The Modern Debate around the Bible

Last Three Parts

In approaching the Bible, the conservative theologian begins with the self-testimony of Scripture. To find out what Scripture is, he sets himself to listen to what Scripture claims to be. In other words, the conservative theologian begins with an act of faith. This is often said to be reasoning in a logical circle, and we do not deny this. But we also maintain that it is inevitable. If the Bible is the Word of God, as it claims to be, then it is simply impossible to appeal to any other authority that stands above Scripture in order to obtain the right view of Scripture. If it is the Word of God, it is itself the highest authority; we can only submit to its claims.

No one in recent years has defended this more cogently than Karl Barth. Although we disagree with his doctrine of Scripture, we cannot but agree with the following statement, which describes his acceptance of this starting point:

What Barth means is that one cannot, by reasoning, work oneself up to this starting point, nor can one, once captivated by the Holy Spirit, get away from this starting point. It is simply a matter of faith, of being convinced by the Holy Spirit. Barth explains it with the following example. If you ask a boy, “Why do you call this woman among all others your mother?,” his only answer is: “Because, of course, she is my mother.” That is the fact upon which he proceeds. In the same way, all our statements about the Bible proceed upon the fact that the Bible is the Word of God. Here God speaks to us.

This, of course, is decisive for one’s whole view of Scripture. One can only begin with listening to what the Bible says about itself.

The Self-Testimony of Scripture

There can be no doubt about this self-testimony of Scripture. Take, for example, the attitude of Jesus and his apostles toward the Old Testament. There is no shadow of a doubt that they accepted it reverently and obediently as the Word of God. There is no trace of the idea that it is only a human document of Israel’s spiritual experiences. No, here God himself speaks. In his discussion with the Pharisees, the appeal to the Old Testament is always final. After his resurrection, his disciples follow his example without any hesitancy. Their writings abound with quotations from the Old Testament, and they always appeal to it as the Word of God. At the same time they make a similar claim for their own preaching. The Apostle Paul, for example, writes to the congregation in Thessalonica: “We also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (1 Thess. 2:13). The Apostle Peter places the epistles of Paul on the same level with the Scriptures of the Old Testament (2 Pet. 3:16).

It is evident that, according to the witness of Scripture itself, the Bible is the Word of God. It is not, as Barth and his followers suggest, only a human document that can become the Word of God, when and where it pleases God. There is identity, direct identity, between God’s Word and the Bible. Or to put it in another way: The Bible not only contains God’s revelation; it is God’s revelation to us.

God’s Self-Revelation in Christ

The words “in Christ” must immediately be added to the last statement. God’s revelation in the Scriptures is not just a revelation of all kinds of interesting facts about the world beyond this world and the life after death; it is primarily self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. There is also information about other subjects—about heaven and hell, about this world and man in this world. Yet the real heart of the biblical revelation is that God makes himself known as the God who in his Son Jesus Christ saves this world from eternal destruction. All other information is subordinate to this central message. One could here apply Jesus’ own words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matt. 6:33).

There is therefore only one way to read the Bible properly: we have to read it as the kerygma, the proclamation of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. This was the way Jesus himself read the Old Testament, as speaking of himself and thus pointing forward to the great redemption (Luke 24:25 ff.; John 5:39). In the same way the New Testament must be read as the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but this time pointing backward, as it were, for now he has come, in the fullness of time (Gal. 4:4). William Tyndale expressed this purpose of the Bible well:

Inspiration

But how can a book clearly written by men at the same time be the revelation of God? The Bible’s own answer is that it is not a purely human document. These men were inspired by the Holy Spirit. There is no need to elaborate on the testimony of the Bible on this point, but let us look at two key texts. In his second epistle, Peter says of the Old Testament prophets that their message did not come “by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (1:21). In his second epistle to his spiritual son, Timothy, the Apostle Paul declares of the whole Old Testament: “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (3:16, 17).

We should note that Paul says pasa graphe, all Scripture, is inspired by God. No part is exempted. Everything in Scripture is inspired, that is, written under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Reformed theology, in its classical expositors, expressed this by use of the term “verbal inspiration.” This term has often been misunderstood. Many think that to believe in verbal inspiration is to believe that the whole Bible was dictated by the Holy Spirit; one can read this again and again in the books of critical scholars. I can only say that this is a misrepresentation, and I do not mind adding that in the case of scholars it is a deliberate misrepresentation. For they really can and should know better. Have not conservative scholars repeatedly said that they do not hold a mechanical dictation view? As long ago as 1893 Warfield stated: “It ought to be unnecessary to protest against the habit of representing the advocates of ‘verbal inspiration’ as teaching that the mode of inspiration was by dictation.”

What do we mean by “verbal inspiration”? We mean that not only the thoughts but the words as well were written under the special guidance of the Holy Spirit. Speaking of the “words,” we do not mean the words in isolation. We definitely do not mean to say that the Holy Spirit, as it were, whispered into the ear of a prophet or an apostle, “Now you have to use the definite article,” or “Now you have to use the conjunction ‘and.’ ” Such a conception would indeed be “mechanical.” But this is definitely not the conservative position. When we say that the “words” were inspired by the Holy Spirit, we think of the words in their context: the single word within the context of the verse, the verse within the context of the passage, the passage within the context of the whole book. Because of this emphasis on the context, I personally prefer to speak of “plenary,” rather than “verbal,” inspiration. Yet I mean the same. I believe on the ground of the Bible’s own self-testimony that the whole Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Everything in it is according to the will and intention of the Spirit. And this will and intention is: to reveal God’s love in Jesus Christ.

All this has very important and far-reaching implications for our doctrine of Scripture. The first is that Scripture has divine authority. This is a very big claim, but it cannot be avoided. If it is true that the Bible is God’s revelation to us, then we have to bow before its message in obedience. At the same time we must add immediately: The Bible has authority as revelation. In fact, this is the only authority it claims. It does not claim authority in astronomy, for example. As Calvin said, he who wants to learn astronomy should go somewhere else. The Bible is not a scientific textbook. This does not mean it has no significance for the sciences. On the contrary, it supplies the basic presuppositions for all sciences. But it does not deal with scientific problems as such.

The other major consequence is that the Bible is trustworthy and reliable, or, as the fathers used to say, infallible. Again we may not shrink back from this conclusion. It is a “good and necessary consequence,” to use the terminology of the Westminster Confession. But again we must immediately add: It is trustworthy and reliable as revelation. It is not correct to use these words in such a general sense as to imply that the Bible possesses a scientific standard of infallibility. Take, for instance, our modern standards of accuracy. These are foreign to the biblical writers. Often they give no more than approximations. Furthermore, they are very schematic in arranging their material. In his genealogy of Christ, Matthew uses the mnemonic device of three times fourteen generations and for that reason leaves out some of the names mentioned in the Old Testament. He and Luke give the temptations of the Lord in a different order. John places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of his Gospel, while the other evangelists mention it as part of the final stage of Christ’s ministry. But all this in no way affects the trustworthiness of the Bible. We can really trust it in all that it wants to reveal.

This, in my opinion, is the only correct starting point for all our thinking and speaking about the Bible, for this is the way the Bible presents itself to us. Often this view is called “bibliolatry.” Again and again we hear people say: “You conservatives believe in a book. That is entirely wrong. You should believe in Christ.” My answer is that this is an absolutely false contrast. Of course, we do not believe in the Bible in the same way we believe in Christ himself. Our relationship to Christ is of a different nature; it is a personal relationship. But we also know that there is only one Christ, namely, the Christ who comes to us in the Bible! In other words, they belong inseparably together.

As conservatives we also recognize that God is not locked up in the Bible. We know that we do not “possess” God or his truth. He is and remains the free and sovereign One, also in his revelation. We know that the Bible does not convert a man; this is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, who brings the message of the Bible home to the man. But as conservatives we maintain that it is the message of the Bible that is brought home by the Holy Spirit. Again we say: The Holy Spirit and the Bible belong inseparably together.

God’s Word in the Words of Men

While fully maintaining the identity between the Bible and the Word of God, we do not deny, of course, that this Word of God comes to us through human words. Perhaps we may say that today we know this better than we ever did before. To a large extent, conservatives owe this clearer insight into the human aspect of the Bible to liberal scholars. For a time, in particular the century after the Reformation, the century of the so-called Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxy, conservatives almost seemed to forget this. Some of the orthodox fathers, though formally recognizing the human aspect of the Bible, defended such a rigid theory of inspiration that in actual fact the human aspect was almost completely ignored. We find this view even in one of the Reformed confessions of that century, the 1675 Helvetic Formula of Consensus. Here we read that “the Hebrew Original of the Old Testament, which we have received and to this day do retain as handed down by the Jewish Church … is, not only in its consonants, but in its vowels—either the vowel points themselves, or at least the power of the points—not only in its matter, but in its words, inspired of God.…” In certain respects, liberalism was an understandable reaction to this attitude.

It is very unfortunate that in reaction to the critical approach to Scripture some conservatives of our day again tend to ignore or to minimize the truly human aspect of the Bible. One finds this in particular in some “fundamentalist,” or ultra-conservative, circles. In these groups we find several mistaken notions about the Bible. Some, for example, identify the Word of God with the King James Version! Quite often one hears these people say: “Everything in the Bible is the Word of God and everything is equally the Word of God.” However well meant such a statement may be, it ignores the organic structure of the Bible. Not everything in the Bible is on the same level, nor is every verse equally central—that is, related to the center of all revelation, Jesus Christ.

Indeed, the Bible, the written Word of God, is at the same time a human book through and through. At this point there is a very close parallel between the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of Scripture. We believe that the Son of God became incarnate. Being truly God, of the same substance with the Father, he really and truly became man. As the Apostle Paul says: “Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:6, 7). Nothing human was alien to him. He shared in all our weaknesses, even in our temptations. There was only one limit: he was sinless. In the same way God’s Word, as it was written down, entered into the “flesh” of human thoughts and words. Again we must say it is really and truly human, and nothing human is alien to it. But here, too, there is one limit: there is no error in it. It does reveal God and his plan of redemption to us, without any distortion or error.

Organic Inspiration

This truly human character of the Bible is also the reason why we reject every mechanical conception of inspiration. Such a conception would be wholly out of keeping with the incarnation, and with God’s ordinary dealings with man. The conservative view of inspiration is not mechanical but rather organic. We believe that the Holy Spirit took into his service men with all their various abilities. This explains the differences in style and language we find in the various books of the Bible. And it also explains the differences in approach. God’s revelation really went into the authors’ minds and hearts and lives and was reproduced with the “colors” of their individual experiences clearly visible in it. In fact, we cannot say beforehand how far the Holy Spirit went in his “accommodation” of the revelation to the level of his organs. We can find this out only by a careful study of Scripture. Calvin once said that in his revelation God acts like a nurse babbling to the baby.

When we study the Scriptures, we do find remarkable things. For instance, God made use of the ancient world picture of those days to express his thoughts to his people. We find this even in the second commandment of the Decalogue: “You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth …” (Ex. 20:4, italics added). And we find “accommodation” also in the historical parts of the Bible. There are the many small differences among the three so-called Synoptic Gospels, and there are greater differences between these three Gospels, on the one hand, and the Gospel of John, on the other. There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer, two of the Sermon on the Mount, and several of the institution of the Lord’s Supper. I do not believe we should try to harmonize them at all cost. They all bring the same message in their own ways, and our task is not to harmonize them but to find out what is the special emphasis of this or that writer.

Furthermore, the Bible writers were definitely children of their own time, and they show it everywhere in their writings. Paul, for example, is a real Jew and clearly shows his rabbinical education in his epistles. We detect it in such things as the way he builds up his argument, the way he argues with his opponents, and the way he quotes the Old Testament. In particular we see it also in his use of Jewish material from the intertestamental period, as when he mentions Jannes and Jambres as the two men who opposed Moses (2 Tim. 3:8), when he writes of the role of the angels in the lawgiving at Sinai (Gal. 3:19; cf. Acts 7:53), and when he speaks of the hierarchy of angels (cf. Eph. 1:21; Col. 2:10, 15).

The same is true of the Old Testament. In fact, we see it even more clearly there, because these books are still further removed from us in time and are even more typically Eastern in their whole structure. The way of writing history in those days was quite different from what we now are used to, and God used this as a medium for his revelation. God wanted to use people of that time in order to speak to people of that time, and this could be done only in a manner that was understandable for both writers and readers.

Problems

From all this foregoing we can draw only one conclusion. The Holy Spirit has used these men with all their peculiarities, both of style and of way of thinking, to reveal himself and his great plan of redemption to his people. I admit that this creates problems for us, some of which we are unable to solve. In some cases we have not studied hard enough, no doubt. But other problems may never be solved, because we do not have enough information for finding a solution.

The fact that there are problems, however, does not mean that our view of Scripture is not basically correct. In fact, in many Christian doctrines we have similar problems that are beyond solution. And in all cases the deepest reason is that we are dealing with the mysteries of God’s ways and works in this world. Here, too, we can point to the parallel with Christology. No one has ever been able to comprehend the mystery of the Incarnation. The Church has spoken of it in the famous dogma of the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451)—two natures, divine and human, united in one divine Person, without division and without admixture—but this dogma was not meant as a “solution” of the mystery. It was only an attempt to describe the mystery by indicating the boundaries beyond which no one is allowed to go. Those who have gone further and claimed to “solve” the mystery have usually lost sight of the mystery itself; all they had left was an empty shell. In the doctrine of Scripture, too, we shall never be able to solve all our problems. Here the mystery of God’s work in and through man will always remain his secret. Yet there can be no doubt that it is his work in and through man. The testimony of Scripture itself at this point is very clear. Every day Scripture proves itself to be the Word of God by its forceful speaking to us. And the fundamental message of Scripture is so clear that even a ten-year-old child can understand it.

Modern Man

The heart of man is full of wrong presuppositions and of rebellion against the God of the Bible, and so the Scriptures may seem quite foreign to him. To say it in Paul’s words: “The unspiritual [or natural] man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). The great miracle is that this same Bible time and again breaks through the rebellion of the natural heart. For it is still the Word of God, which is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).

Where does the Bible stand today? The only correct answer is: It stands where it has always stood. It is still the voice of God, which judges and condemns but also speaks of salvation and redemption. Even these words are misunderstood in our day. Many modern theologians use them to mean something quite different from the biblical meaning. For them, these words are another name for man’s new self-understanding. When they read the parable of the prodigal son, it means virtually that the prodigal arises to return to himself. But in the Bible salvation and redemption refer to what has been done for us in and through Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who “became man for us and for our salvation.”

Those last words are a quotation from the Nicene Creed. I believe with all my heart that this and the other ancient creeds are still fully true. Thanks be to God, they are true. For only then is there real redemption. I believe in the God revealed in the Bible. I believe in God the Father, who is my Creator and Preserver. I believe in Jesus Christ, his Son, who is my redeemer. I believe in the Holy Spirit, who is God with and in me and who shall bring me to the glory prepared for all God’s saints.

Why do I believe these things? For the simple reason stated in a children’s song: “The Bible tells me so!”

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

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