IV Scripture
CHAPTER IV
SCRIPTURE
I want to know one thing, the way to heaven. . . God himself has condescended to teach the way. . . . He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book: At any price give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be Homo unius libri . . . . I sit down alone : only God is here. In His presence I open, I read His book; for this end, to find the way to heaven. . . . Does any thing appear dark and intricate? I lift up my heart to the Father of Lights. . . I then search after and consider parallel passages. . . . I meditate thereon. . . . If any doubt still remain, I consult those who are experienced in the things of God: and then the writings whereby, being dead, they yet speak. And what I thus learn, that I teach.
JOHN WESLEY
And now, 0 Lord God, thou art God, and thy words are true.
2 SAMUEL vii. 28, RSV
THE evangelical view of the Bible has come under fire in this controversy, and it is desirable, as the next step in our argument, to re-state it. We have just established the principle that Scripture, 'God's Word written', is the final authority for all matters of Christian faith and practice; and we must follow the method which this principle dictates. Accordingly, we shall ask Scripture to give account of itself, and test human ideas about it by its own teaching. 'Scripture' is a biblical concept; and it is the biblical doctrine of Scripture which Evangelicals are concerned to believe. We shall now try to see what that doctrine is; and our study will show us, incidentally, what reply Evangelicals should make to those who upbraid them for holding theories of dictation, or inerrancy, or literalism.
We must first be clear as to the nature of our task. Our aim is to formulate a biblical doctrine; we are to appeal to Scripture for information about itself, just as we should appeal to it for information on any other doctrinal topic. That means that our formulation will certainly not give a final or exhaustive account of its subject. All doctrines terminate in mystery; for they deal with the works of God, which man in this world cannot fully comprehend, nor has God been pleased fully to explain. 'We know in part'1—and only in part. Consequently, however successful our attempt to state the biblical doctrine of Scripture may be, it will not put us in a position where we 'have all the answers', any more than a right statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, or providence, would do. We do not, in fact, expect to give all the answers, and a mere complaint that we leave some problems unsolved will not, of itself, be valid criticism of what we say, any more than it ever would be of any theological exposition; for incompleteness is of the essence of theological knowledge. This, of course, is to a greater or less degree the case with all our knowledge of facts. We never know everything about anything. But clearly, when we creatures come to study the Creator and His ways, we must expect our knowledge to be more fragmentary and partial, and further from being exhaustive, than when we study created things. We make no apology, therefore, for leaving some questions unanswered. All that we are trying to do here is simply to find and demarcate the Bible's own attitude and approach to itself, and to present the relevant biblical material from a properly biblical perspective, so that the scriptural way of regarding and employing Scripture may become clear. The sole test of the adequacy of our account will be this : are we putting matters as the Bible itself puts them? Scripture itself is alone competent to judge our doctrine of Scripture.
The relevant evidence for our purpose is the New Testament doctrine of the Old. Since the two Testaments are of a piece, what is true of one will be true of both. The biblical concept of 'Scripture' will cover all that falls into the category of Scripture.
Space does not permit a full-length treatment, but we shall try to sketch out at least the main points in the Bible's view of the following three topics : its divine origin; its nature as the word of God; and its interpretation.
I. THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF SCRIPTURE1
It is customary to use the term inspiration to refer to the divine origin of Scripture. The biblical warrant for this is the phrase 'given by inspiration of God' which is used in the Authorized Version to render the adjective theopneustos in 2 Tim. iii. 16. As B. B. Warfield showed, this Greek word actually means 'breathed out by God'—not so much in-spired as ex-spired; so that the text explicitly teaches the divine origin of 'all Scripture'—here, the written word of the Old Testament.2 As we have seen already, the divine origin of the Old Testament is everywhere assumed in the New Testament.
When we use the phrase 'inspiration of Scripture', the noun may be taken either passively, as meaning 'inspiredness', or actively, as denoting the divine activity by which God-breathed Scripture was produced. In this sense, inspiration is to be defined as a supernatural, providential influence of God's Holy Spirit upon the human authors which caused them to write what He wished to be written for the communication of revealed truth to others. It was a divine activity which, whether or not it had any unusual psychological effects (sometimes it did, sometimes it did not), effectively secured the written transmission of saving truth; in this respect, it is something quite distinct from the 'inspiration' of the creative artist, which secures no such result, and it is more confusing than helpful to try to relate the two things together. It is true that some of those who were 'inspired' in the theological sense were also 'inspired' literary artists in the secular sense—Isaiah or John, for instance; but this comparison obscures the point of the idea of inspiration put forward in 2 Tim. iii. 16, which is simply of a divine activity that produced Scripture—one, in other words, which involved human writers as a means to an end, but which actually terminated, not on them, but on what they wrote.
Inspiration did not necessarily involve an abnormal state of mind on the writer's part, such as a trance, or vision, or hearing a voice. Nor did it involve any obliterating or overriding of his personality. Scripture indicates that God in His providence was from the first preparing the human vehicles of inspiration for their predestined task,1 and that He caused them in many cases, perhaps in most, to perform that task through the normal exercise of the abilities which He had given them. We may not suppose that they always knew they were writing canonical Scripture, even when they consciously wrote with divine authority; and it is not obvious that the writers of, for example, the Song of Solomon, Agur's testament (Pr. xxx), Heman's black Psalm (Ps. lxxxviii), or Luke's Gospel (written, the author tells us, because 'it seemed good to me'), were aware of any directly supernatural prompting at all. Scripture also shows us that inspired documents may be the product of first-hand historical research (as Luke's gospel is2), and of direct dependence on older written sources (as Chronicles depends on Kings), and even of wholesale borrowing (compare 2 Peter and Jude). Moreover, it appears that biblical books may have passed through several editions and recensions over the centuries before reaching their final form, as the book of Proverbs certainly did.3
a. Dictation?
Because Evengelicals hold that the biblical writers were completely controlled by the Holy Spirit, it is often supposed, as we saw, that they maintain what is called the 'dictation' or 'typewriter' theory of inspiration—namely, that the mental activity of the writers was simply suspended, apart from what was necessary for the mechanical transcription of words supernaturally introduced into their consciousness.1 But it is not so. This 'dictation theory' is a man of straw. It is safe to say that no Protestant theologian, from the Reformation till now, has ever held it; and certainly modern Evangelicals do not hold it. We are glad that Dr. Hebert, at least, recognizes this.2 It is true that many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians spoke of Scripture as 'dictated by the Holy Ghost'; but all they meant was that the authors wrote word for word what God intended. The language of dictation was invoked to signify not the method or psychology of God's guidance of them, but simply the fact and result of it; not the nature of their own mental processes, but the relation of what they wrote to the divine intention. The use of the term 'dictation' was always figurative, and the whole point of the figure lay in the fact that it asserted this relation. It was never used with psychological overtones. The proof of this lies in the fact that, when these theologians addressed themselves to the question, What was the Spirit's mode of operating in the writers' minds?, they all gave their answer in terms not of dictation, but of accommodation, and rightly maintained that God completely adapted His inspiring activity to the cast of mind, outlook, temperament, interests, literary habits and stylistic idiosyncrasies of each writer.
b. Accommodation
Those who credit Evangelicals with belief in 'dictation' often appeal to the thought of accommodation as the correct alternative to that view, but in so doing they misunderstand the biblical idea of accommodation no less seriously than they misunderstand the biblical idea of complete divine control. They speak as if it were self-evident that a revelation of truth transmitted through the instrumentality of sinful men would suffer in the process. We are told that, since the biblical writers were imperfect creatures, morally, spiritually and intellectually limited, children of their age and children of Adam too, it was inevitable that crudities, distortions and errors should creep into what they wrote. It is claimed that this is a liberating notion which throws a flood of light on the real character of Scripture, and makes possible a great advance in theological understanding. But does it? It certainly gives the theologian an easy way out when he meets passages that do not square with his idea of what the Bible tells us, or ought to tell us; but is the practice of dismissing awkward details as human corruptions of the pure word of God a biblical way of treating Scripture? It is irrelevant and mischievous to appeal in this connection, as some do, to the example of Christ and the apostles in setting aside Old Testament regulations; for they did this because they recognized that the time had ended for which those regulations were meant to be binding, not because they doubted their divine origin.
