Though I said last week that the bible didn’t just fall out of heaven, whole and entire, and though most Christians understand this, quite a few Christians get bothered by the idea—or even try to dodge the idea—that the bible was edited together. In other words, human beings—inspired by God, but still human beings—took the many different testimonies from God’s people, took histories and poetry and proverbs and prophecies, and selected which of them, or which parts of them, they’d include in their books, which were eventually combined into the bible.
The idea that the books of the bible had to be edited suggests, naturally, that there were parts of these testimonies and histories that the editors didn’t select, or even removed. And that’s the part that bothers people: The thought of someone cutting and pasting together a book of the bible, instead of just composing the book as a whole. The thought that rough drafts of the bible might be out there somewhere… and how inspired are those rough drafts? Or are they more inspired, and our copies of the bible are flawed somehow? What if someone finds the rough drafts, and they turn out to be full of errors? What would that mean for the bible? Or worse—what if they turn out to be just as inspired as the bible, yet the editors of the bible left out several stories that we would consider significant? What would that mean for the bible?
High and low views of the bible.
Most of these worries tend to come from the folks who have a high view of scripture. The high view—yeah, that’s actually a theology term—is that the bible isn’t just an inspired book; it’s a divine book. You know how Jesus is called the Word of God? Well, the bible is also the Word of God; the words of the bible are the only things in the universe that can trustworthily tell us about God, and convey God through them. That’s why the Protestant Reformers taught sola scriptura—just scripture—because the bible, and only the bible, is trustworthy. Other Christians aren’t.
There’s a very fine line between the high view and bibliolatry, and Christians cross that line all the time. The high view is also not true. I went through the five ways that God reveals Himself to people, and the bible is only one of them—the most stable one, since it’s been validated by thousands of years’ worth of God’s followers—but the bible is not a divine book. It has no special power in itself. (If it did, it would stop all these folks from misquoting it!) We confirm other revelation with the scriptures; but we confirm people’s interpretations of the scriptures with all the other forms of revelation, namely prayer, prophecy, miracles, and theophanies. Folks with the high view tend to dodge any forms of confirmation, and insist on sola scriptura instead of holistic Christianity.
Incidentally, the original meaning of sola scriptura wasn’t to say that we listen to the bible alone, instead of the bible plus other Christians. The Roman Catholics, who the Protestants were protesting against, taught a form of the low view of scripture: The bible is an inspired book, but lots of things are inspired, like the writings of the early church fathers, or the great Christian philosophers, or the popes. So these are all on an equal level.
The Protestants objected: No they’re not. Just the bible is authoritative; the rest are commentaries on the bible, and need to be independently judged on their merits, same as any other Christian. If they’re valid, listen; if they’re not, don’t. But the bible doesn’t need to go through this vetting process. It’s pre-vetted.
Putting the Protestants’ concerns aside, you can see the problem with the low view: If the bible is no more important than any other well-written book, what’s the point of quoting it to teach what’s true and false, to correct and to instruct? (1Ti 3.16) Yeah, God inspires people all the time, and clearly blesses certain artists with creativity, but their writings weren’t attempting to testify about God in the same way that the writers of the bible did. They’re not on the same level. (And frankly, those trying to put them on the same level are usually trying to do it to dodge the bible’s authority: If the brilliance of John Calvin or St. Augustine or even William Shakespeare is as good as the bible, then you can read them instead.)
The most realistic view is neither of the above, but something called illumination: The bible is a holy book, and an inspired book. But the Holy Spirit is divine, and the bible only comes alive or has any power and authority when He gets involved in its reading and interpretation. Without Him, the bible is nothing. Like Paul put it:
If the Good News we preach is hidden behind a veil, it is hidden only from people who are perishing. Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.
You see, we don’t go around preaching about ourselves. We preach that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we ourselves are your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” [Ge 4.3] has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.
We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.
—Paul, 2 Corinthians 4.3-7 NLT
Paul wasn’t talking specifically about the bible; he was talking about the gospel. But any good news that comes from God—whether through bible, or through preaching or prophecy or letters or whatever—can’t be understood unless the Spirit makes light shine in the darkness, or illuminates people. Because of sin and pride, people “began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused.” (Ro 1.21) God has to un-confuse us before we can comprehend the bible—before we can preach it without twisting it to fit our own selfish wants, or trying to explain away everything in it that we don’t get, don’t want to get, and are skeptical about.
