1 - The Bible in the Church Today

The Bible in the Church Today
By Bernhard W. Anderson

FROM THE very first, this journal has been concerned about the essential role of the Bible in the theology, worship, and practical life of the church. THEOLOGY TODAY was launched back in 1944 in a time, not unlike the present, when the world was filled with international tumult. It was the season of "God's Terrible Springtime," to quote the title of a brief introductory meditation on Jeremiah's visions, likewise set against an ominous international background. Speaking on behalf of the newly formed Editorial Council, John A. Mackay, the founding editor, declared that the purpose of the journal was to sponsor a "rebirth of vital Christian theology," and with that in view, he said, "the Bible, which was rediscovered by the Reformation, must be rediscovered again."

This editorial, which I have been invited to write, appears more than a generation later. In the intervening years, great theological giants who formerly strode the earth have passed from the scene. The American people have been baptized into a tragic sense of life, owing to an interminably long war in Vietnam, continuing crises in the Middle East and elsewhere, assassinations of American leaders, and continuing forms of violence. During the tumultous sixties, when neo-orthodoxy waned and some Christian theologians talked about "the death of God," various new theologies sparkled like fireflies in the night. Biblical theology was put to the supreme test and, at least in the form of the American biblical theology movement, came to an end.

Despite the flux and erosion of the years, THEOLOGY TODAY continues to stand for the rebirth of vital Christian theology and, in particular, for a rediscovery of the Bible as the church's "supreme standard of reference" in all questions pertaining to faith and practice, to recall the initial Editorial once again. Significantly, Paul Minear, who wrote an incisive article for the first issue under the title, "Wanted: A Biblical Theology," published a hard-hitting essay more than thirty years later (Vol. 33, April 1976, pp. 66-73) on "Ecumenical Theology-Profession or Vocation." Picking up overtones of his earlier essay and speaking out of his subsequent experiences in theological education and in the

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ecumenical movement, Minear challenged academic theologians in an increasingly secularized world to take their church vocation seriously. Specifically, he warned against allowing university centers to call the theological tune at the price of a required "tuition" to be paid in the form of submission to "the prevailing canons of historical and philosophical methodology for the study of revealed Scripture and doctrine " (p. 68 of his essay; italics added). The Editor of the journal invited a number of theologians, most of them biblical scholars, to respond to Minear's challenge, but with a few notable exceptions, the scholars seemed unable to grapple with the issue. Indeed, one of the best parts of the symposium was the editorial introduction which, in line with the concern expressed in the first issue of the journal, lamented that for many scholars today "there appears to be no crisis of faith for themselves, for their students, or for the ministry and the church."

Admittedly, if one were to examine the agenda of professional societies or to take a poll of biblical scholars, it would be easy to conclude that biblical theology is dead. The consensus that prevailed in years past has vanished and everyone is doing his or her own thing while fighting for a place in the professional sun. Scholars demonstrate their scholarship by concentrating on technical problems, often talking among themselves in an esoteric language that outsiders cannot understand. Few there are who want to undertake the formidable task of trying to grasp the totality of Scripture as a coherent whole and hence to become biblical theologians who endeavor to speak to the church.

But for those who have eyes to see there are already signs that there is a future for biblical theology - even in academic circles. As an Old Testament theologian, I may be permitted to observe that 1978 was a "Vintage year," in which appeared an unusual harvest of Old Testament theologies, including works by Walther Zimmerli (in English translation), Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Claus Westermann, and Samuel Terrien (whose work moves into a total biblical theology). From the side of New Testament theologians, too, there is a new theological ferment which could well explode beyond the "departmental" divisions of Old and New Testament theology and lead to a comprehensive biblical theology of the two Testaments.

Scholars will always be in a state of debate. The important question is whether biblical theology has a future in the church, the believing and worshiping community, where scholars should be involved along with other ministers and lay persons. It is in the church where the crisis in biblical theology is, or should be, felt most acutely. So rather than viewing the matter exclusively from the standpoint of a professional (or vocational) biblical theologian, I propose to consider the matter from the standpoint of the authority and use of the Bible in the church.

I

When viewed from this standpoint, the problem of the Bible can be stated in a manner that is at once simple and complex. Many thoughtful

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people in the church, both ministers and laity, find it hard to subscribe to the inherited view that the Bible is "revealed Scripture" or "the revealed Word of God" without a lot of hesitation, qualification, and reservation.

