Muting the Bible

All Christians, but more especially evangelicals, say that the Bible has the central place. It establishes Christian doctrine, and it provides guidelines for Christian conduct. We feel that is what the reformation was all about. It is a dogma with us that the Bible is THE book.

Why then can J. D. Smart write a book entitled The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church? The very appearance of his book shows quite plainly the possibility of arguing that the Bible’s influence on Christians is less than it used to be, perhaps even nonexistent. This is enough to cause evangelical hackles to rise. We maintain that the Bible is our one authority. We insist that it is not through tradition, not through sanctified human reason, not through another book, but only through the Bible that we are able to discern the authoritative word of God.

Our words are the right ones. But what I want to ask is whether in fact we really let the Bible speak to us.

Sometimes we are so familiar with the words of the Bible that we simply let them flow over us without ever really taking them in. We rejoice in the sound of familiar passages with their well-remembered beauty. In our certainty that we know what they are saying, we do not stop to ask what they mean.

In some Anglican circles it has become fashionable to object to the singing of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55), at evening worship. A long-haired youth explained to me that he saw no reason why the church should go on singing the song of a pregnant woman. Putting aside the not unimportant fact that there seems no reason why a pregnant woman should not compose a song worth singing, we can see that my friend has obviously not thought about the words in question. He was all for revolution, and what could be more revolutionary than this song? “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” He had simply silenced the Bible. He was so sure he knew what it was saying that he no longer listened.

Some of us are like that with our disputes with our fellows. We are so sure of our position on the millennium or on predestination or free will or some other question that the Bible has become little more than a quarry from which we dig out stones to hurl at the foe. It is not simply that we pay insufficient attention to the arguments that might be legitimately used on the other side. Our pet controversy so engrosses us that we do not regard as important those passages of the Bible that do not bear on it. We have silenced the Bible in all areas but that of our interest.

It is not often that evangelicals take shelter behind the walls erected by biblical criticism. But it happens to some of them and it happens to many of our contemporaries. This is a very effective way of silencing the Bible, for whenever we come to any disturbing passage we can be sure that some critic will regard it as authentic. Many people these days go comfortably on their way confident that modern scholarship has shown that the Bible as a whole is unreliable. Once we get that idea firmly into our heads, the Bible might just as well have never been written. We then accept it for those teachings that we accept on other grounds and reject it for all the rest.

I would not like this to be taken as a suggestion that we can safely ignore modern scholarship. There is no virtue in obscurantism. Much modern scholarship has shed a blaze of light on the Bible that enables us to understand it much better. It is all too easy to read this old book as though it were nothing more than another twentieth-century product. The background of the Bible writers is not our background, and what they say must be understood in the way they meant it and not in any other way. Anything the scholar can tell us that will help us in this task is to be welcomed. Unless we see the New Testament writers as first-century men and the children of their own times, we will miss what they are saying.

It is not criticism that we must reject. It is that type of criticism that J. V. Langmead Casserley castigates as “so insipid and unstimulating.” He goes on, “We are confronted with the paradox of a way of studying the word of God out of which no word of God ever seems to come.” This type of scholarship forms yet another way of silencing the Bible. Its impressive array of facts, its show of learning, its dogmatism about the “obscurantism” of all those who refuse to go along with its findings, cannot disguise the fact that it keeps men from hearing the word of God.

Or we may silence the Bible by a love for liturgy. It is not difficult for a liturgist to have a deep and abiding love for the Bible and to be a humble and devout student of Holy Writ. But it is not difficult either for him to develop such a passionate concern for what we can learn from Hippolytus and Sarapion that his attention is concentrated on such ancient worthies and not on the Bible. He may also fancy himself as a practical man and give himself over to the proper running of the services in the modern way for the modern day. He will hear the Bible read, but it will not register only as to its effect on the particular service.

Our practical man may have another way of rendering himself immune to the Bible. He finds these days that there is so much to the running of a successful church that he can concentrate on that. He spends his time grappling with the problems of church management and church finance. He is convinced he is doing a good work, and when the disturbing word from the Bible hits him, as it may now and then, he shrugs it off as belonging in someone else’s department.

Or he may be a church musician. This is quite a convenient escape, for the musician is caught up in holy words and a holy purpose. He is singing to God’s glory. Now not all parts of the Bible can be sung easily, and many of the finest pieces of church music are not biblical pieces. So he can bury himself in his music and flee from the word of God. And the beauty of it is that this particular escape caters to all tastes, from the Bach chorale to the rock mass.

The ways of muting the voice of the Bible these days are legion. But when all is said and done, the Church has never been powerful and never known revival except when it has listened for the word of God and obeyed it.

It may be that the powerlessness of much of the contemporary church is due to the diligent contemporary use of a variety of ways of silencing the Bible. There is not much hope for us until we are ready to cast off our shams and listen to God’s Word for us, however disturbing it may prove to be.

LEON MORRIS

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