Taking the view of illumination means that we correctly recognize that it’s not the bible that instructs us. It’s God the Holy Spirit. Since we’re directed by Him, there’s no point in worrying about how careful, or how valid, the process was in getting us our bible. First of all, we see how He directs our lives—messy as they are—so we realize that we can trust He had the process of the bible’s creation well in hand, no matter how messy it might have been. Secondly, we realize that if there are things in the bible that may look to us or others as iffy or erroneous, we don’t have to panic, or fear that the whole of Christianity is going to fall apart over a tiny crack in the armor. We follow Him. We trust Him. We don’t trust the bible so much as we trust God, and it’s because we trust God that we trust the bible. The folks with the high view of scripture have that the other way around. That’s why I call it bibliolatry: If the bible comes before God in any way at all, it’s idolatry. Period.
Many people have noticed that when they read the bible, it speaks to them in a way that no other book does. That’s the cool thing about illumination: It’s not the book doing that, but the Holy Spirit reading it along with you, dropping into your mind, “Yes, this is true. And did you notice this about it? And this? And this?” It’s awesome when the person who inspired the bible is there to help you read it.
Infallibility and inerrancy.
Lots of Christians teach that these two concepts are the same thing, but they’re really not. Infallibility is the idea that the bible will never fail us; it is entirely trustworthy. Inerrancy is the idea that the bible has no errors or mistakes in it. These concepts are connected; Christians teach that the reason the bible is infallible, is because it’s inerrant.
What proof do we have that the bible is inerrant? Well… actually, none. There are errors in our bibles.
Okay, I realize that if you have a high view of scripture, I just committed blasphemy against your god. But let me give one fairly obvious example to prove my point.
Jesus said to them,
“Haven’t you ever read in the Scriptures what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He went into the house of God (during the days when Abiathar was high priest) and broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests are allowed to eat. He also gave some to his companions.” —Mark 2.25-26 NLT
I’ve read in the scriptures what David did, and I recall a different high priest:
David went to the town of Nob to see Ahimelech the priest. Ahimelech trembled when he saw him. “Why are you alone?” he asked. “Why is no one with you?”
“The king has sent me on a private matter,” David said. “He told me not to tell anyone why I am here. I have told my men where to meet me later. Now, what is there to eat? Give me five loaves of bread or anything else you have.”
“We don’t have any regular bread,” the priest replied. “But there is the holy bread, which you can have if your young men have not slept with any women recently.”
Since there was no other food available, the priest gave him the holy bread—the Bread of the Presence that was placed before the LORD in the Tabernacle. It had just been replaced that day with fresh bread.
—1 Samuel 21.1-4, 6 NLT
You might also notice that David didn’t “also give some to his companions,” (Mk 2.26) as Jesus said, because he was actually alone, (1Sa 21.1) and was lying to Ahimelech about sending on his men ahead. So Jesus made two factual errors in this story.
Inerrancy fans are fond of saying, “If there’s a single error in the bible—just one—it all falls apart; you can’t trust any of it.” So my pointing out the errors above tends to give them the creeping horrors. Some of them know about it already, and have come up with some really complex arguments in order to explain it away; look for any books on hard teachings of the bible. Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe’s Big Book of Bible Difficulties, or Gleason Archer’s New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, will set your mind at ease as much as they can. Archer advises in his introduction,
Be fully persuaded in your own mind that an adequate explanation exists, even though you have not yet found it. The aerodynamic engineer may not understand how a bumble bee can fly; yet he trusts that there must be an adequate explanation for its fine performance since, as a matter of fact, it does fly! Even so we may have complete confidence that the divine Author preserved the human author of each book of the Bible from error or mistake as he wrote down the original manuscript of the sacred text.
You see, the basis for inerrancy is faith: Inerrancy can’t be proven, and even the bible itself undermines the idea. But just trust that it’s true, ’cause it has to be true, otherwise “it all falls apart.”
You might also notice, in my quote of Archer, that he referred to “the original manuscript of the sacred text.” One popular way around the errors in our bibles is to claim that in our copies of the bible, there are errors, but in the originals of the bible, there weren’t. And if only we had the originals, we’d see this. Again, this can’t be proven; we have no idea where the originals are, or if they even exist anymore. And to some degree it makes you wonder why the Holy Spirit did such a poor job of keeping those errors out.
But if you believe—as I do—in illumination, you recognize that the Holy Spirit doesn’t care about little factual errors like these. Do they get in the way of Jesus’s teaching? Do they make His point any less valid—that the Pharisees were only complaining about Jesus’s students violating their Sabbath custom, whereas David broke the Law? See, under the Spirit’s direction, we bypass the nitpicking and get to the real issue. Under the high view, we spend most of our time countering the nitpicking, and missing the point.
