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Bible
Introduction
Many contemporary protestants, especially evangelicals, speak of the bible as though it were their God. They declare proudly that every decision in their lives is made subject to the bible. The bible is made the pre-eminent authority in all things, and declared to be the authentic and infallible Word of God.
This is a terrible idolatry, for the book is neither God nor the infallible Word of God. It was compiled by committees from a whole range of sources, and the question of what to include remained unresolved for centuries. There is no definitive text, and certainly no definitive translation. It only became widely available at all after the invention of the printing press, three quarters of the way through Christian history to date. It testifies to its various writers’ supposed experiences of God, but it is not God, and should not be treated as God.
Anglican moderation speaks of three authorities interacting: scripture, tradition and reason. Anglican evangelicals speak of placing scripture at the apex of this triangle, with tradition and reason to be judged in the light of scripture. It is a scandal to suggest that human rationality – a divine gift to every human being – is to be forever subjugated to the authority of a book, prohibited from questioning or inquiring on any topic on which the book declares a view; and it is a practical nonsense to insist that tradition be judged in the light of the book, as the book itself is part of that ever-developing tradition: as recently as the sixteenth century, its compilation remained formally undefined, and Martin Luther sought to demote key New Testament texts like James and Hebrews to an appendix, primarily because he disliked their contents.87 Still protestant leaders today wave their black leather bound, gilt edged compilations, proclaiming that every page, every line, has the full and unambiguous authority of God: that this alone is God’s complete and perfect message to the world. Debate is then dominated by the degree of authority the bible should command. In such a highly charged atmosphere, it has become almost impossible to sustain an intelligent discussion about the actual text.
In order to look dispassionately at the actual contents of the bible, let us place reason at the apex of the triangle, and approach the book not as an authority, but as a potential resource, sifting through its contents as we have already sifted through some of the other resources of the western tradition, to determine whether there is anything here that might usefully enrich our understanding of Yahweh Elohim.
The bible as we receive it today is a hugely diverse collection, the work of hundreds of writers and compilers across more than a thousand years, who argue with each other and contradict each other as they apply their own limited human resources to the task of describing the great mystery which is God. The Old Testament specialises in saga, legend, myth, hagiography, poetry, parable and law; the New Testament in reportage and the collected writings of a handful of apostles. None of it was written with the intention of becoming part of the collection we call the bible – and unless we are confident in both Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek, we are also subject to the imprecise science of translation.
87 Over the centuries the Vatican would determine, from time to time, which texts might be read during the liturgy, but never formally defined the limits of what is now understood as The Bible until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. There are many documents in existence, from the second century onwards, containing lists similar to those which constitute the canon of scripture today, but none was formally endorsed by the Vatican or any full council of the church. When the sixteenth century protestant reformers – with their new printing presses – decided that the Bible was their authority, they first had to determine what constituted the bible. Even the definition given in article six of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (promulgated in 1562) sounds strangely unfamiliar, with Ezra and Nehemiah named as the first and second books of Esdras, ‘four prophets the greater’ counting Jeremiah and Lamentations as a single book, and its list of apocryphal fragments, including the Prayer of Manasseh, being unique to the Church of England.