In fact, this 'liberating notion' is a mistaken idea which reflects a thoroughly defective approach to the written Word. For, in the first place, it flatly contradicts the New Testament witness that every part of Scripture has a divine origin and all that is written (pasa graphe) is theopneustos.1 And, in the second place, it plainly implies that God was somehow constrained, hampered and indeed frustrated in His revelatory purpose by the quality of the human material through which He worked. But this is to deny the biblical doctrine of providence, according to which God 'worketh all things after the counsel of his own will'.2 The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. 'Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth.'3 He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule sinful human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and Scripture tells us that this is what in fact He did. We are to think of the Spirit's inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers' own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God's work. Thus, quotations from the Psalms in Acts are described both as David's words, the issue of his own God-given knowledge and God-guided reasoning, and as God's words spoken through David's mouth.1 David was a sinful man; but his words in these cases were the words of God.
c. Providence
The twin suppositions which liberal critics make—that, on the one hand, divine control of the writers would exclude the free exercise of their natural powers, while, on the other hand, divine accommodation to the free exercise of their natural powers would exclude complete control of what they wrote—are really two forms of the same mistake. They are two ways of denying that the Bible can be both a fully human and fully divine composition. And this denial rests (as all errors in theology ultimately do) on a false doctrine of God; here particularly, of His providence. For it assumes that God and man stand in such a relation to each other that they cannot both be free agents in the same action. If man acts freely (i.e., voluntarily and spontaneously), God does not, and vice versa. The two freedoms are mutually exclusive. But the affinities of this idea are with Deism, not Christian Theism. It is Deism which depicts God as the passive onlooker rather than the active governor of His world, and which assures us that the guarantee of human freedom lies in the fact that men's actions are not under God's control. But the Bible teaches rather that the freedom of God, who works in and through His creatures, leading them to act according to their nature, is itself the foundation and guarantee of the freedom of their action. It is therefore a great mistake to think that the freedom of the biblical writers can be vindicated only by denying full divine control over them; and the prevalence of this mistake should be ascribed to the insidious substitution of deistic for theistic ideas about God's relation to the world which has been, perhaps, the most damaging effect of modern science on theology. When the critics of Evangelicalism take it for granted that Evangelicals, since they believe in complete control, must hold the 'dictation' theory, while they themselves, since they recognize accommodation, are bound to hold that in Scripture false and misleading words of men are mixed up with the pure word of God, they merely show how unbiblical their idea of providence has become. The cure for such fallacious reasoning is to grasp the biblical idea of God's concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man's own mind.
F.—6
d. The Analogy of the Person of Christ
A further way in which some critics try to make the point that they do justice to the human character of the Bible, while Evangelicals do not, is by comparing their own position to the orthodox doctrine of the two natures of Christ, and the evangelical view, as they understand it, to the Monophysite heresy. So Dr. Hebert writes: 'The Liberals of the last generation, like critical scholars today, were asserting the vital theological truth of the human nature of the Bible, which is analogous to that of the human nature of Christ. They were in fact fighting against the Monophysite heresy which, with its denial of the true humanity of our Lord, is the favourite heresy of orthodox Christians—who are inclined so to exalt Him as their divine Saviour that they lose sight of the fact that He was and is also truly man.'1 The suggestion is that Evangelicals fall into an analogous heresy with regard to Scripture. Dr. Hebert goes on to quote some words of Professor R. H. Fuller to this effect, which conclude thus: 'All the way through, we have to discern the treasure in the earthen vessels : the divinity in Christ's humanity . . . the Word of God in the fallible words of men.' Hebert regards this line of criticism as 'very important';2 but, in fact, he and Professor Fuller misconceive the bearing of the Christological parallel. In so far as it is valid, it confirms the evangelical view of Scripture as against theirs, as we shall now see. We would make the following observations upon it:
1. At best, the analogy between the divine-human person of the Word made flesh, who is Christ, and the divine-human product of the Word written, which is Scripture, can be only a limited one.
2. If the point of the analogy is merely that human as well as divine qualities are to be recognized in Scripture, we can only agree, and add that it should be clear from what we have already said—which is no more than Evangelicals have said constantly for over a century—that we do in fact recognize the reality of both.
3. If we are to carry the analogy further, and take it as indicating something about the character which the human element has by virtue of its conjunction with the divine, we must say that it points directly to the fact that, as our Lord, though truly man, was truly free from sin, so Scripture, though a truly human product, is truly free from error.1 If the critics believe that Scripture, as a human book, errs, they ought, by the force of their own analogy, to believe also that Christ, as man, sinned.
4. If we are to carry the analogy further still, and take it as indicating something about the reality of the union between the divine and the human, we must say that it is in fact the approach of Evangelicals to Scripture which corresponds to Christological orthodoxy, while that of their critics really corresponds to the Nestorian heresy. Nestorianism begins by postulating a distinction between Jesus as a man and the divine Son, whom it regards as someone distinct, indwelling the man; but then it cannot conceive of the real personal identity of the man and the Son. The right and scriptural way in Christology is to start by recognizing the unity of our Lord's Person as divine and to view His humanity only as an aspect of His Person, existing within it and never, therefore, dissociated from it. Similarly, the right way to think of Scripture is to start from the biblical idea that the written Scriptures as such are 'the oracles of God' and to study their character as a human book only as one aspect of their character as a divine book. Those who start by postulating a distinction between the Bible as a human book and the word of God that is in it are unable, on their own premises, to recognize and exhibit the real oneness of these two things, and when they try to state their mutual relationship they lapse into an arbitrary subjectivism. This is what happens to the critics. (Incidentally, once we see this, we see why they are so ready to accuse Evangelicals of Monophysitism; for Nestorians have always regarded orthodox Christology as Monophysite.) We must dissent, therefore, from Professor Fuller's Nestorian assertion that our task is to discern the divinity in Christ's humanity and the word of God in the fallible words of man, and suggest that it is rather to appreciate the true manhood of the divine Word incarnate and the authentic human character of the inerrant divine Word written.
II. THE NATURE OF SCRIPTURE
a. The Unity of Scripture
We come now to discuss the nature of the Bible, considered as a single entity—the organism of Scripture, as we may call it. Our first point here is that Scripture is a real unity.
