This Treasure in Earthen Vessels

The question of the authority and interpretation of the Bible, that indispensable source of the church's knowledge of God's word and revelation, is critical for the church. Although we all wish that debates about the Bible would go away, leaving us to get on with the all-important task of living out its message, a better understanding of its nature and authority is still needed in many parts of the church, and the quest to achieve it cannot be put aside.

In North America, at least in Protestant circles, there is a serious polarization between "liberal" elements, which have let the subject drop out of sight, and "conservative" forces, which have raised the stakes by inflating the categories involved. This has opened a major chasm in popular theology and church life. Somehow we have to transcend this gulf and bring about reconciliation by proposing an understanding of biblical authority which is really comprehensive and satisfying. I believe that the doctrinal model or key which could enable us to heal the rift contains the three elements found in a significant statement of Paul's: "We have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us" (2 Corinthians 4:7).

The Bible is a rich treasure, the word of God, mediated to us in a human vehicle and capable of being, in the power of the Spirit, the place where we can hear God speak to us today.

The Treasure
We need to have a sense of proportion. For Muslims the Quran is the primary form of revelation, but for Christians the Bible occupies a humbler place. It fits into a pattern of revelation in which the word of God has been made flesh, and the Bible is the decisive witness to what God has said and done. Of course, the Bible is a very important part of the revelation process, but we should avoid getting things out of proportion. Even Warfield admitted that God could have administered the same plan of salvation without providing a Bible at all!

At the same time, God's provision of Scripture for the church is an important biblical idea and a much appreciated gift. Moses and Paul are both described as recipients of revelation and as writers of covenantal scripture. The longest chapter in the Bible by far (Psalm 119) is an extended eulogy praising God for the gift of God's written word. Jesus and the apostles shared this sense of gratitude and acknowledged the unique authority of the Bible which had come down to them. They submitted joyfully to it as written communication from God. We ought to do so too.

But at this point many conservative Christians go wrong. We pride ourselves on our fidelity to the Bible's claims for itself. Yet we distort those claims in our reaction to religious liberalism: We tend to exaggerate our conclusions about inspiration beyond what the data actually require.

For instance, we employ the "prophetic" model (the idea that God himself speaks every verse in the Bible) to account for the whole extent of Scripture, even though all of Scripture is plainly not in the prophetic mode. When Luke expresses his purpose in writing his Gospel (1:1-4), he does not pretend to be setting forth an inspired utterance, but a well-researched historical record. Ecclesiastes and Job do not invite us to regard them as divine utterances from beginning to end, and indeed no reader can do so.

But because we do tend to see Scripture this way we also tend to draw unwarranted conclusions which get us into trouble; we regard every verse as timelessly inerrant and sacrosanct, even though it is obvious that Jesus did not handle the Old Testament text in this rigid way.

We tend to make the Bible more authoritarian than it wants to be. Somehow we do not listen when Paul tells his readers that these are his opinions and that they as mature Christians ought to think things through for themselves in the Spirit. He admits that even he knows only "in part" and invites all of us to enter into the process of discerning God's will.

But we will not grant Paul such a humble place. We insist on making the apostle our doctrinal master despite his protests that he wants to be a colleague and friend. And so we elevate the Bible to impossible heights, lock up the gospel of liberty in a tight little box, and claim we are doing it in defense of divine revelation and for the honor of Jesus.

As one who has done this, I think I understand why we do it. We are afraid of the dangers implicit in liberal theology and radical biblical criticism (dangers not entirely imagined), and we respond by tightening our doctrine of inspiration and shutting out those who cannot agree with us. But to claim more for the Bible than the Bible evidently claims for itself is a sign of weakness, not of strength. It means that we are grasping for a worldly security God has not given and trying to protect the Bible with walls God has not built.

I believe that conservative Christians are correct to want to preserve the high doctrine of inspiration. But we must ask if we have really understood that doctrine if in fact it is well represented in the theological traditions of our elders. It seems to me that the Bible says much about itself that does not fit into our tight little scheme, and what we must do is to hear its witness afresh. The Bible does not want us to make it into an oppressive set of legalistic rules designed to put people in their place. It is a book that frees us to become the sons and daughters of God and participate in God's work of liberation which has begun and which will result in the coming of God's kingdom of peace and justice.

