Why believe the Bible?
Your church probably has a statement of faith affirming (among other things) the total trustworthiness of the Bible, as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct. (If it doesn’t it should!) But why do we affirm this?
After all, not all churches do. Most growing churches do: that is to say, they’re `evangelical`, rather than `liberal`; the ground of what they teach is that the Bible is completely reliable, and our supreme authority.
This confidence makes a huge difference to our lives. In the end, if we want to grow, we must be committed to this certainty that in the Bible God speaks, and therefore we listen.
But why? The answer is bound up with the very nature of our faith. For our God is a God who speaks: whose Word – law, prophecy and gospel — shapes history. The Christian faith is not about people struggling towards God by our own unaided reason; it is about the majestic initiatives of a God of undeserved grace, shining His light into our fallen and distorted thinking, so that we may see and follow.
But in the end our ground for trusting in the Bible comes back to Jesus.
Before we believe in him, we may or may not believe that the Bible is 100% reliable; God reveals his truth to different ones of us in different ways. But let’s take it we have come to the conclusion that Jesus is God, and a God who loves us, wants relationship with us, and speaks. Because of that we give our lives to following him. Then part of that involves following his teaching; and a central part of this is taking on board his view of the Bible.
It may go something like this. We read the gospels; we sense God speaking to us through them. We sense the wisdom, profundity, the sheer glory of what Jesus says – so much that is true, so much that is sublime. And we start to think: if ever a life was lived right, it was this life. Now, we may not be affirming that the gospels are 100% true, yet. But they have to be basically true: written so very close to Jesus’ time, often by eyewitnesses, anyway for people who suffered and died for their faith in unpleasant ways (as did their families) and would have wanted to ensure that the gospels were true or at least very close to what Jesus really taught. But as we do that, something starts to nag away at us: he’s unlike any other religious leader, he claims to be sinless, and God, and the only way to God, over and over again. And as the Holy Spirit speaks to us we come to the point where we realise the Jesus who claims to be God and sinless and the only way to God either is a maniac, or a colossal liar, or is what he says; and we find that we cannot stake our lives on Jesus being a liar, or a lunatic; and we take a deep breath and say, So he is God; so You are God; so what now?
Let’s notice that this doesn’t depend on our believing in the historical reliability of Genesis, say, or Joshua. It doesn’t even depend on our trusting the gospels absolutely 100% – yet. But: once we do give ourselves to be Jesus’ disciples: what does following God mean for my Lord Christ? Where does my Lord Christ say God speaks? And we start to read the gospels and see Jesus saying that the scriptures cannot be broken, they’re 100% reliable. Messiah, God come to earth, he is unafraid to challenge anything in human religion, even things that were considered unchallengeable (throughout the sermon on the mount, for example; or rewriting the sabbath regulations; or blasting the Jewish religious authorities). But there is one thing he never challenges: he emphasizes (if the gospels can be trusted at all!) the reliability and final authority of the Scriptures, unflinchingly.
Over and over again, faced with Pharisaic traditionalism, or Sadducee anti-supernaturalism, we find his response is continually, ‘Have you not read…?’ [we could cite Matt 12:3,5, 19:4, 21:16,42; Mk 12:26]. He sets God’s Word authoritatively against human religious tradition, even that of the chosen people (Mk 7:6-13). (As John Stott has observed, Jesus was clearly unafraid to be a controversialist!) He challenges the rebellious Jewish theologians, ‘Are you not in error because you do not know the scriptures?’ (Mk 12:24). So even if we are still at the point of thinking that one or two of these verses could be non-historical, his overall approach is very clear: Jesus challenges everything else, but not the Scriptures. They are his authority; to him they are 100% reliable. Watch our Master; they must hold the same place for us too.
Dig a bit deeper. Ethics: the old testament law contains, for Jesus, no mistakes. `Until the heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter… will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished’, he says in the sermon on the mount; `Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt 5:18-19).
Biblical prophecy is likewise, for Christ, God’s utterly trustworthy Word, the fulfilment of which governed the future, even his own – evidently with no capacity for error. Continually he shows how his life, death and resurrection are in total conformity with old testament prophecy. [We could cite Matthew 26:24; Mark 12:9-12; Luke 4:18-21; 18:31-34; 22:37; 24:25-27, 44-47.] For him, Bible prophecies are not part of some bygone culture that might be mistaken, or a minor accommodation to His surroundings; rather, the dependability of the old testament is basic to his whole self-understanding. In Gethsemane he reminds Peter that twelve legions of angels were available for his deliverance, ‘but how then would the scriptures be fulfilled?’ (Matt 26:54). The biblical prophecy has no capacity for error; he is God come to earth, and it determines what he does. It’s 100% reliable.