The literary historian sees the Bible as a library : a miscellaneous set of more or less occasional writings—public records, legal and liturgical documents, history books, lyric and philosophical poetry and visionary prose, hymns, letters, sermons—put together over a period of a thousand years or more. But it is more than a library of books by human authors; it is a single book with a single author—God the Spirit—and a single theme—God the Son, and the Father's saving purposes, which all revolve round Him. Our Lord is therefore the key to Scripture, and its focal centre; there is a sense in which all bears witness of Him,1 and in this common reference the heterogeneous contents of the Bible find their unity. Not that all parts of Scripture are equally important, or witness to Christ and the kingdom of God in the same way. But no part of Scripture is without its bearing on these central topics, and no part of Scripture is rightly understood if read without this reference.2 The course of redemptive history included apostasies, judgments and captivities, yet that history formed a God-guided unity, and these apparently unproductive episodes served to advance its course towards its predestined goal. And, in the same way, Scripture contains passages which seem unedifying in isolation, yet all these, when set in the context of the whole, contribute something of their own to the biblical message. The structural interrelation of the various parts of the organism of Scripture is certainly complex, but it yields progressively to patient study.
b. The Word of God
It is customary to speak of the Bible, thus regarded, as the Word of God. This phrase is applied in the Old Testament both to individual revelations to and utterances by the prophets (every such communication being 'the word of God' or 'of the Lord'), and also to the totality of God's verbal revelation to Israel, as such;3 and in the New Testament, as we saw, it is used to refer comprehensively to the body of revealed truths which made up the apostolic gospel.4 The phrase declares the divine origin of that to which it applies : whatever is denominated 'the word of God' is thereby affirmed to be a divine utterance. It is for this reason that the phrase is applied to the Bible. The purpose of this usage is to make explicit the biblical conception of Scripture—which is that Scripture is the sum total of divine revelation recorded in a God-breathed written form, and that every scriptural statement is therefore to be received as a divine utterance. The New Testament writers regarded Scripture as the written Word of God, made up of the written words of God—as, in fact, 'the oracles of God'.1 No clearer proof of this could be given than Warfield's survey of 'two classes of passages, each of which, when taken separately, throws into the clearest light their (the New Testament writers') habitual appeal to the Old Testament text as t6 God Himself speaking, while, together, they make an irresistible impression of the absolute identification by their writers of the Scriptures in their hands with the living voice of God. In one of these classes of passages the Scriptures are spoken of as if they were God; in the other, God is spoken of as if He were the Scriptures : in the two together, God and the Scriptures are brought into such conjunction as to show that in point of directness of authority no distinction was made between them.
'Examples of the first class of passages are such as these: Gal. iii. 8, "The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the nations be blessed" (Gen. xii 1–3); Rom. ix. 17. "The Scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up" (Ex. ix. 16). It was not, however, the Scripture (which did not exist at the time) that, foreseeing God's purposes of grace in the future, spoke these precious words to Abraham, but God Himself in His own person : it was not the not-yet-existent Scripture that made this announcement to Pharaoh, but God Himself through the mouth of His prophet Moses. These acts could be attributed to "Scripture" only as the result of such habitual identification, in the mind of the writer, of the text of Scripture with God as speaking, that it became natural to use the term "Scripture says" when what was really intended was "God, as recorded in Scripture, said".
'Examples of the other class of passages are such as these : Matt. xix. 4, 5, "And he answered and said, Have ye not read that he which made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and the twain shall become one flesh?" (Gen. ii. 24); Heb. iii. 7, "Wherefore, even as the Holy Ghost saith, Today if ye shall hear his voice", etc. (Ps. xcv. 7); Acts iv. 24, 25, "Thou art God, who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things" (Ps. ii. 1); Acts xiii. 34, 35, "He that raised him up from the dead, now no more to return to corruption . . . hath spoken in this wise, I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David" (Isa. lv. 3); "because he saith also in another [Psalm], Thou wilt not give thy holy one to see corruption" (Ps. xvi. 10); Heb. i. 6, "And when he again bringeth in the first born into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him" (Deut. xxxii. 43); "and of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels wings, and his ministers a flame of fire" (Ps. civ. 4); "but of the Son, he saith, Thy Throne, O God, is for ever and ever", etc. (Ps. xlv. 7); and, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning", etc. (Ps. cii. 36). It is not God, however, in whose mouth these sayings are placed in the text of the Old Testament: they are the words of others, recorded in the text of Scripture as spoken to or of God. They could be attributed to God only through such habitual identification, in the minds of the writers, of the text of Scripture with the utterances of God that it had become natural to use the term "God says" when what was really intended was "Scripture, the Word of God, says".
'The two sets of passages, together, thus show an absolute identification, in the minds of these writers, of "Scripture" with the speaking God.'1
Now the divine utterances of which Old Testament Scripture was composed were held, as we saw, to coalesce into the unity of a single message. The very use of the terms 'Scripture' (graphé) and 'the Scriptures' (hai graphai) in the New Testament proves this. At the conclusion of a careful survey of this usage, Warfield records the following just verdict: 'The employment of graphe in the NT so far follows its profane usage, in which it is prevailingly applied to entire documents and carries with it a general implication of completeness, that in its more common reference it designates the OT to which it is applied in its completeness as a unitary whole. . . It remains only to add that the same implication is present in the designation of the OT as hai graphai, which, . . . does not suggest that the OT is a collection of "treatises", but is merely a variant of he graphe in accordance with good Greek usage, employed interchangeably with it at the dictation of nothing more recondite than literary habit. Whether hai graphai is used, then, or he graphe, or the anarthrous graphe, in each case alike the OT is thought of as a single document set over against all other documents by reason of its unique Divinity and indefectible authority, by which it is constituted in every passage and declaration the final arbiter of belief and practice.'1
The biblical concept of Scripture, then, is of a single, though complex, God-given message, set down in writing in God-given words; a message which God has spoken and still speaks. On the analogy of scriptural usage, therefore, it is evident that to describe Scripture as the Word of God written is entirely accurate. Accordingly, if when we speak of 'the Bible' we mean not just a quantity of printed paper, but a written document declaring a message—if, that is, we view the inspired volume as a literary product, a verbal expression of thought—then 'the Bible' and 'Scripture' will be synonyms : it will thus be correct to call the Bible the Word of God, and to affirm that what it says, God says. If, on the other hand, we are thinking of the Bible simply as a printed book, it will not be wrong to say that the Bible contains the Word of God, in the same sense in which any other book contains the pronouncements of its author. To speak in these terms, however, is to invite misunderstanding, since Liberal theologians have been in the habit of using this formula to insinuate that part of what the Bible contains is no part of the Word of God. It is worth guarding our language in order to avoid seeming to endorse so unbiblical a view.
The scriptural approach to Scripture is thus to regard it as God's written testimony to Himself. When we call the Bible the Word of God, we mean, or should mean, that its message constitutes a single utterance of which God is the author. What Scripture says, He says. When we hear or read Scripture, that which impinges on our mind (whether we realize it or not) is the speech of God Himself.
