What Is the Bible? (Part 2)
Is the Bible the "Word of God"?
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
(An eight-minute read.)
Last week, I started wrestling with the question of what the Bible is. I initially proposed that, for starters, the Bible is a collection of writings that were composed over hundreds of years and written by numerous human authors, reflecting the ways they understood themselves to be participating in God’s redemption project.
I also introduced the idea that I believe the universe is governed by a personal God who is primarily defined by love. I then proposed that love, by its very nature, seeks to communicate with the objects of its love.
It may not thus come as a surprise to you that I believe the Bible is a communication from this God of love.
Notice that I said it is “a” communication from God.
I won’t go into all the ins and outs on this, since my chief focus in these reflections is the Bible, but I tend to follow a line of thinking which John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, proposed when he maintained that the Bible was not the only source of religious knowledge.
Wesley suggested (or at least others have summarized his framework this way) that God also speaks through tradition, reason, and experience.
One of the founders of my faith community, Ellen White, who had been raised Methodist, articulated it similarly, when she explained that “through nature and revelation, through His providence, and by the influence of His Spirit, God speaks to us.”
So I’m not necessarily a strict biblicist, believing that the God of love only communicates through the Bible.
However, I do feel persuaded that the Bible is God’s primary source of communication—and, as a good Protestant, believe the Bible is what Protestants have historically described as norma normans (that is, the norm that norms everything else).
But how can I say that the Bible—as opposed to the Koran or the Book of Mormon or the Hindu Vedas—is the book through which this God of love chooses to communicate?
I’m not here to tear down any other book. I’m not even here to say that God hasn’t or couldn’t speak through them. God actually could have and perhaps did.
While admitting that I haven’t read other religious texts as closely and carefully as the Bible, I will simply say that I’ve yet to read another “sacred” text that points to and lifts up love to the degree that the Bible does.
Indeed, much of what I know about love, and what I long for about love, has largely been shaped and animated—I do believe—by the message of the Bible.
And this is in no place more evident than in the person of Jesus, who is, I’d propose, the leading character in the story of the Bible—and embodied and demonstrated love more than any other figure in human history.
Simply put, were it not for Jesus, I’m not sure I’d know much about love. My heart would wander far and wide in search of some object upon which I could place my love, and from which I could receive and experience love. And I’d have a hard time understanding what love is.
I think the Bible shows and gives me that love especially in the person of Jesus (I’d also argue, as others have similarly done elsewhere, that Jesus shifted human history toward love—and all the rights and egalitarian sensibilities we’ve come to cherish and celebrate in the West—in an unparalleled and unprecedented way, and was a singular figure in this regard).
In presenting this argument, I’m essentially applying what N. T. Wright calls an “epistemology of love.” Though Wright means something slightly different by the phrase, what I mean is that I’m using love as the filter by which I determine if something is true or not.
Epistemology is, after all, the study of knowledge—figuring out how we know what we know and how we know what is true (for example, how do I know that gravity exists or that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated?).
And I’m saying that I’m using “love” as the means by which I determine whether a book is inspired by the God of love or not.
So here’s the punchline: in some way that’s a bit mysterious to me, I do believe that God spoke to the writers of the Bible in an attempt to communicate his heart of love to humankind.
Again, I can’t explain exactly how it worked. And I’m not sure all the implications of the idea. I just know that the fruit of love that I see in the Bible, and especially in the person of Jesus, is extremely compelling to me.
Of course, I know this may seem fairly subjective—and rather convenient, since the Bible just happens to be the religious text I’ve used throughout my life as the primary source of religious knowledge.
I’m also acutely aware that the Bible contains lots of stories, ideas, and rules and regulations that don’t seem to harmonize with love (an issue which I’ll try to tackle—perhaps indirectly—in my next piece).
But I can simply speak from my experience (even while acknowledging all the biases I bring to this question).
And what I’ve experienced and tasted and enjoyed has been the fruit of love, especially in the person of Jesus, leading me to conclude that somehow, some way, the Bible seems to be a communication from God’s heart of love.
This isn’t to say I believe the Bible is a communication from God on the basis of personal experience alone—and because it features the story of Jesus.
I feel like I have fairly convincing rational grounds to justify this conviction as well—grounds that you can probably find in any standard book on Christian “apologetics” (though this one may be the best), and which I won’t duplicate here.
I’m simply saying that, for me, what I find most convincing is the way that the Bible has been personally edifying, enriching, compelling, and inspiring. It speaks to my head, my heart, and my hands—and paints a picture of love like no other “sacred” book I’ve read.
What this doesn’t mean
This doesn’t mean a number of things, though, lest you misunderstand what I’m saying.
This doesn’t mean, I don’t believe, that God told the authors of the Bible the exact words to write. As Seventh-day Adventist co-founder (and theologian!) Ellen White explained:
The Bible is written by inspired men, but it is not God’s mode of thought and expression. It is that of humanity. God, as a writer, is not represented. . . . God has not put Himself in words, in logic, in rhetoric, on trial in the Bible. The writers of the Bible were God’s penmen, not His pen.
I therefore don’t believe in what many Christians call “verbal inerrancy,” which maintains that God not only inspired the thoughts of the biblical writers, but actually inspired the very words they wrote (and “controlled” the writers, as the link above puts it).
Consequently, this also doesn’t mean, I don’t believe, that the Bible is free from historical discrepancies, for example, and that we have to “blindly” take every little detail at face value, as though the Bible is inerrant in every jot and tittle.
I therefore don’t fret a whole lot if one writer says there were two people who were healed, and another writer says there was one. That sort of thing doesn’t challenge my faith, as if my faith rests upon the historical factualness of every crack and crevice of the Bible—and I don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to explain how to harmonize the apparent differences.
This is the way I explain it: the Bible is the Word of God, but it’s not the words of God (except in the places that claim to be direct quotes from the mouth of God—like the Ten Commandments).
As I see it, God utilized the personalities, styles, backgrounds, experiences, and understandings of the various human authors, seeking to communicate the “big idea” of his heart of love to humankind.
Yes, sometimes the authors “wrote better than they knew,” but I don’t believe God completely bypassed their agency, using them merely as machines to express his will. That’s not what love does.
How that all gets “cashed out” is its own interesting question—and just because, for example, I may not believe that every jot and tittle of the Bible’s historical claims are “exactly as they happened” (as though any historical writing does that), it doesn’t mean it presents an unreliable history as a whole (I seem to recall N. T. Wright saying something to the effect of, “Just because Matthew may have been off a year or two on the dating of Quirinius’s census, it doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t exist”).
Similarly, I don’t have a lot of interest in trying to figure out which parts of the Bible were “God-inspired” and which parts were man-initiated. That feels like trying to unscramble an omelet.
The point in all this is that I believe the Bible, like its claim about Jesus, is somehow this messy, complicated—and yet beautiful—mixture of the human and divine, communicating God’s heart of love in an attempt to bring humankind into oneness with himself.
How we approach it hermeneutically (that is, how we approach it interpretively) is a question I’ll tackle next week in my last installment on this topic.
To read Part 1, click here.
To Read Part 3, click here.
Shawn is a pastor in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.