(For those who are dying to know, Archer’s explanation is that “when Abiathar was high priest” can be translated “in the time of High Priest Abiathar,” and that Abiathar didn’t have to be high priest at that time, just like David wasn’t “King David” yet. However, he doesn’t explain how David “also gave some to his companions.”)
My attitude about errors in the bible is that God works with human beings, regardless of our flaws; and God can just as easily work with a text, regardless of its flaws. And there are hardly any flaws in a bible. Archaeologists regularly excavate things that confirm the bible’s accurate descriptions of ancient things, events, and customs. Linguists regularly discover that hard-to-understand passages actually do make sense as archaeologists and historians discover more about the past. And sometimes biblical discrepancies are deliberate: God wants us to recognize that it takes far more than just one point of view to understand Him comprehensively. So errors are not a major hurdle; they’re a minor one that’s meant to make us depend more on God, and less on the text and our own ability to understand it.
If you can’t prove there are errors in the text you’re reading, it’s safe to take for granted that there aren’t any. Trust the Holy Spirit to direct you around any. As for infallibility, the bible is infallible because the Spirit is infallible: He won’t lead you astray, but into the truth. (Jn 16.13) We trust the bible because we trust God, and for no other reason.
Open or closed canon?
The Mormons are famous (or notorious) for having extra books in their bible—a whole extra testament, actually, called the Book of Mormon, consisting of scriptures that they believe God revealed to the ancient Americans, and re-revealed to Joseph Smith. And most of the reason Mormons believe such distinctively different things from other Christians—causing other Christians to call them heretics*—is because these ideas are found in their extra scriptures.
The rest of Christendom generally has the idea that the canon—the official book-list of the bible—is closed, meaning it’s decided and done and not to be re-opened for discussion. The 66 books of the bible (more, for non-Protestants) are the books we accept as scripture. We’re not adding new ones; we’re not deleting unpopular ones. Lots of Christians may be fans of St. Augustine’s Confessions or Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ or John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, but they’re not going in. Lots of Christians may object to James as too works-focused, or Ecclesiastes as too pessimistic, or Song of Songs as too sexy, but they’re not going out. Canon closed.
Cessationists* teach that the canon is closed because the Holy Spirit stopped inspiring prophecy. If nothing else can be inspired to be written, there’s nothing else to add to the bible. So really, it’s God who closed the canon. (Most of us don’t buy it that God stopped prophecy, but plenty of Christians do believe God stopped inspiring bible-level prophecy: It may be inspired, but it’s not that inspired.)
Largely the canon is closed for practical reasons. If we kept it open, and added any book that was popular, the bible would be huge. And less read than it is already. Plenty of Christians already consider 66 books to be an insurmountable hurdle, so imagine if we only added a book a decade, and wound up with a 255-book bible. Plus the debates about which books to add would be nuts, and politically driven, and in the years where the church’s leadership was corrupt all sorts of evil would get added to the bible. And now that the church is fragmented into denominations, it’ll be harder than ever to decide such things. Nope, an open canon would be insane.
A professor of mine pitched the idea that if some archaeologist were to discover an unknown book—the Gospel of Peter, perhaps—that was consistent with the rest of the bible, and shed a lot more insight on who Jesus is, might we add that to the bible? Should we stick to the idea that the canon is closed in all cases? And I’m sure there would be plenty of folks who would argue for making an exception for newly discovered first-century documents. And there’d be just as many who would argue against it, for all sorts of reasons—mostly that if the Spirit wanted it in there, He’d have made sure it was in there already.
Certain churches do revere various books as much as they revere the bible. I mentioned Roman Catholics earlier; some of them quote Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica with the same fervency as Romans, ’cause they believe God inspired both of them, and that they complement one another. I’ve known various Christians who tend to quote C.S. Lewis an awful lot… or Francis Schaeffer, Thomas Merton, Brian McLaren, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, E.M. Bounds, or A.W. Tozer. There’s nothing wrong with being fans of those guys. There are plenty of bright Christians in Christendom. The difference between them and the bible, like I’ve said, is that the bible is pre-vetted: We trust the bible automatically, whereas we’re a lot more skeptical of those other fellows. They could be wrong. The bible, however, keeps getting confirmed, time and again. Best to not tinker with it… any more than we already do.
Okay, that’s enough biblical theology. I don’t want you to get the idea that the Bible Survey articles are all theology. I just figured I’d knock out the main theological issues in one pass. Next week: Original languages and bible translations.