Not that the Church knows, or ever knew, or will know in this world, the full meaning of God's Word. As we shall point out more fully later, the task of biblical interpretation never ends. There is no such thing as an exhaustive exegesis of any passage. The Holy Spirit is constantly showing Christian men facets of revealed truth not seen before. To claim finality for any historic mode of interpretation or system of theology would be to resist the Holy Ghost; there is always more to be said, and the Church of each age should echo John Robinson's confidence that the Lord has more light and truth yet to break out of His holy Word. Our point here is simply that the Church must receive all teaching that proves to be biblical, whether on matters of historical or of theological fact, as truly part of God's Word.1
This shows the importance of insisting that the inspiration of Scripture is verbal. Words signify and safeguard meaning; the wrong word distorts the intended sense. Since God inspired the biblical text in order to communicate His Word, it was necessary for him to ensure that the words written were such as did in fact convey it. We do not stress the verbal character of inspiration from a superstitious regard for the original Hebrew and Greek words (like that of Islam for its Koran, which is held to consist essentially of Arabic words, and therefore to be untranslatable); we do so from a reverent concern for the sense of Scripture. If the words were not wholly God's, then their teaching would not be wholly God's.
This consideration suggests a further problem, at which we may here glance : how is it warrantable to treat the Bible as we actually have it as the Word of God, when we have no reason to think that any manuscript or version now existing is free from corruptions ? It is sometimes suggested that the evangelical view of Scripture can have no practical application or significance, since the faultless autographs which it posits are not available to us, and that in practice we are involved in an inescapable subjectivism by the necessity of relying on conjectural reconstructions of the text. The suggestion here is that we can have no confidence that any text that we possess conveys to us the genuine meaning of the inspired Word. It is, of course, true that textual corruptions are no part of the authentic Scriptures, and that no text is free from such slips. But faith in the consistency of God warrants an attitude of confidence that the text is sufficiently trustworthy not to lead us astray. If God gave the Scriptures for a practical purpose—to make men wise unto salvation through faith in Christ—it is a safe inference that He never permits them to become so corrupted that they can no longer fulfil it. It is noteworthy that the New Testament men did not hesitate to trust the words of the Old Testament as they had it as reliable indications of the mind of God. This attitude of faith in the adequacy of the text is confirmed, so far as it can be, by the unanimous verdict of textual scholars that the biblical text is excellently preserved, and no point of doctrine depends on any of the small number of cases in which the true reading remains doubtful. Professor F. F. Bruce expresses the verdict of scholarship as well as of biblical faith when he writes: 'By the "singular care and providence" of God the Bible text has come down to us in such substantial purity that even the most uncritical edition of the Hebrew or Greek . . . cannot effectively obscure the real message of the Bible, or neutralize its saving power.'1
This is not to say that textual criticism is needless and unprofitable; but it is to say that, while the work of recovering the original text is not yet finished, and no doubt never will be finished in every minute particular, we should not hesitate to believe that the text as we have it is substantially correct, and may safely be trusted as conveying to us the Word of God with sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes. God's faithfulness to His own intentions is our guarantee of that.
c. Propositional Revelation
The Word of God consists of revealed truths. This is nowadays an unfashionable notion. It is commonly said that there are no revealed truths; God revealed Himself, not by words, but by the mighty redemptive works through which He became the world's Saviour. Revelation is by action, not by instruction. The Bible is not revelation, but a memorial and legacy of revelation : a record of observations, impressions and opinions of godly men involved in redemptive history. It has the relative authority of a firsthand account, written with thought and care by men of good faith and great insight, but it has not the absolute authority of truth. Later generations must use their own insight to decide how far its reports may be taken as true, or its theology as adequate. No finality attaches to what it says; it is a source and quarry for theology, but not a standard or criterion for it. It is the work of pious men using their God-given abilities to interpret and explain the acts of God—in other words, a piece of godly speculation; and it forms the jumping-off ground for the religious enquiry and reflection of later ages—which is also, of course, no more than godly speculation. Scriptural statements are simply human testimonies to revelation, fallible and inadequate as all man's words are. They must not be equated with a verbal word of God; there is, in fact, no such word.
But according to Scripture, God reveals Himself to men both by exercising power for them and by teaching truth to them. The two activities are not antithetical, but complementary. Indeed, the biblical position is that the mighty acts of God are not revelation to man at all, except in so far as they are accompanied by words of God to explain them. Leave man to guess God's mind and purpose, and he will guess wrong; he can know it only by being told it. Moreover, the whole purpose of God's mighty acts is to bring man to know Him by faith; and Scripture knows no foundation for faith but the spoken word of God, inviting our trust in Him on the basis of what He has done for us. Where there is no word from God, faith cannot be. Therefore, verbal revelation—that is to say, propositional revelation, the disclosure by God of truths about Himself—is no mere appendage to His redemptive activity, but a necessary part of it. This being so, the inspiring of an authoritative exposition of His redemptive acts in history ought to be seen as itself one of those redemptive acts, as necessary a link in the chain of His saving purposes as any of the events with which the exposition deals.
The need for verbal revelation appears most clearly when we consider the Person and work of Christ. His life and death was the clearest and fullest revelation of God that ever was or could be made. Yet it could never have been understood without explanation. Whoever could have guessed, without being told, that the man Jesus was God incarnate, that He had created the world in which He was crucified, that by dying a criminal's death He put away the sins of mankind, and that now, though gone from our sight, He lives for ever to bring penitent sinners to His Father? And who can come to faith in Christ if he knows none of this? No considerations could show more plainly the complete inability of man to 'make do' in his religion without a spoken word from God.
In fact, however, there is nothing of which the Bible is more sure than that God has from the first accompanied His redemptive acts with explanatory words—statements of fact about Himself and His purposes, warnings, commands, predictions, promises—and that it is in responding specifically to these divine words that obedience consists. Moses, the prophets, Christ, the apostles, all spoke God's words to men; and what they said took the form of statement and inference, argument and deduction.1 God's word in their mouths was propositional in character. Christ and the apostles regularly appealed to Old Testament statements as providing a valid basis for inferences about God, and drew from them by the ordinary laws of grammar and logic conclusions which they put forward as truths revealed there—that the dead do not perish, that justification is by faith and not by works, that God is sovereign in saving mercy, and so forth.2 Plainly, they regarded the Old Testament as propounding a body of doctrinal affirmations. And we have seen reasons already for regarding the New Testament as of the same nature as the Old. We conclude, therefore, that, if we are to follow Scripture's own account of itself, we are bound to say that whatever 'is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture"3 must be regarded as a revealed truth. The Bible confronts us with the conception that the Word of God which it embodies consists of a system of truths, conveying to men real information from God about Himself.
Not that the text of Scripture is made up entirely of formal doctrinal statements; of course, it is not. The Bible is not a repository of isolated proof-texts, as the Mediævals, unconcerned about the literal sense of passages, were prone to think. Comparatively little of Scripture consists of systematic theological exposition; most of it is of a different order. Broadly speaking, the Bible is an interpretative record of sacred history. It reports God's words to Israel, and His dealings with them, down the ages. It includes biographies, meditations, prayers and praises, which show us how faith and unbelief, obedience and disobedience, temptation and conflict, work out in practice in human lives. It contains much imaginative matter—poetical, rhetorical, parabolic, visionary—which sets before our minds in a vivid, concrete and suggestive way great general principles, the formal statement of which has often to be sought in other contexts. In fact, Scripture is an organism, a complex, self-interpreting whole, its theology showing the meaning of the events and experiences which it records, and the events and experiences showing the outworking of the theology in actual life. All these items have their place in the total system of biblical truth.