A God Who Really Does Things
Then, our obedience to Christ likewise means we follow Him into a very robust commitment to the reliability of biblical history. Indeed, his teaching frequently – deliberately?!- builds on those very sections that would make later, theologically liberal, academics squirm with embarrassment! ‘As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of man’, he says (Matt 24:37); the one is as historical as the other. Sodom, which might conceivably have ‘remained until this day’, will be judged alongside first-century Capernaum, and it ‘will be` more bearable for Sodom (Matt 11:23-34). Jonah’s audience `will stand up` with the current religious gurus of the Pharisees and condemn them (Matt 12:41). Clearly these statements can’t be equated with something mythical like `Father Christmas will stand up at the judgment’, or ‘It shall be more tolerable for Camelot’ (the fabled city of British legend), or ‘As were the days of Frodo the hobbit, so will be the coming of the Son of Man’!- Christ is treating them as real history. In Matthew 23:35 Christ speaks of a series of deeds that will bring retribution on ‘this generation’ (which surely implies historical reality!), and they begin with Abel, from Genesis 4. Matthew 19:4ff is particularly interesting, because there Christ cites a comment by the narrator of Genesis as an utterance of God Himself. Our Lord clearly views biblical history as real history.
It must be so. The Bible is not a book of hellenistic abstractions: it is about God acting in historical reality. Unlike, say, Hinduism, our faith is about history, and inseparable from it. The good news is that Christ has historically died and risen again, as prophesied in the scriptures, says Paul, and if Christ be not risen, as a matter of historical fact, ‘your faith is futile’ (1 Cor 15:3,4,17). The apostle Peter certainly knew the difference between history and myth, and wanted his readers to be sure that his account of the Mount of Transfiguration was the one and not the other (2 Peter 1:16).
God’s acts are real. So we need never get embarrassed by Bible narratives where He works miracles. On the topic of how God works, our culturally-determined ideas must surely be corrected by God’s self-revelation! (In passing, is this not the question even with Jonah? Is God really the kind of God who breaks into history, “preparing” a fish, orchestrating events, for the sake of a prophet’s education? — a God who values natural laws less than our spiritual maturity? Or is the ‘problem with Jonah’ that we have been brainwashed into preferring a distant God, a safely predictable God, not a God who interrupts historical and natural processes with such glorious and majestic abandon?)
Occasionally it is suggested that biblical history is only trustworthy when ‘directly concerned with salvation’. Sometimes this means that biblical history need only be affirmed when the plan of salvation would collapse without it: but that can result in the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection being the only pieces of biblical history that are seen as guaranteed! The authority of the remainder is eroded: we can never know if the passage we are studying was ‘the one that got away’. And so the Bible is turned into a ragbag of travellers’ tales. We cannot expect Christians taught in this way to spend time grappling with what God is saying through, say, Judges. And so we are impoverished: and robbed of that vital sense of the God who does things.
But if we affirm biblical history to be trustworthy whenever it is concerned with God’s saving purposes, what sections could we confidently discard? With any great literature, it is only when we understand the book as a whole that all the individual sections reveal their full significance. If the writer is good enough, we dig into all the odd corners to find their place: not unless we are convinced that we have mastered all a book has to offer do we dismiss any of it as dispensable or merely circumstantial. So with Scripture: the more we (prayerfully) study its obscurer sections, the more we find them revealing God’s saving purposes to us, and the more it seems that ‘all Scripture’ is indeed ‘profitable for teaching’ (2 Tim 3:16). Which means we cannot go salvaging some parts and discarding others.
In fact the New Testament writers often base their arguments on the details of Old Testament history. In Galatians 4, Paul demonstrates crucial matters from the minor points of the story of Sarah and Hagar; in Galatians 3:16 the use of the singular ‘offspring’ rather than the plural ‘offsprings’ is crucial to his case. In Hebrews 7:1-9, the writer bases his argument about Christ’s priesthood on the details of Genesis. These items are incidental to the main thrust of the Old Testament contexts. Yet the New Testament writers treat them as reliable narratives proving the nature of God’s ways. To them, as to Christ, the Old Testament is a trustworthy whole.
So why then do we rely on the Bible? Not because we can “prove the Bible” point by point, or have videotapes of the Fall or the Flood! Nor yet because the balance of scholarship currently tilts in our favour, or because we have instant solutions for every apparent biblical difficulty. (We don’t have ‘instant solutions’ for the problem of suffering either, but we still trust in the love of God.) Nor just because this week BBC2 or Channel 4 showed a documentary that was in our favour. Scholarly fashions rise and fall; moral fashions do too. We’ve got to get beyond all that. It’s because of Jesus, on his authority, that we affirm, with Augustine, What Scripture says, God says, and that as his radical disciples we will believe and obey it. For him, they do not merely contain God’s Word, they are God speaking, without adulteration. Our faith in Scripture is a central part of following Christ; if we are his followers, our submission to its authority and reliability must be as unqualified as his.
Two Alternatives
Ultimately, this choice – what finally shall we base upon, God’s Word or this decade’s opinions?- is probably the fundamental difference between the `evangelical’ and the `liberal’; and this is why we are `evangelicals`. It’s as Jesus’ followers that we make the crucial refusal to correct God’s Word by current opinion, preferring rather to let our own decade’s limited conclusions be corrected by the eternal Word. For which is to be the final judge, Scripture or our contemporary opinions? With our fallen reason, are we going to pick and choose, correcting Scripture by what we (at this moment) consider reasonable (this is what happens in theological `liberalism`)? Or do we, as `evangelicals`, allow the limited thinking of our decade and culture to be corrected by the eternal Word?
