The Bible - Part IV

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus

Glory to God most High, for ever and ever. I understand that this blog is coming a bit too late after the earlier post, but due to some circumstances I was unable to write and post this earlier. 

In the previous parts,  Part 1 and Part 2 (you may click on the link to go the said chapter to read in full) we learned that unless God takes the initiative to disclose what is in His mind, we shall never be able to find out. Unless God makes Himself known to us, we can never know Him. We also understood that God reveals Himself in two manners - first through Natural Revelation, where the Divine Artist has revealed Himself in the beauty, balance, intricacy and order of His creation and secondly through speech. Speech is the main model used in the Bible to illustrate God's self revelation. We understood that Scripture is God's Word, issuing from God's mouth.

In Part 3, we started to understand some of the qualifications to clarify our thoughts on how God spoke His Word and understood that His Word was closely related to His activity, that is He spoke to His people not  only through His words, but also through His deeds.

Now let us understand the second qualification. God's Word has come to us through human words. 

When we read the Bible, we can see that whenever God spoke, He usually did not shout audibly out of a clear blue sky. He spoke through prophets in the Old Testament and through the apostles in the New Testament. Moreover, these human agents of the revelation of God were real people. Did these speakers or writers ever have personal agenda? Did they lose their personality while writing the words of God? Were they reduced to being automatons or dictating machines or tape recorders?

Divine inspiration was not a mechanical process which reduced the human authors of the Bible to machines, whether dictating machines or tape recorders. Divine inspiration was a personal process, in which the human authors of the Bible were usually in full possession of their faculties. We only have to read the Bible in order to see that this is so. The writers of narrative (and there is a great deal of historical narrative in the Bible, Old and New Testament alike) used historical records. Some are quoted in the Old Testament. Luke tells us at the beginning of his Gospel of his own painstaking historical researches. Also, all the biblical authors developed their own distinctive literary styles and theological emphasis. Hence the rich diversity of Scripture. Nevertheless, through their varied approaches God Himself was speaking.

This truth of the double authorship of the Bible, namely, that it is the Word of God and the word of men, or more strictly the Word of God through the words of men, is the Bible's own account of itself. The Old Testament law, for example, is sometimes called "the law of Moses" and sometimes "the law of God" or "the law of the LORD". In Hebrews 1:1 we read that GOD spoke to the fathers through the prophets. In 2 Peter 1:21, however, we read that men spoke from God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Thus God spoke and men spoke. They spoke from Him and He spoke through them. Both these affirmations are true.

Further, we must hold the two affirmations together. As in the incarnate Word (Jesus Christ), so in the written Word (the Bible), the divine and human elements combine and do not contradict one another. This analogy, which was developed quite early in the history of the church, is often criticized today. And obviously it is not exact, since Jesus was a person whereas the Bible is a book. Nevertheless, the analogy remains helpful, provided that we remember its limitations. For example, we must never affirm the deity of Jesus in such a way as to deny His humanity, nor affirm His humanity in such a way as to deny His deity. 

So with the Bible. On the one hand, the Bible is the Word of God. God spoke, deciding himself what He intended to say, yet not in such a way as to distort the personality of the human authors. On the other hand, the Bible is the word of men. Men spoke, using their faculties freely, yet not in such a way as to distort the truth of the divine message.

The double authorship of the Bible will affect the way in which we read it. Because it is the word of men, we shall study it like every other book - using our minds, investigating its words and syntax, its historical origins and its literary composition. But because it is also the Word of God, we shall study it like no other book - on our knees, humbly, crying to God for illumination and for the ministry of the Holy Spirit, without whom we can never understand His Word.

May the Lord Almighty bless you and keep you in all your ways.

Your brother in Christ Jesus

Jobin George