It should be clear, therefore, that when we assert that what Scripture contains is a body of truths, embracing both matters of fact and general principles about God and man, and that these truths together constitute His Word, we are not prejudging the literary character of Scripture as a whole, or of any part of it. There is nothing in this position to cramp one's exegetical style, as some of the critics of Evangelicalism seem to fear. We do not suggest that every passage should be treated according to the same prearranged formula (as the Mediævals did by putting all texts through the same allegorical mincing-machine), but rather the very opposite—that we must recognize the complexity of Scripture, and do full justice to all the varied types of literary material which Scripture contains.
d. Infallibility and Inerrancy
Evangelicals are accustomed to speak of the Word of God as infallible and inerrant. The former term has a long pedigree; among the Reformers, Cranmer and Jewel spoke of God's Word as infallible,1 and the Westminster Confession of 'the infallible truth' of Holy Scripture.2 The latter, however, seems not to have been regularly used in this connection before the nineteenth century. Both have been so variously employed in theological discussion that they now bear no precise meaning at all. Terms which one cannot safely use without first stating what one does not mean by them are of little practical worth, and it might be argued that they, like the word 'fundamentalist', would be better dropped. Certainly, they are not essential for stating the evangelical view. If, however, they are construed in the sense intended by those who first applied them to Scripture, they express an important aspect of the approach to Scripture which we are outlining. For this reason, and because they have been misunderstood and misused in the present controversy, we shall briefly discuss them here.
'Infallible' denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading, and so means 'wholly trustworthy and reliable'; 'inerrant' means 'wholly true'. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God 'who cannot lie',3 whose word, once spoken, abides for ever,4 and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly. This is just the conviction about Scripture which our Lord was expressing when He said : 'The scripture cannot be broken', and 'it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail'.5 God's Word is affirmed to be infallible because God Himself is infallible; the infallibility of Scripture is simply the infallibility of God speaking. What Scripture says is to be received as the infallible Word of the infallible God, and to assert biblical inerrancy and infallibility is just to confess faith in (i) the divine origin of the Bible and (ii) the truthfulness and trustworthiness of God. The value of these terms is that they conserve the principle of biblical authority; for statements that are not absolutely true and reliable could not be absolutely authoritative.
The infallibility and inerrancy of biblical teaching does not, however, guarantee the infallibility and inerrancy of any interpretation, or interpreter, of that teaching; nor does the recognition of its qualities as the Word of God in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert. This can be determined only by careful Bible study. We must allow Scripture itself to define for us the scope and limits of its teaching. Too often the infallibility which belongs to the Word of God has been claimed for interpretations of Scripture which are, to say the least, uncertain and which make Scripture pronounce on subjects about which it does not itself claim to teach anything. The Bible is not an inspired 'Enquire Within Upon Everything'; it does not profess to give information about all branches of human knowledge in the way that Bradshaw professes to give information about all branches of British Railways. It claims in the broadest terms to teach all things necessary to salvation,1 but it nowhere claims to give instruction in (for instance) any of the natural sciences, or in Greek and Hebrew grammar, and it would be an improper use of Scripture to treat it as making pronouncements on these matters.
We must draw a distinction between the subjects about which Scripture speaks and the terms in which it speaks of them. The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, any more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages. They do not claim to teach either science or grammar.1 Sometimes their grammar lapses; often the mental picture of the created order which their phraseology suggests to the twentieth-century mind differs from that of modern science;2 but these facts do not bear on the inerrancy of the divine Word which the writers' conceptual and linguistic resources were being used to convey. This distinction between the content and the form of the written Word of God needs more discussion than we can give it here, but it seems clear enough in broad outline, although admittedly it is not always easily applied in particular cases. The question which the interpreter mustconstantly ask is : what is being asserted in this passage? The more poetic, imaginative and symbolic the form in which the truth is presented, and the further the truth transcends our present experience and comprehension (as when Scripture tells us of life before the Fall, or in heaven), the harder it is to answer that question with exact precision. But the few passages in which it seems impossible to determine the limits of the symbolism with any finality (such as Gn. ii and iii, or Rev. xxi and xxii) are not typical of the Bible as a whole. In most passages, the use of the ordinary rules of exegesis enables us to determine accurately enough the limits of the intended assertions, and to distinguish them from linguistic forms which are simply vehicles for their communication and could be changed without altering their meaning.
F.—7
This is just to say that the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture are relative to the intended scope of the Word of God. Scripture provides instruction that is true and trustworthy, not on every conceivable subject, but simply on those subjects with which it claims to deal. We must allow Scripture itself to tell us what these are. The concepts of inerrancy and infallibility express one aspect of the conviction that the teaching of Scripture is the authoritative teaching of God, and call attention to the fact that it is always a wrong approach to treat anything that Scripture actually says as untrue or unreliable. But they are not hermeneutical concepts, and carry no implications as to the character or range of biblical teaching. Those matters can be settled only by honest and painstaking exegesis.
Dr. Hebert misunderstands the position of Evangelicals here. The 'rigid theory of the factual inerrancy of the Bible'1 which he attributes to them involves, he supposes, not merely the recognition of its teaching as the Word of a truth-speaking God, but also the imposition upon it of a literalistic mode of interpretation which refuses to take account of the symbolic element in the telling of (for instance) the story of Adam and Eve. The concept of inerrancy, as he sees it, is thus an untheological concept, and one which expresses an essentially untheological interest in vindicating the factual truthfulness of the Bible. This interest, he suggests, results from living in the twentieth century, and hence from being 'unconsciously dominated by the materialistic, intellectualistic view of truth which comes so readily to us in a scientific age'. It is because of this conditioning 'that it seems so plausible to think that if the Bible is true, it must be literally and factually true'. Hebert considers that 'a style of thinking which is alien to the Bible is being imposed forcibly upon it' by modern Evangelicals, and that their preoccupation with factuality inevitably leads to rather wooden and unedifying exposition of the text; he quotes the New Bible Commentary1 as an example of this.2 On this line of argument, we would make the following comments :
1. The idea that the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Word of God commits its adherents to a literalistic type of exegesis is wholly groundless. There is nothing inconsistent in recognizing that real events may be recorded in a highly symbolic manner, and Evangelicals do in fact recognize this. Dr. Hebert has evidently forgotten the passage which he himself quoted from the I.V.F. New Bible Handbook in which the use of symbolic modes of representation in the story of Adam and Eve is explicitly acknowledged.3
2. The evangelical insistence on the factuality of what Scripture presents as fact is neither new nor untheological. It goes back to the Reformation, when the allegorical method of exposition was abandoned in favour of the sounder principle that Scripture must be taken in its literal4 sense. The way in which some have voiced and defended this conviction in recent years may reflect the influence of the modern scientific outlook; but the conviction itself derives, not from modern science, but from the Bible's own claim that what it tells is the truth, no less when it reports historical facts than when it states theological principles. Dr. Hebert confesses it to be his faith (though he gives no satisfying proof) that Scripture errs in matters both of fact and of doctrine;1 but he did not learn this faith from Christ and the apostles, who, as we saw, uniformly treated Scripture statements in both these categories as truths from God. The authority of Christ requires us to receive as God's Word all that the Bible asserts. No other attitude to biblical assertions is theologically warrantable; the untheological approach in this case is Hebert's own.