This is probably the central divide in Christianity, and nearly all fast-growing churches are on the evangelical side of it. For both scholarly fashions and moral attitudes (eg on divorce, or sexual ethics) change and waver, so that what seems obvious to one generation seems bizarre to another. And if the Bible’s reliability is made subject to the approval of our latest opinions, then we cannot speak with confidence as mouthpieces of the God who sees from beyond our uncertainties: we’ll be blown around by every breeze of intellectual style.
When Paul reminds the Corinthians of what is ‘of first importance’, he stresses that the gospel events occurred ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’ (1 Cor 15:1-4). And only if God has clearly spoken can we speak our gospel with certainty as ‘Thus says the Lord’; opinions are not enough when salvation is at stake! If we don’t have a trustworthy Word from heaven, our liberating gospel proclamation will dwindle, in time, into a mere exchange of religious views that never comes close to `conversion’ (and we certainly see that happen). Likewise, it is only if our teaching and ethics are founded on a trustworthy Word from God that we can be certain they are more than our own bright ideas, and so be able to march with confidence against the fashion of our particular decade. Prophetic critique and radical holiness build on the certainty that ‘this is the word of the Lord’!
This Is Not A Game!
Of course this doesn’t mean we understand everything in the Bible, nor that we are interpreting it correctly. It isn’t always easy to hear what the Word, rather than our decade or background, is saying; but it’s what Scripture actually says, not what we misunderstand it to say, that God says. So we’ve got to dig in and learn. We need to be uncompromising (see Galatians 1:8, Jude 3) where it’s clear, but humble where it isn’t.
This is a practical matter. Firstly, it must lead to study and understanding. For it is what Scripture actually says – not what we misunderstand it to say – that God says. Here we need the aid of scholarship. We must treat biblical history as history, symbolism as symbolism, metaphor as metaphor; remembering, too, that the historical sections were written in the ancient middle east, not the 21st century west! Different cultures have their own ways of writing history; in England, for example, if we begin a sentence “He said that….”, we can abridge or paraphrase without appearing inaccurate, more than if we use “He said” followed by quotation marks. Such conventions vary from culture to culture: if we ignore them we shall create unreal problems with non-existent ‘biblical contradictions’. God’s infallible Word came through human writers, with their individual idioms and characters. The interweaving of divine and human action is as real – and mysterious – as that of divine predestination and human freewill. And the result, the book we hold in our hands, has a humanness as real – and as error-free – as the humanity of Christ.
It is a practical matter. If we really believe that this book, and nothing else in the world, is the living word of God, then we will soak ourselves in it, reading the whole of it, reading it in quantity: we read no other book in fragments as we do Scripture! If we read less of it than we do the web or the newspaper, then assuredly we believe the web or newspaper to be more indispensable than the Bible; and the web rather than the Bible will shape our attitudes. (Ideally we’ll be prayerful readers of both!) We’ll prioritize our time with God’s Word, picking a good time daily to read it, and then protecting that time. We’ll note down our daily discoveries, and turn them into worship and prayer, and share them, and obey them (even when we encounter something we don’t want to hear; we know that God wants to lovingly reshape our life through them!) The desire to read through the whole Old and New Testaments, listening for the unexpected lessons, is a key marks of a true follower of Jesus. And because we believe the whole Bible is God speaking, we will venture with enthusiasm into the most difficult passages; and our trust in him will not be in vain! Our feet will be on solid rock; we have the word of God, we have truth, we have certainty!
Thirdly, while it is vital that we tolerate one another on secondary issues where Scripture is not entirely clear, yet if we believe Christ was right about Scripture we will not be willing to compromise on the fundamentals (Gal 1:8). Rather, as Jude 3 says, we will ‘contend for the faith’, just as Paul stood up to Peter when the nature of the gospel was at stake (Gal 2:11ff.).
But biblical obedience is active as well as defensive. We can have impeccably orthodox opinions, yet ignore biblical imperatives like ‘Go into all the world and preach’. Or we can read ‘Love one another’, yet treat a brother in Christ as an enemy because he understands a few difficult passages differently from us. Or we can hear the Old Testament prophets demanding that the poor and hungry be fed, yet go along with a self-seeking, materialistic society, doing what is reasonable according to the neighbours and the adverts. Here again the human reason, blown around as ever by the powers of this world, is exalted against God’s Word: here, as clearly as in liberal theology, the Enemy queries, ‘Has God said?’ (Gen 3:1).
A fullblooded commitment to Scripture is the only true radicalism. In our thirst to follow Christ we must be, as John Stott says, ‘radical conservatives’: unshakeably committed to the trustworthiness of the entire Bible, but also radically consistent in its application. Any other radicalism, daring to select what passages it will obey and believe, will be swayed by every change of fashion in the world’s thinking.
‘What Scripture says, God says.’ That was Christ’s teaching. When we set our hearts on such a vibrant spirituality we are following Jesus. His life was shaped by total faith in and unqualified obedience to his Father’s flawless Word. As his followers, we cannot do otherwise.
