For Further Reading
With the psalmist, the people of God proclaim, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" In Psalm 119, the writer gratefully recognizes that God's word guides his steps and shapes his life. Living in and by this word brings delight, elicits love and wonder, and increases wisdom and hope. God's word is a gift whose study brings joy and understanding to the person who is in relationship with the giver.
This word is both light and delight, says the psalmist, for those who wholeheartedly seek God and earnestly desire to perform God's will. Its guidance is available to persons who come to it in a posture of humility and trusting in God's steadfast love. Such a divinely provided resource draws responses of praise, gratitude, and obedience from those who love God.
In the New Testament, we read that the "sacred writings" (2 Tim. 3:15), the "Godbreathed" Scriptures, instruct us "for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" (John 5:39). The Bible bears witness to Jesus; it points readers to him. The stories and signs of Jesus were written down, John's Gospel explains, "so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:30-31).
The Bible is a guide for Christian living because through it we encounter the work and character of the living God that culminates in the story of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and ascension. We see God's purposes for Israel and for the church being worked out. Through direct teaching and through the stories of men and women who have been God's friends, we discover what it means to walk with God. God's qualities of love, righteousness, mercy, holiness, and justice become the basis and model for our decisions and dispositions. Within the pages of Scripture, we learn of Jesus' character and ministry, are invited to follow him, and are called to be like him. We read of the gift of the Holy Spirit, who brings understanding and power for response.
Our Christian moral identity is formed in response to the character and activity of God revealed in the Scriptures, as well as in the church, the world, and our own lives. But most importantly, it is formed in response to the love God has shown us in Christ. The Scriptures live in us as we read them, reflect on them, live with them, and hide them in our hearts. But, in a sense, we also come to live inside the Bible, as its stories become our stories, as they begin to describe reality for us, and as we imagine ourselves present to some of the events we read about. In this way, our character and identity are gradually shaped; our loves, loyalties, preferences, dispositions, and motivations are transformed.
While Christians sometimes think that Scripture guides us primarily through specific rules about what we should and should not do, its more formative impact is related to how it shapes our total selves. This happens over the long term, through our exposure to the Bible in study, Christian liturgy, and prayer. It occurs as we hear sermons and interpret parables and as the Scriptures shape the life of a community of faith. And if we are faithful in the process, God's word "reads" us; it challenges and convicts us, and gradually we are shaped and formed into particular kinds of persons that embody the gospel, the good news. Our way of life becomes "worthy of the gospel of Christ" (Phil. 1:27).
As we read the Scriptures, we also learn to read the world in a distinctive way. The Bible's perspectives on the value of life and the power of human sinfulness help us to interpret events, cultural values, and societal practices. We learn to view persons and situations through a lens shaped by God's word and purposes. As we dwell in the Scriptures, they begin to affect what we care and worry about and whom we notice. But we need a community of faith to do this well; we need sisters and brothers to help us see insights and emphases in the Bible that we would miss on our own, or that we might deliberately avoid.
Finding in Scripture a guide for Christian living requires that we engage in several other related practices. Through regular prayer and dependence on the Holy Spirit, the texts of Scripture come alive and God speaks to our lives. We are formed by Scripture as we study it on our own and in community.
Although Christians often read the Bible quite individualistically, its words were originally addressed to communities. Scripture is so rich that the individual can find treasures within it daily, but its wisdom and truth are most available in the context of a believing community that is historically rooted, presently engaged in God's work in the world, and guided by the Holy Spirit.
The church, both through its tradition and in a local congregation, helps us to deepen our individual understandings of Scripture and to check the accuracy of our personal interpretations and applications. Especially when it is made up of people quite different from ourselves, the church helps us to understand the Bible's narratives and teachings more fully. Because our own experiences and social location affect what we see and pay attention to, believers from other socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds can open our eyes to new insights as well as help us to see our own blind spots.
As Christians grow in faith and discover the increasing significance of the Scriptures for our lives, we rejoice that `All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work" (2 Tim. 3:16-17). We affirm that Scripture is normative or authoritative for our lives and that "whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope" (Rom. 15:4).