An Earthen Vehicle
It has always been difficult for conservative theology, which has placed such emphasis on Scripture as the word of God, to do equal justice to the human character of the Bible. This has two unfortunate results. It obscures the servant character of revelation which is the glory of the Christian message: God coming to us, not in superior power, but in the form of a servant. It misses the wonder of God's decision to accommodate God and God's word to the conditions of time and place in order to communicate effectively with us.

The human weakness of the Bible, like that of the apostle Paul, is not a liability and limitation, but a key ingredient in the wisdom of God which seems foolish to the world. We make a serious mistake when we resist the human weakness of the Bible.

The second result of not facing up to the Bible's humanity is the enormous difficulty for interpretation this creates for the reader, who is unable to cope with the human dimension which is there, whether acknowledged or not.

To give a few examples of the human side of Scripture, we could refer to the different ways in which texts were written and edited, to the local character of their intention and composition, to the use made of current wisdom and imagery. Minor discrepancies are easy to find, psalms are occasionally duplicated, merely human sentiments are often voiced. Differing viewpoints on the same topic are expressed, the physical universe is described in a pre-scientific manner, the time perspective in prophecies is often foreshortened. Attitudes expressed in the Old Testament, such as Elijah's appeal for revenge, are cancelled and transcended in the New. Not to recognize such aspects of the Bible for what they are will either make us disillusioned with it or else lead us to erroneous conclusions.

I have always felt that, while inerrancy is not a necessary term, when applied to the whole Bible it does express a firm confidence in the truthfulness of Scripture. The difficulty with it comes when we read into the term suppositions that go contrary to the observed character of the text.

These suppositions arise from the meaning which our culture pins on the term inerrancy. One would naturally think that the Bible, if it is inerrant, must then observe modern standards of, say, historical or scientific writing. Since it does not do so, it becomes necessary to qualify the term to avoid false conclusions. These efforts at qualification and explanation can quickly become a barrier to good communication, and are the reasons why many Christians choose not to use inerrancy language.

In my opinion, the term was chosen by defenders of the Bible who liked it because it was a strong word, but who gave too little attention to its inappropriateness and limitations. The struggle in conservative circles now concerns how best to correct this distortion without seeming to be unfaithful to recent conservative tradition. It is the humanity of the Bible, not our theological foes, real or imagined, which creates problems for the term inerrancy, and it would help greatly if we would stop imputing bad motives to each other and begin to look to the Bible together in order to discern how best to handle it. The inerrancy issue, far from being a watershed, is a difficulty bequeathed to us by our recent past.

Biblical criticism is a sustained investigation of the humanity of the Bible, its language and history, its context and genres. It has produced immensely valuable tools for discovering the meaning of the text. It has also been the occasion, however, for a good deal of speculative reconstruction of the biblical text and a debunking of its message on the basis of frankly humanistic assumptions. For this reason many of us have reacted sharply to it and been overly suspicious of it.

There seems to be a technology of criticism in the spirit of the Enlightenment that does not submit itself to God speaking in the Scriptures. At the same time, because of our sometimes inflated conceptions of biblical inspiration, we evangelicals have resisted taking the Bible literally and resorted to fantastic reconstructions ourselves in order to explain away the apparent meaning of the present text. We have no reason to fear biblical criticism which devotes itself to the study of the canonical text of the Bible which we believe God has willed for the sake of our salvation.

The Dynamic Power
A mere doctrine of the authority of the Bible is an empty useless thing if it does not help us discover how to determine the meaning of the Bible for our lives. If people are not hearing God speak through Scripture, no theological defense of its authority is going to convince them. Furthermore, even a high view of the Bible cannot prevent them from refusing the truth and holding it at a distance, refusing to let it make contact with their lives. It is of utmost importance to ask how the Bible can come alive for us. It helps me to see this outworking of biblical authority in a dynamic rather than a static way. The Bible should not be seen as a legal compendium of timelessly applicable divine oracles, but more as the place to stand when one wants to hear God's word and to discern God's will. Reading the Bible is the way we can orient our lives according to the parameters of definitive past revelation and, open to the Holy Spirit, receive direction for our life and work at hand. The Bible is a means of grace, a sacramental circle, where we can stand together with the family of God and seek the will of the Lord prayerfully for our time and place.

Let us not forget that the coming of the Spirit is an event as important as the incarnation itself. The Spirit was sent to make the gospel come alive, and the written word a living and powerful sword. The Bible can be little more than a museum of old antiques, but when the Spirit gets hold of it, the inspired information deposited in the text becomes activated in our experience. The Bible in the power of the Spirit is a means of grace whereby the liberating force of Jesus' message can become real in human life today. We should think of the Bible then as an instrument in the hands of the living God, as an occasion for the enlightening and illuminating of our hearts and minds.

The Bible itself assists us to reconceive of it in a dynamic way by means of its own composition and nature. For one thing, it is a covenant document, given not just to inform our minds, but to shape our character and to motivate our will. It is an inexhaustible resource, made up of incredibly diverse elements which come together in a grand symphony through the work of the Spirit to further our progress as the people of God. It does not announce a law dangling over our heads like the sword of Damocles, but the promise of the coming of the kingdom of God, pointing us forward, not backward, to the Christ who is coming to reign.

Now we know "in part," even when we read from the Bible, but then "face to face." Now our prophecy, even when recorded in the Bible, is "imperfect," but when the "perfect" is come, we shall see everything plainly. Even the Bible does not know everything it would like to. Even the Bible sees in a mirror dimly, and also we who read from it. But it plants a glorious hope within us and points us in the directions we should be moving. The Bible never intended for us to employ it as an instrument of oppression.

This does not mean that it is safe to avoid the scriptural letter and follow the inner light instead. The inner light can be a quick route to outer darkness. We want to hear exactly what the text has to say in exactly the shade of meaning that it had when first written down. Otherwise the truth of the text would turn out to be the reader's opinions of that moment, and the real authority of the Scripture would be lost. Frequently these "relevant" self-interpretations turn out to be misconceptions which obscure the word of God.

But when we return to the original sense of the text, the first thing we discover is the dynamism of the text itself. Not only is its basic message forward-looking, the text itself records a very dynamic process of revelation, in which the saving message once given gets continually and constantly updated, refocused, and occasionally revised. Just consider the progression between the Old and the New Testament; how the coming of the Messiah introduced crucial reinterpretations into the earlier revelational process. Or consider how the four Gospels present different portraits of Jesus, shaping the tradition reverently for their own contexts, and inviting us to think of Jesus afresh for our time and place. Thus a biblical text, say in Isaiah, not only has an original meaning in the eighth century B.C., but also a place in the history of interpretation in which unsuspected nuances of meaning surface because of what was seen later on.

The authority of the Bible is not a static affair of soliciting infallible oracles to suit one's need. By presenting us with a process of clarification and education and by offering us many angles of interpretation on God's word, the Bible serves as a tutor and guide in our own covenant pilgrimage. Precisely because the Bible itself updates its own material, placing older texts in new contexts, it helps us to do the same thing where we are. Because the Bible is inherently a dynamic book it can be the covenantal Scripture it claims to be for us.

The Bible does not present a tight uniformity of doctrinal or ethical concepts which can easily be cited to prove what is right and true. Instead its diversity pulls us into the process of discernment and forces us to listen much more carefully to what the Lord is saying to us now.

We live with the Bible in the hope that God will cause ever more light to break forth from God's holy word. We seek the leading of the Spirit into all truth, into the deeper and fuller penetration of God's intended message. We look to the One who contextualized his word in ancient times to do the same thing again with us, to make that word alive again in our hearing.

The art of interpreting the Bible (it is not a science) is not something we can do all by ourselves. We will need all the help we can get from readers who have gone before, from Christians studying the Bible in different contexts than ours, and from our brothers and sisters who stand, and more importantly, kneel beside us. Our ability to understand the Bible is as broken and imperfect as all the other things we try to do for God, and yet we can gain strength and truth from it because of the indwelling Spirit testifying to the risen Lord. From my conversion 30 years ago to this hour, I have always loved the Bible and the message it conveys to me, and always desired to place my life under its authority. I think we all need to do so. It has not been easy for me to express this doctrine or to defend it against threats real or imagined.

But Scripture is not a "problem." It is a priceless treasure bringing our Saviour to us and us to him. I only hope that these humble reflections will lead some others into more of an experience of the blessing of Scripture and less of an experience of Scripture as a bone of contention.

Clark H. Pinnock taught theology at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, and was a contributing editor for Sojourners when this article appeared.