Immediately it has to be said that there are wide areas of the church in which this generalization does not hold true. In recent years a strong tide of conservatism has swept people into worship services where the Bible is forcefully proclaimed as the veritable Word of God, indeed the inerrant Word of God. Harold, Lindsell, editor of Christianity Today and one of the contributors to the Minear symposium, believes that the fundamental problem is that "the church has been secularized to an amazing degree," and in his book, The Battle for the Bible, he declares that biblical inerrancy is "the most important theological topic of this age." "Word of God" has become a platform on which to take a reactionary stand, as we know from what has happened in the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church and, most recently, in the Southern Baptist denomination.

But there are many ordinary Christians, located somewhere in the center, who are neither "liberal" nor "conservative" but simply evangelical in the proper, non-partisan sense of the word. They do not spend time quarrelling over the traditional view of Scripture and, especially in the context of worship, are not disturbed by the liturgical formula "Word of God." Yet when the traditional language is lifted to the level of serious thought, it seems to imply divine authorship, and there are murmurings of discontent. Many sensitive Christians, who want to be honest to God in the life of faith, would agree with James Barr in his book, The Bible in the Modern World, where be boldly challenges the traditional language. "My account of the formation of the biblical tradition," he writes, "is the account of a human work. It is man's statements of his beliefs, the events that he has experienced, the stories he has been told, and so on." He continues: "It has long been customary to align the Bible with a movement from God to man." Yet, he insists, it is human beings who formed the traditions, who decided what was suitable to fix in writing, and who set aside some scriptures as canonical. "If one wants to use the Word-of-God type language," Barr says pointedly, "the proper terms for the Bible would be Word of Israel, Word of some leading Christians" (p. 120).

This testimony of a leading biblical scholar, even if it is only partially true, makes the biblical theology crisis in the church far more serious than has been diagnosed so far. Of late, "historical criticism" has become a target of attack. Some believers long for a return to a pre-critical period before the rise of historical criticism; others hope that we can move into a post-critical era when the Bible will once again be the normative basis for the church's understanding of God's revelation. However, there is no harbor safe from the winds and tides of the modern world. We are modern persons, and we cannot escape the impact of the critical approach to Scripture. But our modern situation does not

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require that we have to scrap "Word of God" language as a worn-out cliche, a coin that no longer has legal tender. On the contrary, this is the time for pastor and people to come to a clearer theological understanding of the indispensable place of the Bible in the life of the church.

II

To begin with, we should keep in mind that when speaking of the Bible as Word of God we are using metaphorical language. Speaking and hearing constitute the mode in which persons become related to one another. When a friend speaks and the word is heard, a bridge of communication spans from one life to another with the result that a personal relationship exists. Thus it is proper to affirm that God's self-disclosure is through word spoken to a people-the word of the prophets of old and, above all, Jesus Christ, "the Word made flesh." In a secondary sense, the Bible is Word of God, for it is the means whereby God seeks to communicate and to enter into relationship.

The analogy between the human act of speech and God's speaking cannot be literalized. The Word of God is not a voice carried on the sound waves, nor is it reducible to written form as a letter is dictated and transcribed. The analogy is not even that of a simile (God's word is like a human word), for God's thoughts are not our thoughts. Metaphor is an imaginative form of poetic speech in which one thing is spoken of as if it were the other, as in the familiar Shakespearian line, "All the world is a stage." Metaphorically, the Bible is the Word of God.

The metaphor Word of God, which transcends literalism, carries us into the dimension of mystery. Traditionally, we speak of the "Holy Bible." The Bible, however, is holy, not because of some intrinsic property, but because God draws it into the sphere of divine holiness and mystery. God chooses to use human literature, initially composed in the oral words of tradition and finally written down as Scripture, to establish relationship with people. As my colleague, David Willis has put it, "The Scriptures have authority in the church as God uses them to engender faith." This Godly "use" of Scripture is an act of divine election-an act that is related essentially to God's election of a people to be the bearer of the divine purpose and God's election out of this people of Jesus Christ who, as Paul said, was "designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:4). In the community of faith, God uses Scripture as the chosen mode of communication to the end that people may know who their God is, may understand their identity and vocation as the people of God, and may receive guidance on how they are to live, act, and worship. God's use of the Bible, however, becomes effective through the inspiring activity of the Spirit. Here it is appropriate to repeat a sentence from the first editorial of this journal, which links inseparably the inspiration of the Bible and the inspiration of the reader: "That the Bible is in a unique sense Word of God to man is witnessed to by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Christian believers, who, in the words of