Because the Bible is richly multifaceted, how it is normative is a fairly complex question. Scripture speaks to all areas of life, but it does not speak in a single mode. In it we find specific "instruction," but we also find much more. The Bible is made up of wonderful and disturbing stories, poetry and laments, prophecy and parables, commandments, history, proverbs, direct teaching, and apocalyptic visions. While we might be persuaded that these passages are inspired by God, it is not always immediately clear how they might be authoritative or life-giving to us today.
It is not only the diversity of biblical genres that challenges us in seeing portions of the Bible as our guide to Christian living. The texts emerged from, and were originally addressed to, communities of believers whose life situations, social and cultural contexts, and economic and political circumstances were quite different from ours. When we read these ancient texts, we bring our own presuppositions, values, needs, and experiences, shaped not only by the Scriptures but also by the contemporary world. While some of our questions transcend culture and time, others are rooted in assumptions and frameworks quite alien to the biblical writers.
In addition, we bring to the texts our sinfulness. It is difficult to be guided by Scripture when we pick and choose what portions we take seriously, when we exempt our own lives from its scrutiny, or when we soften its demands toward us as we hold others strictly accountable to the letter of the law. In our self-serving sinfulness, we eagerly seek out verses that will legitimate our strongly held opinions, whether or not those opinions were shaped by biblical concerns and commitments.
In fact, our use of the Bible for guidance is sometimes shaped by our own peculiar needs and prejudices. We refer to the parts that we like and quietly ignore sections that are inconvenient or troublesome. When we view Scripture primarily as a law book, we assume that if an issue is not addressed, then the Bible has nothing to say about it. As a result, certain areas of our lives are completely unaffected by the biblical witness. Since the Bible says nothing specific about reproductive technologies, speed limits, or insider trading, we assume that our behavior in those areas is subject to another law, or to none at all.
But if God's purposes are to form us to holiness and that we be conformed to the image of Christ, then every area of our lives comes under God's scrutiny, and God's word provides necessary and relevant guidance. When a topic is not addressed directly, there are often larger principles that can guide us, such as the preciousness of human life, God's concern for the weak, the commandments to love neighbor, stranger, and enemy, or God's concern for truthful speech. In other cases, we can apply biblical texts "analogically"; for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan can be a window for us on how to understand race relations, or ancient Israel's practical responsibility for sojourners can suggest ways a local church might respond to migrant workers in its community.
Scripture guides our Christian living when we handle a particular passage with respect, seeking to understand what the text means in its literary and social context, what the author intended, and what it meant to the original recipients. The Bible is a grace-and truth-filled guide when we are careful that our interpretations and applications are true to the genre in which a text is written. For example, we will be wary of turning narrative accounts into rules or poetry into scientific claims. Commandments and principles that recur throughout the Scriptures provide some of the most fundamental and authoritative structuring for the Christian life.
When we look into God's word for guidance on a particular matter, we sometimes find specific relevant texts. It is rarely the case, however, that such texts are the only way in which Scripture addresses the issue. Individual passages are part of a larger whole, and the guidance process involves bringing a particular text into conversation with the full canon. This helps us to discern whether a particular teaching is central or peripheral, universal or specific to a single occasion.
We need also to examine the ways biblical themes and theological concepts might inform our search for guidance. For example, if we are seeking scriptural wisdom on divorce, Jesus' teaching on the subject is central, but the Bible's many passages on marriage and covenant are crucial as well. In fact, some of our most basic guidance comes through struggling with the implications of central theological themes and concepts in and derived from Scripture - concepts such as creation, love, and justice.
While for the people of God, the teachings of Scripture should never be considered apart from our relationship with God, there are ways in which the Bible's guidelines and commandments have also affected the larger society. In the West, understandings of justice, equality, and civil law have been shaped profoundly by the Bible. Through the Decalogue, in particular, Scripture has provided important boundaries for social life. Although the Bible's impact is less evident today, the adequate functioning of Western institutions continues to depend on observing these boundaries and on persons shaped by basic biblical values and commitments.
In the Bible, God has provided practical wisdom for living, commandments to guard our integrity and well-being, and numerous testimonies to the dangers of unfaithfulness and to the joys of living by the word. But even more, in Scripture God has given us a story to be lived out, owned, and appropriated by all who hunger for the life it promises.
FOR FURTHER READING
Birch, Bruce C., and Larry L. Rasmussen. Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life. Rev ed. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989.
Hays, Richard B. The Moral Vision of the New Testament. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
CHRISTINE D. POHL