How is the bible to function in the Church? This is one of the urgent questions of our time. The way the Bible works within the Church is another matter than the Church’s confession about the Bible. Whether the Bible functions powerfully in the Church is not decided by a traditional acknowledgment by the Church that the Bible is the Word of God. There is a genuine confession of the Word only where there is biblical action in the life of the Church. We are “doers” of the Word if our “hearing” of the Word is genuine (Jas. 1:22).
The Church has sometimes lived by “excerpts” from the Word and missed a living and constant contact with the Bible. People have relied on memories of passages learned long before and have failed to listen to the Word itself, to listen anew each day to the Word. The result was an inner estrangement from the Scriptures.
People have dealt with the Bible like a student preparing for an examination. A student will make a digest of a book once and then before taking the examination will simply refer to his own digest rather than re-read the book. He leaves the book closed and opens his own notes. This is the way people have sometimes dealt with the Bible. But the Bible will not let itself be used in this manner.
The Book and our listening to it are bound together in holy matrimony. The Bible cannot really be for us what it is in fact unless we close our notes and listen to the Bible. The history of the Church’s relation to the Bible discloses some fascinating facts to support this statement. The Bible’s function within the Church is not a thing to be taken for granted. Confessions about the Bible do not always mean that the Bible is the center of the Church’s attention.
The early days of the Church saw the Christians living out of the Bible. We always recall the believers of Berea, who eagerly accepted the Word and daily searched the Scriptures (Acts 17:11). Much later, especially in the twelfth century, all that changed. The Church of the Middle Ages was not at all sure that it was good for individual believers to be in close contact with the Bible.
One reason for the hesitant and nervous attitude of the Church was its fear that personal contact with Scripture was dangerous. Think of the possibilities of arbitrary and heretical interpretations! One could, it was thought, far more safely leave Bible reading to the Church—that is, to the officials—and then let the Bible come to the people as it was filtered through the teaching office.
We find this attitude reflected in a discussion that took place at the Council of Trent. The issue was the translation of the Bible into the language of the people. Spanish Cardinal Pedro Pacheco argued that such translations were a misuse of the Bible. A people’s Bible, he contended, was the mother and origin of heretics. The historian of the council (H. Jedin) tells us that this argument was supported by the fact that 150 doctors of the Sorbonne had pleaded for a prohibition of translations of the Bible into the vulgar languages.
Another cardinal at the council (Madrusso) indignantly fought this point of view. He contended that no one had the right to withhold the Bible from people in their struggle against the enemies of the spirit. (This, by the way, is Calvin’s contention in his comments on Ephesians 6:17.) Although the Council of Trent did not accept the argument against the people’s Bible, it had many supporters. And the fear of the open Bible lingered in the Church for a long time. We can rightfully speak of an anxiety response stimulated by the sight of the power of the Word in the hand of the Reformers.
Much later, changes set in. In the nineteenth century, there was still a good deal of criticism in the Roman church of Protestant Bible translation and distribution societies. But the twentieth century produced a new insight into the significance of the Bible and its function in the church. Catholic writers began to say that although the church was perhaps justified in its attitude during previous eras, what was necessary in the past may be injurious now. They spoke of an estrangement between the Church and the Bible.
In fact, most recently, Catholic writers have spoken of a reactionary viewpoint of the church that was disastrous for the Bible’s rightful place in the Church. The Catholic New Testament scholar Schelke said that Rome sometimes appears to have forgotten that the Bible was, after all, the Word of God. And he added: “God’s Word, we may be sure, will be able to make itself clear to the listener; it will reveal itself clearly.”
We must say that the intense concern among Catholics for the Bible and for translations of the Bible is a reason for rejoicing. That the Catholic Church has changed its response to the Bible is not due to a lessening of the dangers of arbitrary interpretation. These dangers were present in the early days and are alive today. Personal contact with the Bible is always dangerous.
But we may not take it on ourselves to “protect” the Bible from heretical or arbitrary interpretations. What Paul says in Second Timothy 2:9 about the Word of God not being bound has relevance for the function of the Bible in the Church. We are not allowed to limit the entrance into the Bible to the officials of the Church. The Word has gone out to all men, and it calls us to trust its own efficacy.
The Bible itself warns us against arbitrariness, against the possibility of its being misinterpreted to the reader’s own ruin (2 Pet. 3:16). But this is a warning that the whole Church must heed; it comes to individuals, to the theologians, and to the congregation. The possibility of misuse offers no reason for withholding the Bible from anyone.
If Protestants have no problems on this point, they do have to ask whether the Bible actually does function as the whole Bible among them, genuinely function in the entire life of the people, creating faith and love, service and sanctification, and hope.
This is a critical question that hits us all in times when it is easy to undergo a gradual secularization of our fives. The question has nothing to do with intellectualism or with a worship of the letter of Scripture. But it has much to do with the fact that the Bible is indeed useful for instruction, and for refuting error, “for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind.” (2 Tim. 3:16, NEB).
Woe be to the Church if the Word of God is thinned down to digests and outlines that keep us from the living words of Christ, words that are spirit and fife. That Church is no longer the listening Church. And if the Church no longer really listens to the Word, how can it truly be the Church of the Living Word?
