From Inspiration to Understanding. Edward W. H. Vick

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      2 Our recognition of it is essential to its having authority. The recognition or acknowledgment of this authority takes place when the Bible has had and continues to have the effect upon the believer, of evoking and nurturing Christian faith. In the words of C. H Dodd,

a book is as external as a church, or rather it is much more so. The act of faith which accepts the authority of the Bible is as purely individual a judgment as that which accepts the authority of the church. What is the ground of it? . . . . Really — may we not say? — he believes the Bible to be authoritative because of the effect it produces upon his own mind and spirit. In this as for all his beliefs he must accept personal responsibility.37

      The acceptance of the authority of the Bible, associated with and dependent as it is upon confession of faith in God, is a reasonable and responsible act.

      7 TESTIMONY NOT PROOF

Authority resides in the truth alone, in the mind and will of God. The Bible possesses authority in religion as it mediates the truth, as the ‘Word of God.’ The truth is not given in an external, self-subsistent form. In dealing with the question of biblical authority we must consider the response of the subject. ‘Granted that religious authority somehow resides in the Bible, how does it become authoritative for me?’38 The answer to this question is not to be found in thinking of the Bible as a repository of doctrine, waiting to be excavated. ‘The most important thing we find in the Bible is not “doctrine” but something that helps us in a new attitude to God and to life.’39 If we treat the Bible as a source of information, whether doctrinal information or historical information, we are missing the point. The traditional theory valued the Bible ‘as giving authoritative information, in the form of dogma, upon matters known only by special revelation.’40 The critical method treated it as a source of historical information. In both cases there is a failure to understand the real character of the Bible. The authority of the Bible is not in its being a source of doctrine, but rather and ‘primarily in inducing in us a religious attitude and outlook,’41 not in providing static and unchanging dogma, but in including us within ‘a tradition of life and experience.’42 That means that we are caught up in a progressing movement, in which (as the New Testament says) the Spirit of God is leading us into a developing and forward-looking experience. It is in performing this activity that the authority of Scripture consists. The Christian believer’s claim is that the religious authority of the Bible is known when God makes himself known. Such authority is known in the experience of the believer. The Bible is the instrument through which believers receive the word of God. ‘The Scriptures are holy because they are the vehicle through which the Gospel is communicated to us . . . . Hence there is no outside standard by which we can measure the adequacy of the biblical communication.’43 This unique authority can be witnessed to but it cannot be proved. It is a matter of testimony and not of proof.

      8 RELIGIOUS AND FACTUAL AUTHORITY

The religious value and authority of the Bible does not depend on its reliability as a different kind of authority, namely its historical and factual trustworthiness. It is not my purpose at all to re-engage in the battles fought and fought again in the nineteenth century over this issue. I shall survey and draw lessons from some of that debate later.44 If we learn a lesson from history it will be that we must fight our own battles and not simply replay old ones, even if in some contexts it seems we are very much doing the latter, or observing others doing the latter.

      Statements in the Bible frequently have reference to historical, geographical and other factual states of affair. Such statements may be confirmed where there is appropriate evidence. We can check such biblical statements by examining the relevant evidence. The cosmological assumptions of the Bible are a quite different matter from its factual claims. By ‘cosmological assumptions’ we mean what they took for granted about how the universe is structured, how it operates, how the bodies that make it up and the events which take place within it are related to one another, about whether there is something more than the natural world to be accounted for and, if there is, how the supernatural world is related to the natural. The Bible is an ancient book and its writers operated with pre-scientific assumptions. It is pre-Einsteinian, pre- Newtonian, pre-Copernican. This means that they had a different kind of understanding, a different mode of thinking from ours. We understand Newton and know he is a watershed in the history of human development. We may not well understand Einstein, but we well know that we live in a quite different world from the ancients when it comes to our understanding the universe. The words ‘nature,’ ‘universe,’ as we use them were unknown to the ancients. There is a great divide between us. It is the advent and long success of scientific method that has brought about this change.

      What they have to say about God and the world and his relation to the world and history they say in their idiom. They were well able to say what they had to say in the form and within the thought- patterns within which they operated. It did not stand in the way of their communicating what they had to communicate, which were their convictions about what God was doing in the world, what they understood God to have done and what he would yet do.

      Christian believers, who live in a different world from them and who try to understand them, have to make allowance for the important fact that their world was very different from ours. We want to understand their message, and we want to let God speak through their words. We also want to put the message about the God of whom they speak in our words, to relate the message about him to our problems. So we must interpret their message, understand their expression. We may do so because we experience through their words the revealing activity of the same God who revealed himself to them. To say this is to claim that we find the unity of the Bible in its witness to the revealing activity of God.

      The Christian’s task is to make that clear and to find in the present time the means to speak intelligibly about the activity of God within the world.

      Science resulted from the discovery of scientific method. Ancient peoples did not know what scientists of the seventeenth, eighteenth and later centuries discovered. Ancient writers did not know the scientific method. For example, the Bible writers did not know about the circulation of the blood, the constitution of the universe, the movements of the planets, and the diurnal motion of the earth as it makes its annual circuit around the sun. Their astronomy was geocentric.

      What does it matter that they thought very differently about the way things are than we do, that they did not have the idea of nature which we have? How could they? For us the eighteenth century is history. But not for them! They could not, and therefore did not, think of nature in Newtonian terms, let alone in post-Einsteinian terms as we do. There is a distance between them and us. The temporal gap is also a cultural gap. We think of a universal order of nature with each event linked to every other in a chain of cause and effect. Our science does not speak of God nor of divine or supernatural activity as cause in any sense whatever, neither in physics, nor in psychology, nor in economics. We explain nature and history in secular terms. So our horizon is very different from their horizon.

      9 MUST?

      Christians sometimes speak of the Bible as the ‘word of God.’ ‘To believe the Bible’ means then to accept it as the means through which God ‘speaks.’ By using this analogy from human speech as communication, they convey the idea that God communicates with the human person through the reading and exposition of the words of Scripture. To have Christian faith is the product of this revelation of God through Scripture. But this does not entail belief in the literal accuracy of all the statements of Scripture.

      To decide whether the Bible is the ‘word of God’ requires a different sort of approach than to decide whether its statements are true or false. If the Bible has proved to be the vehicle through which readers and hearers have come to have faith, the means through which that faith is strengthened, then there would be sufficient ground for a special claim about the Bible. But the Bible will have a quite different kind of ‘authority’ in this case from that which it would have purportedly in the case where someone СКАЧАТЬ