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Thomas á Kempis, read it 'with the same Spirit with which it was written.' "

The literature of the Bible is composed in human language, the very language that reflects the all too human story of God's people. It is only in human language, with its limitations of syntax, vocabulary, and literary forms, that we can understand and experience the bond of relationship. And it is only in human language, which becomes meaningful in concrete situations, that we can perceive that God is involved in the historical particularity of human life. The Bible, then, is a human medium, and hence a fallible medium, which God nevertheless uses authoritatively to speak to the believing and worshiping community. In this sense, the divine and the human are inseparably related in the Bible, making it impossible to separate Word of God and human words at any point. Of the canonical Scriptures it has been said in Chalcedonian language: Omnia ex Deo, omnia ex hominibus ("All things are from God, all things are from human beings").

Since the Bible is written in literary forms that reflect the situations of a people on the way, from the time of Abraham to the end of the apostolic age, it is open to, and may be illumined by, historical critical investigation. There is no special mode of interpretation that applies to Scripture alone. Nor are there modes of criticism that apply to other literatures but not to the Bible. The uniqueness of the Bible is not that it contains a special kind of literature but that God uses this literature through the activity of the Spirit in the community of faith. In freedom, God can use any literature to mediate grace; but in a special sense the Bible, which presents the story of God's people, is the book of the church.

III

To say that the Bible is the book of the church does not require that a sharp line be drawn between the church and the world, the ecclesiastical and the secular, the seminary and the academy. It is true that the Bible is often mistreated in the "secular" university context insofar as teachers concern themselves with atomistic analysis, or obscure the faith-claim of the Scriptures by using some "common denominator" comparative-religions approach, or force biblical literature into the Procrustean bed of a particular philosophy. On the other hand, it must also be said that the Bible is often mistreated in churches and seminaries insofar as it is interpreted within the confines of a parochial pietism, or is conscripted to be "relevant" to church interests or practical needs, or is interpreted by orthodoxy in such a way as to demand a sacrifice of the intellect. "The interpretation of scripture from faith to faith," observes Robert Funk, one of the respondents in the Minear symposium, "runs the danger of circling harmlessly in antiseptic precincts." God is free to speak through the medium of the Bible without having to go through special channels.

Within the Bible itself there is plenty of evidence that people are all

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too eager to identify the Word of God with their own social values, national interest, or personal situations. Amos proclaimed that the Day of Yahweh would be a time when popular expectations would be upset, when human values would be reversed. God's "story," to which the Bible bears witness, is not to be identified with "our story" or "my story." This must be understood by both conservatives who uphold the establishment and by radicals who advocate revolutionary social change. Undoubtedly, God is speaking to people today through the Bible with a new demand for social justice, a new call for the liberation of the oppressed; and in some circles, a Marxist perspective has been influential in the formulation of liberation theology. But God's story of liberation (salvation) is not reducible to a particular ideological view or revolutionary program.

These days we are becoming more and more aware of the inadequacy of scientific historical methods for dealing with the scriptural witness to the self-disclosure of God in the story of a people, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But historical criticism, despite its built-in limitations, has performed at least one great service for the church: it has warned us against the peril of modernizing the Bible. It has helped us to understand that God's word comes to us through the medium of an ancient literature, which reflects particular historical situations and discloses a "strange new world" that stands over against our modern world. By making us aware of the strangeness of the scriptural testimonies, it has helped us to be more open to "transcendence," to the Word which is not a mere echo of the strident voices of the modern world.

When the Bible is read in the believing and worshiping community, the Spirit bears witness that it is Word of God, God's chosen medium for speaking to the community. As H. Richard Niebuhr observed in his now classic study, The Meaning of Revelation, the Bible presents "a single drama of divine and human action," in which God issues a call to action in an ongoing story. Through the medium of Scripture, God speaks today as in times past in order that hearers may know who God is, may understand the identity of the people of God, and may respond to what they are called to be and to do. When a passage from the Old Testament or the New Testament is read in the context of the community of faith, it is appropriate for the reader to conclude with the exclamation, "the Word of the Lord!" and for the people to respond in one voice, "Thanks be to God!"

Bernhard W. Anderson
Professor of Old Testament Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary