostles as recorded in the letters of the New Testament
And most importantly we have a more specific revelation in the person of Jesus Christ which is recorded for us in our Gospels.
As far as General revelation goes the nature of God is said to be revealed through the beauty and organisation of Creation however we also know that creation itself is in decay, due to the influence of Sin it is, as recorded in Genesis ‘Cursed’ which means also of course that the reflection of God it now holds is (unlike the picture of the Garden of Eden where it was perfect) now also a corrupted reflection. Which for Christians leaves the revelation of the Bible as the main source through which we seek to understand who God is.
The question then for today is the very important question ‘How should we as Christians understand the nature of Scripture?’
And there are basically two main theories which we will consider today:
For Many Christians and in particular for those within the conservative Evangelical tradition The Bible is believed to be in its original form, totally without error, and free from all contradiction; " and this view has been treasured by those who hold it with a passion.
However it is a fact that it is only in the last two centuries that anyone can legitimately speak of a formal doctrine of this so called belief in the ‘inerrancy of scripture.’ This concept then as a formal doctrine is far from old and in no way dates back to the early Church and interestingly enough is not found either within the teachings of the Bible itself.
The second idea is that the Bible is a result of an Holy Spirit inspired partnership between God and specially blessed men and that as such it contains the inspired revelation of God to his world written through the eyes, wisdom, experience, understanding and culture of the men who composed it. They under Gods inspiration produced a record of how they understood the revelation they received.
So the first question that we need to ask ourselves today is of course ‘what do we mean when we say that the bible is the word of God?
For some who hold the first view of ‘innerancy’ their understanding of the Bible seems to very closely accord with the Islamic view of the Koran. Muslims believe that the Koran is a exact copy of the writing contained in heaven, so even when translated it ceases to be the Koran (that’s why it is learnt in Arabic) so it is perfect in every way every jot, full stop etc and naturally completely without error, contradiction or cultural influence.
The Bible also, to some who hold this view, seems to assume the characteristics of what Spiritualists would call ‘Spirit guided automatic writing’ i.e. that when the various authors wrote the Bible they did so under the absolute controlling influence of the Holy spirit, as if he literally guided every stroke of the pen. It is therefore without error or contradiction and free from the influence of those who wrote it……………………..(expand if needed)
In the second view the Bible is also a product of God and man working together, but not in the sense that he took control or turned the writers into automatons incapable of putting in their own interpretations, experience, insight and wisdom into the text.
And what is interesting about this view is that the one passage which alludes to how we should see the writings of the Bible states that “all scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit” or “God Breathed” and good for the building up of the Church etc, which in itself of course in no way teaches us that the creative capacities and culture of those who wrote it were excluded from the process.
The belief that scripture therefore contains nothing of a partnership of the different writers inspiration, Cultural influences, experience, insight, wisdom and even their fallen humanity is, simply an assumption and an interpretation of this text on the part of those who created the first view of Biblical inerrancy only some 200yrs ago or so!
But more importantly doesn’t this interpretation also fly in the face of how God has always communicated himself to humanity? Hasn’t God always worked ‘with’ mankind, in partnership, as it were? In Creation ‘Eve came from Adam’ in the inevitable ‘Fall’ of man! In judgement, Noah built the Ark! And in redemption as Israel became his witness, and of course most importantly didn’t God work in partnership with man in Christ, his HUMAN Messiah and up today doesn’t he work in partnership to build his Kingdom “We are his Body the Church” Partnership then seems to be ‘Gods thing’ with all the dangers and weaknesses that go with it. God always involves us in what he does because that is the way he chooses to act and to suggest that Scripture is any different seems perhaps just un-Godlike.
Well I hear you say that’s all well and Good but is there any problem with forgetting all this tosh and clinging to my belief that the Bible is in fact completely free from any cultural, fallible human influences.
Is believing the Bible to be inerrant (by the definition above) then a bad thing?
Well, quite possibly, it is, if we are really going to follow the argument through because as we said right at the beginning of this sermon how we see the nature of God, which is our quest, has to be defined by that which we believe he does or did in the past and believing in the first doctrine of complete innerancy seems frankly to cause us some serious problems in this quest.
I led a Bible study once on Joshua chapter 6 :15--21 where the writer described how once Israel had conquered The City of Jericho they declared that God had commanded that it be ‘dedicated to him’ which to Joshua and the writer meant that the soldiers went in and basically massacred every one and every animal (which they duly did!) Mass murder basically, what we would call genocide today and I dared to suggest that perhaps this was not really what God had possibly wanted (I personally in the light of the New Testament don’t see God as one who would be too happy with the wanton slaughter of innocents, call me a sentimentalist if you like, but hey!) My suggestion was that rather than this actually being Gods will or actual command, it had been inspired in the writer’s and in Israel’s mind set by the cultural view of that day and situation, in which Israel at that time had seen their God, as the other surrounding nations did, as a God of War. The proof that Yahweh was the true God was if they won in battle. The command recorded as being from God to go forth and slaughter the innocents was in fact not from God at all but a record of how they saw God and of what they believed he would as a God of war have wanted.
Now this didn’t seem to me anyway to be too unreasonable a suggestion, my mistake, as a number of the Good and true stood up and harangued me off the podium as a heretic. Unbelievable, but you get my point.
If you are prepared to believe that the Bible was written without any influence from the culture and insight of those who wrote it then you must also believe that God actually ordered this and other Genocides recorded in the Bible which in turn must lead you to ask yourself who is this God whom you worship? And How does this image of God accord with the God who we are told in the New Testament is Love?
Scripture is inspired of course, it is exactly what it says it is ‘God Breathed’ but I would suggest, it is also the product of a partnership;
We should see the Bible as a treasure of Truth, but also as what it purports to be. That is a Revelation (revealing) of God written by a number of creative, honest, and devout men working in relationship to and with God by the presence of his Holy Spirit to produce a most Holy collection recording Gods new revelation to the world.
A revelation which contains the influence of all parties involved, a book to be understood for the wonderful thing it is without pretending that it is something that it isn’t, for to do that causes huge difficulties in our quest to understand who God is, and actually lessens the real impact that it should have on our lives.
The task of Biblical study is then to look for God within the revelation we have been given and to do that with the help of those who wrote the Bible who themselves were also looking for God and with prayer that God might Guide us into all truth.