Archive: The Bible…Good Book or God’s Book?

By John N. Oswalt, President of Asbury College, Wilmore, KY
Contributing Editor, Good News

The basic difference among United Methodists today is what we believe about Scripture. Is the Bible the inspired Word of God, unique in the world? Or is it one more religious book, valuable to us merely because it describes our particular religious history”?

If the Bible is the inspired Word of God, it provides clear, divine guidance for the Church. If it is not God’s Word, then anything goes. There is no standard to guide our beliefs and practices. So society determines our values and behavior.

Reflection will show that nearly all our differences stem from differing views of the Bible. The virgin birth? Is Scripture an accurate report of God’s self-revelation or just a collection of religious legends? Ordination of homosexuals? Is the Bible the report of the Creator’s principles or the record of a people’s prejudices?

What this means is that any genuine reformation of our denomination will require, sooner or later, a widespread reevaluation of the Bible as God’s Word. Personally, I question whether it is possible to bring about that change before spiritual revival occurs. Typically the head follows the heart.

When a person has experienced the reality of God at work in his heart, it is less difficult to believe that the Bible is the Word of God. But unless that revived heart is immediately grounded in inspired Scripture, all kinds of aberrations may result. Not the least of these is loss of the ground gained and then a hardening spiritually.

So it is critical for evangelicals to know their own position and present a united front. One of the potentially divisive areas today is the discussion of the inerrancy versus the infallibility of Scripture. Here the Enemy seeks to exploit a situation where essentially the same views are held. His tactic is to make our words rallying cries by which we exclude one another.

That doesn’t mean words are unimportant. Words are our only means of communicating ideas and opinions.

The problem comes when we use words as convenient labels by which to make snap decisions. Political labels are a good case in point. Words must be vehicles for thought, not substitutes.

In discussing the inspiration of Scripture, words are very important. The issue of the Bible has never been more crucial to evangelicals. Since the evangelical surge of the last decade, everyone wants to be called evangelical.

But just because people claim a personal relationship with Christ, that doesn’t make them evangelicals. Neither does a concern for the lost. Both of these are critical, but they are not bed rock.

Biblical truth is bedrock. Apart from its teachings, personal relationships with Christ degenerate into subjective mysticism. And concern for the lost becomes mere do-goodism.

Liberal or Neo-orthodox

What is unique about the evangelicals’ view of Scripture? It’s the conviction that the Bible is the revelation of God.

Older liberal theology denied this altogether. For liberals, the Bible was just one of many expressions of the divine Spirit which has appeared in the development of human thought. But two world wars treated harshly the optimistic notions of human progress at the core of liberalism.

During this period in history a movement back toward orthodoxy began. This movement was fueled by two European theologians, Karl Barth and Emil Bruner. They saw again that God was other than humanity, and that if humanity was to be saved from itself, God must reveal Himself to us. But they did not believe that God reveals Himself in the Bible, only through it. So the movement they fathered came to be called neo-orthodoxy (or the New Orthodoxy), similar to but not the same as true orthodoxy.

How much difference can two little words in and through, make? As it turns out, a great deal. If God only reveals himself through the Bible, then the Bible itself is not factually true. God may reveal a truth through the account of Adam and Eve, for example, even though the account itself may be false.

In other words, this approach allows us to separate truth from facts. This enables a person who cannot believe the factual statements of the Bible to believe the truths of the Bible.

Here’s the great drawback of this point of view: If the truth of the Bible is unrelated to its facts, who is to say that it is the truth at all? If I say I am the smartest man in the world, but cannot add two and two, you are quite justified in saying I don’t tell the truth.

Thus the neo-orthodox movement did not last very long. Most scholars who agreed that the Bible was factually unreliable took the next logical step. They denied that it was any more truthful than any other merely human book.

In the middle and late 70s several evangelical scholars began to rediscover neo-orthodoxy. Either through childhood training or a conversion experience, they were inclined to accept the theological truth of Scripture. But they had become convinced during graduate training that the facts out of which the Hebrew and Christian people had learned their faith were false.

Barth’s and Bruner’s teachings were a god-send to these new followers of neo-orthodoxy. But, in fact, they are caught in a logical fallacy which cannot stand. As history has already shown, their position carries the seeds of its own destruction. Either the Bible’s theology is true because the facts are true, or its theology is false because the facts are false. There is no middle position.