Maintaining the evangelical view of Scripture has always involved controversy, and the changing demands of controversy have naturally led to changes of emphasis in stating it. At the time of the Reformation, all the emphasis was laid on the truth of biblical doctrine, for it was only this that the then opponents of Evangelicalism—the church of Rome and the Socinian rationalists—would not face. For the past century, however, there has been as much need to insist on the truth of biblical testimony on matters of historical fact as on matters of theology, for liberal Protestants have regularly denied both. However, this increased emphasis on the factual truthfulness of the Word of God, to which Dr. Hebert calls attention, is not due to the materialistic influence of modern science, but to the characteristic form of modern heresy. So far from indicating a different approach to the Bible from that of the Reformers, as some suppose, it bears witness to an interest in maintaining the authority of the Bible which is identical with theirs.
3. While passing no judgment on modern evangelical standards of biblical exposition, we do not doubt that the approach to Scripture which we are outlining is far more likely to edify the Church than any modern version of the thesis that the written Word of God is true although it is false; that the teaching of Scripture is only roughly right, and that, though we ought to believe what we suppose the Bible means, we cannot believe all that it actually says. Only highly sophisticated persons could stomach such an approach in any case; but in this case it is simply a wrong approach. Perhaps, after all, the words 'inerrancy' and 'infallibility' have not yet outlived their usefulness as signposts to point to this fact.
III. THE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE1
We now come to the third part of this chapter, in which our aim will be to outline the biblical approach to biblical interpretation.
Scripture, as we have seen, is a many-sided interpretative record of an intricate cross-section of world history. The Word of God is an exceedingly complex unity. The different items and the various kinds of material which make it up—laws, promises, liturgies, genealogies, arguments, narratives, meditations, visions, aphorisms, homilies, parables and the rest—do not stand in Scripture as isolated fragments, but as parts of a whole. The exposition of them, therefore, involves exhibiting them in right relation both to the whole and to each other. God's Word is not presented in Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, and, indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it—grasp it, that is, as a whole. Every text has its immediate context in the passage from which it comes, its broader context in the book to which it belongs, and its ultimate context in the Bible as a whole; and it needs to be rightly related to each of these contexts if its character, scope and significance is to be adequately understood.
An analogy may help here. A versatile writer with didactic intent, like Charles Williams or G. K. Chesterton, may express his thought in a variety of literary forms—poems, plays, novels, essays, critical and historical studies, as well as formal topical treatises. In such a case, it would be absurd to think any random sentence from one of his works could safely be taken as expressing his whole mind on the subject with which it deals. The point of each sentence can be grasped only when one sees it in the context, both of the particular piece of work from which it comes, and of the writer's whole output. If we would understand the parts, our wisest course is to get to know the whole—or, at any rate, those parts of the whole which tell us in plain prose the writer's central ideas. These give us the key to all his work. Once we can see the main outlines of his thought and have grasped his general point of view, we are able to see the meaning of everything else—the point of his poems and the moral of his stories, and how the puzzling passages fit in with the rest. We may find that his message has a consistency hitherto unsuspected, and that elements in his thought which seemed contradictory are not really so at all. The task of interpreting the mind of God as expressed in His written Word is of the same order as this, and must be tackled in the same way. The beginner in Bible study often feels lost; he cannot at first grasp the Bible's over-all point of view, and so does not see the wood for trees. As his understanding increases, however, he becomes more able to discern the unity of the biblical message, and to see the place of each part in the whole.
a. Interpreting Scripture Literally
Scripture yields two basic principles for its own interpretation. The first is that the proper, natural sense of each passage (i.e., the intended sense of the writer) is to be taken as fundamental; the meaning of texts in their own contexts, and for their original readers, is the necessary starting-point for enquiry into their wider significance. In other words, Scripture statements must be interpreted in the light of the rules of grammar and discourse on the one hand, and of their own place in history on the other. This is what we should expect in the nature of the case, seeing that the biblical books originated as occasional documents addressed to contemporary audiences; and it is exemplified in the New Testament exposition of the Old, from which the fanciful allegorizing practised by Philo and the Rabbis is strikingly absent. This is the much-misunderstood principle of interpreting Scripture literally. A glance at its history will be the quickest way of clearing up the confusion.
The Mediæval exegetes, following Origen, regarded the 'literal' sense of Scripture as unimportant and unedifying. They attributed to each biblical statement three further senses, or levels of meaning, each of which was in a broad sense allegorical: the 'moral' or 'tropological' (from which one learned rules of conduct), the 'allegorical' proper (from which one learned articles of faith), and the anagogical' (from which one learned of the invisible realities of heaven). Thus, it was held that the term 'Jerusalem' in Scripture, while denoting 'literally' a city in Palestine, also referred 'morally' to civil society, 'allegorically' to the Church, and 'anagogically' to heaven, every time that it occurred. Only the three allegorical senses, the Mediævals held, were worth a theologian's study; the literal record had no value save as a vehicle of figurative meaning. Mediæval exegesis was thus exclusively mystical, not historical at all; biblical facts were made simply a jumping-off ground for theological fancies, and thus spiritualized away. Against this the Reformers protested, insisting that the literal, or intended, sense of Scripture was the sole guide to God's meaning. They were at pains to point out, however, that 'literalism' of this sort, so far from precluding the recognition of figures of speech where Scripture employs them, actually demands it. William Tyndale's statement of their position may be quoted as typical: 'Thou shalt understand, therefore, that the scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense. And that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, whereunto if thou cleave, thou canst never err or go out of the way. And if thou leave the literal sense, thou canst not but go out of the way. Nevertheless, the scripture uses proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do; but that which the proverb, similitude, riddle or allegory signifieth, is ever the literal sense, which thou must seek out diligently.'
Tyndale castigates the Scholastics for misapplying 2 Cor. iii. 6 to support their thesis that 'the literal sense . . . is hurtful, and noisome, and killeth the soul', and only spiritualizing does any good; and he replaces their distinction between the literal and spiritual senses by an equation which reflects Jn. vi. 63 : 'God is a Spirit, and all his words are spiritual. His literal sense is spiritual… if thou have eyes of God to see the right meaning of the text, and whereunto the Scripture pertaineth, and the final end and cause thereof.'1 Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.
