As I said in the last post, until the prerequisite of omniscience is met the Bible is such a thing that the very last thing you can do is cut things out of it. Which brings us to the next question: what is the Bible? Paul tried to answer that same question for Timothy in 2 Timothy:
“All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”
Paul’s answer implies to things: 1. The Bible is an authority and 2. The Bible is life-giving. The fact that it is useful for correcting, teaching, rebuking, etc. implies that it is in its rightful place when it is standing over a human life, not the other way around. But this is not only an impersonal book of rules; it is life-giving. It is breathed out by God. Think of the creation story: God makes a man from clay and then “breathes into his nostrils” and the clay man comes alive. Paul is saying that this is the right way to view the Bible: life breathed in from the outside. It is not a one time event at creation, but an on-going process of God making the world right all over again, and this is exactly what the Bible is.
There is a catch though. The life is contingent on the authority. You don’t get the one without the other. If it’s not an authority which is able to correct, rebuke, teach, and cut you, then there will be no life breathed in.
In essence, this is the problem with what Thomas Jefferson did. In other words, the problem is: what if Perelandra is right?
Perelandra is the second book of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. In it the main character meets an angel that appears as a shaft of light. The shaft of light is not straight up and down, but is slanted at an angle that makes it feel like vertigo to even look at, but as he continues to look he begins to realize that it is not the angle of the light that is at a slant, but himself. He realizes that here is something from Outside, which appears bent and slanted because it is being viewed from the Inside, but if he could but see all the way through he would realize that this light was aligned with the plumb line of Deep Heaven. It is the voice from Outside spoken into the world. I love this scene because it fits the Biblical worldview so well. This is what the Bible says about itself, that it too is the voice spoken from the outside.
According to the Biblical worldview that description fits the universe like a lock fits a key. A few things follow from this. First, as we read the Bible parts of it will appear slanted, bent, twisted at times. It is not a question of If but of When. Read it and you will encounter those places which rub against the grain of your natural preferences or tell you things you don’t want to hear. Also, if that is true, the last thing you can ever do it cut it out. If it is really the Voice from Outside then those very things that rub at your natural preferences are the things that you need to be told, it is those things that are wrapped up in the way the Bible imparts life. If you cut it, it becomes a dead end. You will be left with a handful of things you think of as “diamonds,” but it will only be a mirror. You might as well record your own voice and play it back to yourself over and over again. It will be comfortable, but it will be a prison in the end. The Bible will no longer be able to come after you. It can’t cut you. It can’t take you by the shoulders and shake you. It can’t make you uncomfortable ever again. And if it is the Voice from Outside then it absolutely must, in fact, that is exactly what it means to do to you. It is God-breathed for the purpose of unbending you, of aligning you to the plumb line of Deep Heaven. It will feel like vertigo, of course. We’ve all grown in a broken world and grown broken ourselves, and we only want to be given things that look like what we’ve always had. But God means to give us more.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (1), Rethink the Bible (3)]
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2 comments:
Couple of questions for the good people of Veritas. What writings is the writer of 2 Timothy talking about exactly? Surely he is directly referring to the holy writings of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament of 2 Tim 3:15 that give one the wisdom to accept Jesus.
What warrant do we have to jump from the verse talking about the OT and us attaching it artifically to the NT as well?
Additionally, what about the assembly of the NT texts as sacred texts?
When we ask "What is the Bible?", I think these are things we need to carefully examine. I think, like you all, that we can do these things, but is still profitable to work them out instead of just assuming them.
Henry, great comment. I think you can make a strong case that Paul's comment is not necessarily limited to the OT. Certainly, there are passages in the Bible that suggest Paul's writing itself, was already viewed as scripture while he was writing. For instance, 2 Peter 3:15-16 which says, "... just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures."
Peter, at least, viewed Paul's writing as authoritative and on the level of "the other scriptures."
Peter and Paul aw a unity between the OT and NT, not a division. They did not think of it as the OT and NT at all. The OT speaks of the same Christ that the NT does, breathed out by the same God.
You asked "what about the assembly of the NT texts as sacred texts." What did you mean by that? What about its assembly specifically.
-the good people of Veritas
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