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.