This 'literalism' is founded on respect for the biblical forms of speech; it is essentially a protest against the arbitrary imposition of inapplicable literary categories on scriptural statements. It is this 'literalism' that present-day Evangelicals profess. But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical 'literalism' than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was; and this sort of 'literalism' Evangelicals repudiate. It would be better to call such exegesis 'literalistic' rather than 'literal', so as to avoid confusing two very different things.2
The modern outcry against evangelical 'literalism' seems to come from those who want leave to sit loose to biblical categories and treat the biblical records of certain events as myths, or parables—non-factual symbols of spiritual states and experiences. Many would view the story of the fall, for instance, merely as a picture of the present sinful condition of each man, and that of the virgin birth as merely expressing the thought of Christ's superhuman character. Such ideas are attempts to cut the knot tied by the modern critical denial that these events really happened, and to find a way of saying that, though the stories are literally' false, yet they remain 'spiritually' true and valuable. Those who take this line upbraid Evangelicals for being insensitive to the presence of symbolism in Scripture. But this is not the issue. There is a world of difference between recognizing that a real event (the fall, say) may be symbolically portrayed, as Evangelicals do, and arguing, as these persons do, that because the fall is symbolically portrayed, it need not be regarded as a real event at all, but is merely a picture of something else. In opposing such inferences, Evangelicals are contending, not for a literalistic view, but for the very principles of biblical literalism which we have already stated—that we must respect the literary categories of Scripture, and take seriously the historical character of the Bible story. We may not turn narratives which clearly purport to record actual events into mere symbols of human experience at our will; still less may we do so (as has been done) in the name of biblical theology! We must allow Scripture to tell us its own literary character, and be willing to receive it as what it claims to be.
It may be thought that the historic Protestant use of the word 'literal' which we have here been concerned to explain is so unnatural on modern lips, and that such a weight of misleading association now attaches to the term, that it would be wisest to drop it altogether. We argued earlier that the word 'fundamentalist' should be dropped, as having become a barrier to mutual understanding, and the case may well be the same here. We do not contend for words. We are not bound to cling to 'literal' as part of our theological vocabulary; it is not itself a biblical term, and we can state evangelical principles of interpretation without recourse to it (as, indeed, we did in the opening sentences of this section);1 and perhaps it is better that we should. If we do abandon the word, however, we must not abandon the principle which it enshrines : namely, that Scripture is to be interpreted in its natural, intended sense, and theological predilections must not be allowed to divert us from loyalty to what the text actually asserts.
b. Interpreting Scripture by Scripture
The second basic principle of interpretation is that Scripture must interpret Scripture; the scope and significance of one passage is to be brought out by relating it to others. Our Lord gave an example of this when he used Gn. ii. 24 to show that Moses' law of divorce was no more than a temporary concession to human hard-heartedness.1 The Reformers termed this principle the analogy of Scripture; the Westminster Confession states it thus : 'The infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.2 This is so in the nature of the case, since the various inspired books are dealing with complementary aspects of the same subject. The rule means that we must give ourselves in Bible study to following out the unities, cross-references and topical links which Scripture provides. Kings and Chronicles throw light on each other; so do the prophets and the history books of the Old Testament; so do the Synoptic Gospels and John; so do the four Gospels and the Epistles; so, indeed, do the Old Testament as a whole and the New. And there is one book in the New Testament which links up with almost everything that the Bible contains : that is the Epistle to the Romans, of which Calvin justly wrote in the Epistle prefacing his commentary on it: 'If a man understands it, he has a sure road opened for him to the understanding of the whole Scripture.' In Romans, Paul brings together and sets out in systematic relation all the great themes of the Bible—sin, law, judgment, faith, works, grace, justification, sanctification, election, the plan of salvation, the work of Christ, the work of the Spirit, the Christian hope, the nature and life of the Church, the place of Jew and Gentile in the purposes of God, the philosophy of Church and of world history, the meaning and message of the Old Testament, the duties of Christian citizenship, the principles of personal piety and ethics. From the vantage-point given by Romans, the whole landscape of the Bible is open to view, and the broad relation of the parts to the whole becomes plain. The study of Romans is the fittest starting-point for biblical interpretation and theology.
c. Problems and Difficulties
The scientific study of Scripture is a complicated and exacting task. The biblical languages have their own distinctive idioms and thought-forms. Each writer has his own habits of mind, vocabulary, outlook and interests. Each book has its own character, and is written according to stylistic conventions which it is not always easy to see. Each book has its own historical and theological background, and must be interpreted against that background; thus, we should not look in the Old Testament for clear statements about the Trinity, or the believer's hope of a future life, for these things were not fully revealed till Christ came. All these factors must be borne in mind, or we shall misinterpret Scripture.
This does not mean that only trained scholars can study the Bible to any profit. Its central message is so plainly stated in the text that the most unlearned of those who have ears to hear and eyes to see can understand it. 'The unfolding of thy words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.'1 The technicalities of scholarship may be out of the ordinary Bible-reader's reach, but none the less he can, with God's blessing, grasp all the main truths of God's message. 'Those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.' 2 It is only over secondary matters that problems arise. Here, however, ignorance of the background of biblical statements and allusions, coupled (no doubt) with failure to enter adequately into the writers' minds,1 leave us on occasion in doubt as to what texts mean, and how they fit in with other texts and with the rest of the Word of God. But these uncertainties affect only the outer fringes of the biblical revelation. And in fact, this class of problem steadily yields to patient study as our knowledge grows. As in all scientific enquiry, however, the solution of one problem raises another and we have no reason to expect that all the problems that crop up in biblical exposition will ever be completely solved in this world.
An idea that persistently haunts some people is that the presence in Scripture of passages which are hard to harmonize is an argument against regarding it as God's Word written in the sense we have explained, and that one is not entitled so to regard it until one has first reconciled all the seeming discrepancies to one's own satisfaction. If this were right, every apparent contradiction would be a valid reason for doubting the truth of the biblical doctrine of Scripture. But the idea rests on a confusion. Christians are bound to receive the Bible as God's Word written on the authority of Christ, not because they can prove it such by independent enquiry, but because as disciples they trust their divine Teacher. We have pointed out already that no article of Christian faith admits of full rational demonstration as, say, geometrical theorems do; all the great biblical doctrines—the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the work of the Spirit in man, the resurrection of the body and the renewal of the creation—are partly mysterious, and raise problems for our minds that are at present insoluble. The doctrine of Scripture is no exception to this rule. But that should not daunt, nor even surprise us; for it is the very nature of Christian faith to believe, on the authority of God, truths which may neither be rationally demonstrated nor exhaustively understood. We must remember that God does not tell us everything about His acts and purposes, nor put us in a position to work them all out for ourselves. We shall not reach right views about the things of God by backing our independent judgment, but only by taking His word. We are wholly dependent on Him for our knowledge of His ways.
God, then, does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to know as a basis for our life of faith. And He leaves unsolved some of the problems raised by what He tells us, in order to teach us a humble trust in His veracity. The question, therefore, that we must ask ourselves when faced with these puzzles is not, is it reasonable to imagine that this is so? but, is it reasonable to accept God's assurance that this is so? Is it reasonable to take God's word and believe that He has spoken the truth, even though I cannot fully comprehend what He has said? The question carries its own answer. We should not abandon faith in anything that God has taught us merely because we cannot solve all the problems which it raises. Our own intellectual competence is not the test and measure of divine truth. It is not for us to stop believing because we lack understanding, or to postpone believing till we can get understanding, but to believe in order that we may understand; as Augustine said, 'unless you believe, you will not understand.' Faith first, sight afterwards, is God's order, not vice versa; and the proof of the sincerity of our faith is our willingness to have it so. Therefore, just as we should not hesitate to commit ourselves to faith in the Trinity although we do not know how one God can be three Persons, nor to faith in the incarnation, although we do not know how the divine and human natures combined in the Person of Christ, so we should not hesitate to commit ourselves to faith in Scripture as the infallible Word of the infallible God, even though we cannot solve all the puzzles, nor reconcile all the apparent contradictions, with which in our present state of knowledge it confronts us. On all these articles of faith we have God's positive assurance; and that should be enough.
