A guide to understanding the Bible

To some Christians, the Bible is a record of and a witness to divine revelation but not the direct word of God. It is understood as the word of God in the indirect sense because it comes through the medium of human language and the human writers. Therefore the Bible, a record of revelation, can never be directly the revelation of God nor a pure communication of it. In this view, termed neo-orthodoxy, the interpreter looks for the divine word behind the human words.

To some Christians, the Bible is verbally inerrant, that is to say, it does not contain any mistakes in its wording because the Holy Spirit guided the human writers. This viewpoint maintains that the Bible record must, therefore, be entirely true historically, and the revelation of the character and actions of God is a true one in all parts of the Bible equally. This viewpoint cannot allow that the story of Jonah is allegorical or a parable, for example. Christians who uphold that the Bible is verbally inerrant have been given the name of 'fundamentalists' by those who have a different viewpoint, but we shall not use the word in this book. The word 'conservative' is rather more acceptable, but not entirely satisfactory as one can have a conservative view of the Bible without maintaining it to be verbally inerrant.

Other Christians maintain that the Bible is a true record of the relationship between God and man but a record written by men who sometimes did not understand the character of God because of the limitations of their circumstances and therefore sometimes (particularly in the Old Testament) depicted him in ways which had to be modified in the light of the revelation given in Jesus Christ. Light which passes through coloured glass is affected by it but is still light; the light does not derive from the glass but has its own source. The imperfections of the human beings to whom God revealed as much of his truth as they could comprehend were a limitation which God accepted but which did not prevent his truth shining through them and their words. These writers, being human, could make mistakes of detail; they could ignore the difference between actual historical event and allegory in their attempts to express what they understood of God's truth in human language.

This viewpoint is generally known as the 'liberal' view, but this is not a very good name for it. Where it is necessary in this book to refer to this viewpoint and compare it to the other viewpoint described, however, we shall use the term 'liberal' as compared with 'conservative'.

A serious student of the Bible should be willing to look carefully at both conservative and liberal viewpoints in debated passages, and should refer to Bible commentaries in the search for the fullest possible understanding. It is a legitimate question to ask how God communicates with a human being and inspires him to put into human language what he has understood. The simplest answer is that man's mind and total personality is capable of sensitive response to God's invisible presence and power in the person of the Holy Spirit. Man's spirit is touched by and can respond to God's Holy Spirit. Man is capable of spiritual birth and growth in a way that animals are not. As we read and consider what Biblical scholars have understood about the Bible, we should be open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our understanding. The great importance of the Bible is in its spiritual teaching and academic arguments over differing interpretations of passages can obscure what is really important.

We can be guided in the study of Biblical writings if we ask the following questions about any passage or book which we are reading:

Can we identify the writer and his situation?

What is the viewpoint of what is written?

What can we learn about the writer from what is written?

Can we find out what led him to write in that way?

What is he trying to communicate to the reader?

In studying historical passages describing events, situations, and people, we need to remember that there is no such thing as uninterrupted history. All happenings in human life and experience have to be understood and interpreted to make sense to those affected by them. It is possible to give conflicting interpretations of the same event; someone who has profited as a result of a particular event is likely to describe it very differently from someone who has suffered as a result of the same event.

Biblical interpretation is a skill and a science. It involves understanding the language and its meaning; the situation and viewpoint of the writer which will touch upon the cultural, political and even geographical conditions in which the writer lived as well as his religious understanding; and the relationship of any given passage to the wider teaching of the Bible, which in turn is the foundation of all Church doctrine.