It is crucial to understand that because the Bible is a reliable record of God’s revelation to His people then, He is able to reveal Himself to us now. The neo-orthodox position says we only know what the Biblical writers thought God was doing and saying. We don’t know what He actually did and said. This is not the historic position of the Church, nor that of the evangelical movement as it has developed over the last 60-70 years.

What evangelicals believe

Evangelicals believe the Bible is the Word of God in which God directly reveals Himself and His truth to us. To be sure, it comes to us through the medium of specific times and places. It comes through human writers who had their own styles and cultures. But this does not mean that the truth is obscured. It only means that we have to understand how the culture, style, and locale affected the presentation of the truth. This is not easy, but neither is it as hard as many would have us believe.

Some may ask why God bothered to use particular cultures and styles and locales. Why didn’t he just give us a list of statements and rules and truths? The answer is that we need a setting to help us understand a plain truth. Most of us understand stories much better than statements.

Plain statements which were quite sensible to the Jews are meaningless to us. We have to see them in their settings before we can say, “Oh, so that’s what it means.” In the same way, if God had given the Jews plain statements designed for us to understand, those people would have been completely mystified.

Granted, the matters of culture, style, and locale create some problems. First of all, when we say the Bible is factually true, we must take into account the purpose of the statements and their setting. For instance, Jesus said the mustard seed is the smallest of seeds (Mark 4:31). If His purpose were to give a botanically precise statement, then this statement would be incorrect. There are many other seeds smaller than the mustard seed. But that was not His purpose. He was making a general statement in support of his teaching about the relativity of greatness. In that context, His statement is perfectly true.

Of much more weight is whether Jesus made such a statement at all. Here would be a watershed between the evangelical and the non-evangelical. The Bible asserts in the plainest of terms that Jesus made such a statement. If in fact He did not, then the Bible has perpetrated a lie and its reliability is in question.

Here is another example of the importance of understanding the purpose of facts recorded in the Bible. About 90 percent of the information in Matthew’s Gospel is also included in Mark and Luke. However, beyond a general agreement over the order of some of the major events of Jesus’ life, each book arranges the information quite differently.

If the purpose of the Gospels were to give a biography in the modern sense, then one of them (at the most) would be true, and the other two false. But it is evident that each of the Gospel writers has arranged the facts in order to highlight certain aspects of Jesus’ ministry.

These examples explain why some who are genuinely evangelical are uneasy with such a statement as, “The Bible is inerrant.” No, the Bible is not absolutely free from any error, when judged by an absolute standard. Nor could it be. Those who use this word are aware of this, and so they carefully qualify what they don’t mean by inerrant.  

Still, evangelicals who have a concern over the appropriateness of the word inerrant are often more comfortable with such a word as infallible. They feel it lays its stress at a better point: the Bible’s function. In this sense they declare that the Bible will, without fail, lead to a true understanding of the nature of God, man, and the world.

But more important than terms is the way a person uses the Bible. Historically, evangelicals have held certain basic convictions. These include belief in the deity of Christ, a literal resurrection, and the necessity of conversion.

In addition, evangelicals have held certain convictions about Scripture:

• Though it must be rightly understood and interpreted, the Bible’s report of facts is correct and reliable.
• Direct claims of authorship and composition should be accepted at face value.
• Each of the 66 canonical books have some degree of authority over the Christian.
• Biblical statements which seem to contradict each other could be harmonized if all the facts were known.
• Biblical principles for behavior are binding for all times except where the Bible gives clear reason to believe otherwise.
• The Bible should have a prominent place in the lives of all Christians. It is ours to read and study with devotion, diligence, and delight.

Stark contrast

Though evangelicals may disagree over fine points of interpretation, their view of the Bible stands in stark contrast to liberal and neo-orthodox views. Sadly, both liberal and neo-orthodox traditions have given the Church a less-than-inspired Bible. They leave readers to pick. and choose· what seems meaningful.

Such views would have been unbelievable to John Wesley. He enjoyed calling himself “a man of one book.” Of course, this does not mean he read only one book. In fact he read hundreds, if not thousands, of others. But he did seek to base all his thinking and behavior on the Bible and to judge everything else by it. Let’s pray for a rebirth of such an attitude among United Methodists today.