Accordingly, our methods of interpreting Scripture must be such as express faith in its truth and consistency as God's Word. Our approach must be harmonistic; for we know at the outset that God's utterance is not self-contradictory. Article XX of the Church of England lays down that it is not lawful for the Church so to 'expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another'; no more is it lawful for any individual exegete. Not that we should adopt strained and artificial expedients for harmonizing; this will neither glorify God nor edify us. What we cannot harmonize by a natural and plausible hypothesis is best left unharmonized, with a frank admission that in our present state of knowledge we do not see how these apparent discrepancies should be resolved. We may not, with the heretic Marcion and some modern Liberals, 'criticize the Bible by the Bible', singling out some parts of Scripture as the authentic Word of God and denying the divine character of the rest because it seems to say something different from the parts approved; instead, we should confess the divine origin of all the Scriptures, and be guided in interpreting them by Augustine's axiom: 'I do not doubt that their authors therein made no mistake and set forth nothing that might mislead. If in one of these books I stumble across something which seems opposed to the truth, I have no hesitation in saying that either my copy is faulty, or the translator has not fully grasped what was said' (Augustine read Scripture in Latin), 'or else I myself have not fully understood.'1 We must base our study of Scripture on the assumption that governed the New Testament men in their study of the Old—that God's revealed truth is a consistent unity, and any disharmony between part and part is only apparent, not real.
d. The Holy Spirit as Interpreter
One final point concerning interpretation remains to be made. Scripture tells us that if we are to understand Scripture we need, over and above right rules, personal insight into spiritual things. Scripture sets before us spiritual truths—truths, that is, about God, and about created things in relation to God; and to grasp spiritual truths requires spiritual receptiveness. But no man has this by nature. 'The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : for they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.'1 The habit of mind which enslaves the natural man, Paul tells us, is to set up his own 'wisdom' and make it ultimate, and so he is compelled to dismiss as foolishness all that does not accord with it. Without spiritual enlightenment, he will never be able to see the foolishness of his own wisdom, nor the wisdom of the 'foolishness of God'2 proclaimed in the gospel; hence he will never forsake the one for the other. Our Lord confirms this view of man. His repeated diagnosis of the unbelieving Pharisees was that they were blind, lacking the capacity to perceive spiritual realities;3 and He regarded spiritual perception, where He found it, as a supernatural gift from God.4
Now, the Holy Spirit has been sent to the Church as its Teacher, to guide Christians into truth, to make them wise unto salvation, to testify to them of Christ and to glorify Him thereby.5 To the apostles, He came to remind them of Christ's teaching, to show them its meaning, to add further revelation to it, and so to equip them to witness to all about their Lord.6 To other men, He comes to make them partakers of the apostolic faith through the apostolic word. Paul indicates the permanent relation between the Spirit, the apostles' word and the rest of the Church in 1 Cor. ii. 10–16. The Spirit, he says, gave the apostles understanding of the gospel : 'we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God'; 'God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit,' Now the Spirit inspires and empowers their proclamation of these things to other men : 'which things we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth'; Paul preaches, and knows that he preaches, 'in demonstration of the Spirit and of power'.7 And 'he that is spiritual'—he in whom the Spirit abides to give understanding—discerns the meaning of the message and receives it as the testimony of God. This applies no less to the apostolic word written than to the apostolic word preached; and no more to the apostolic writings than to the rest of the written Word of God. The Spirit, who was its author, is also its interpreter, and such understanding of it as men gain is His gift.
Not that the Spirit's presence in men's hearts makes patient study of the text unnecessary. The Spirit is not given to make Bible study needless, but to make it effective. Nor can anything in Scripture mean anything when the Spirit interprets. The Spirit is not the prompter of fanciful spiritualizing, or of applications of texts out of their contexts on the basis of accidental associations of words. The only meaning to which He bears witness is that which each text actually has in the organism of Scripture; such witness as is borne to other meanings is borne by other spirits. But without the Spirit's help there can be no grasp of the message of Scripture, no conviction of the truth of Scripture, and no faith in the God of Scripture. Without the Spirit, nothing is possible but spiritual blindness and unbelief.
It follows that the Christian must approach the study of Scripture in humble dependence on the Holy Spirit, sure that he can learn from it nothing of spiritual significance unless he is taught of God. Confidence in one's own powers of discernment is an effective barrier to spiritual understanding. The self-confidence of nineteenth-century critical scholarship was reflected in its slogan that the Bible must be read like any other book; but the Bible is more than a merely human book, and understanding it involves more than appreciating its merely human characteristics. God's book does not yield up its secrets to those who will not be taught of the Spirit. Our God-given textbook is a closed book till our God-given Teacher opens it to us.
A century of criticism has certainly thrown some light on the human side of the Bible—its style, language, composition, history and culture; but whether it has brought the Church a better understanding of its divine message than Evangelicals of two, three and four hundred years ago possessed is more than doubtful. It is not at all clear that we today comprehend the plan of salvation, the doctrines of sin, election, atonement, justification, new birth and sanctification, the life of faith, the duties of churchmanship and the meaning of Church history, more clearly than did the Reformers, or the Puritans, or the leaders of the eighteenth-century revival. When it is claimed that modern criticism has greatly advanced our understanding of the Bible, the reply must be that it depends upon what is meant by the Bible; criticism has thrown much light on the human features of Scripture, but it has not greatly furthered our knowledge of the Word of God. Indeed, it seems truer to say that its effect to date has been rather to foster ignorance of the Word of God; for by concentrating on the human side of Scripture it has blurred the Church's awareness of the divine character of scriptural teaching, and by questioning biblical statements in the name of scholarship it has shaken confidence in the value of personal Bible study. Hence, just as the Mediævals tended to equate Church tradition with the Word of God, so modern Protestants tend to equate the words of scholars with the Word of God. We have fallen into the habit of accepting their pronouncements at second hand without invoking the Spirit's help to search Scripture and see, not merely whether what they say is so (in so far as the lay Bible student is qualified to judge this), but also—often more important—whether God's Word does not deal with more than the limited number of topics with which scholars at any one time are concerned. The result of this negligence is widespread ignorance among Churchmen as to what Scripture actually says. So it always is when the Church forgets how to search the Scriptures acknowledging its own blindness and looking to God's Spirit to teach it God's truth. There is no more urgent need today than that the Church should humble itself to learn this lesson once more.
We have now presented in positive outline the biblical approach to Scripture. Its text is word for word God-given; its message is an organic unity, the infallible Word of an infallible God, a web of revealed truths centred upon Christ; it must be interpreted in its natural sense, on the assumption of its inner harmony; and its meaning can be grasped only by those who humbly seek and gladly receive the help of the Holy Spirit.
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