were every copy of the bible destroyed
I came across a new blog today courtesy of Leighton. And I was struck by the eloquence of this post. It was hard to select a part of it to quote as it is all well worth reading and commenting on, in the interests of engendering a positive discussion of the differences in viewpoints about the bible. So here is a taste anyway:
I want you to know that I am not anti or against the bible. I do not view it with suspicion, I do not think that it cannot be trusted. It is my family history, a legacy that has been handed on to me from the very friends of Jesus who lived and travelled with him for those three years. It has been handed down from one generation of Christians to the next because each has recognised its value and worth in telling the story of Jesus in a way that is faithful and true, written by friends and loved ones who were faithful and true to the best of their ability. The community of God’s people have always upheld the scriptures’ worth and value for the Christian, and I do not deny it. But what the scriptures do is lead me to the God, not contained in its pages, but described in its pages who in fact cannot be contained! My study of the bible allows me to learn new things about the character of God, and his dealings with humanity. But ultimately if all the bible does is inform me about God then it has failed, or I have failed it. The bible exists to help me establish and maintain a relationship with the true and living God. Were I to lose my copies of the bible, that relationship would remain. Were every copy of the bible in the whole world to be destroyed, God would be none the less. Had the New Testament never been written, Jesus Christ would still live, and reign. He would still build his church, and people would still bow the knee to him. Christianity is served by the bible, but it does not depend upon it. Christianity depends upon the loving faithfulness of God, of which the bible is but one example in so many.
Anyway, go and read the whole post and comment on it there.
April 5th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
Bother. I had hoped it would be a very long article that raises the question as to whether, in either the old testament or new, the phrase “the word of God” was ever used to talk about a canon of Scripture. What can I say? It was late, I lacked coffee, and I don’t have all the answers, just questions that keep me up at night.
April 5th, 2005 at 2:19 pm
the_blacke, don’t get down about it. Homer has a very neat way of avoiding the issues.
Your piece made me think exactly that….made me review my reading of passages such as John 1…. kept me thinking a lot.
Keep digging.
April 5th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Homer….
“that is merely a very long aticle to state that he doesn’t believe the N/T is the word of God.He is a bit al over the place with regard to the O/T.”
Ok - fair enough, if that’s how you read it. But he does argue his thesis cogently.
How would you disagree? In cogent, cohesive argument.
April 5th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Can I put it another way.
God keeps us informed in the O/T from the start to Malachi and then decides to stay mute when Jesus comes to save the World? After all the signs he promises which would show the Messiah.
What is he point of that? How would we know how we are to be saved if the word of God did not persist in that time?
Ot to put in another way. If you people get confused over things such as unrepentant sinners, Pharisees, legalism now when it is in black and white imagine the scene if there wasn’t any bible.
April 5th, 2005 at 5:37 pm
I think the point of the discussion is that God doesn’t stay mute, and indeed he was obviously not moot in the times prior to the books and letters of the bible being committed to parchment.
And I don’t think that anyone here is suggesting that God doesn’t speak powerfully through the Greek Testament. He does.
If God is confined only to speaking through the scriptures, then you are faced with the difficulty of explaining whether God communicated with humankind in the period prior to the writing and assembling of the canon.
You say
How would we know how we are to be saved if the word of God did not persist in that time?
And I agree (if I am understanding you correctly). God must have been able to communicate in that time. However, if you choose to describe that communication and relationship as “the word of God” then the word of God must be more than simply the text on the page.
As for confused, I believe that we can never fully know God in the sense that we can know physics or even know the bible. If he were capable of being fully known by us, then he would not be God. So I don’t know that there is really a good argument for confining God to the pages of the bible to reduce confusion. It just limits God.
April 5th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
We fear… therefore we want to control.
For some this happens in their relationships, for others in their jobs and for others in their faith.
April 5th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
Phil, that’s an interesting observation. In her book The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong talks about the links between people undergoing an experience of loss of control, and the rise of religious fundamentalism in response. It appears that when we fear that our world (our faith, our culture, our morality) is under attack, that often we become more insistant about “returning to the basics / good old days”. She plots this across Judaism, Islam and Christianity, though I suspect we would see similar patterns at work in, for example, the “white Australia” policy.
April 5th, 2005 at 7:35 pm
Yeah but believing in the Bible is not the same as creating a fundamentalist dangerous planting bombs in abortion clinics type of christianity. It simply is not. And nor can it be compared with extremist muslims, jews etc. Any faith attracts dangerous extremists… but thats not what believing in an UNCHANGING God is about…
Sure… I’d have no less a relationship with God if every copy of the Bible was destroyed. But if i had never read it, if any children i might one day have never got to read it…. would we be able to understand firstly God generally, and more importantly, Jesus christ as he was when he walked among us…. no i dont believe so. Relying on feely emotions and not having the written word to keep us on a reasonably solid foundation is potentially dangerous. Yeah sure God leads and speaks today. But if he appears to speak in contradiction to his written word… there is a problem…
April 5th, 2005 at 10:51 pm
Yes, I agree Heath. There is no doubt that the bible is a good thing, valuable thing to guide us in the discernment of what is God etc. But, that is not the point being argued.. but rather that God does speak and can experienced outside the bible.
April 5th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
Hmm, I am losing track of the argument here. And aaugh we are wading into huge topic here and I know I will soon be out of my depth and likely to be misunderstood anyway.
If I’ve understood you correctly Phil, yes God is not silent. He is constantly speaking. From all eternity, ’speaking’ characterizes the communication within the Trinity - and here I am not talking mere words. All speech originates with the persons of the Trinity.
I wouldn’t say that the Bible is the ONLY way he speaks to us …in fact I wonder if that statement sits on top of some false premise.
I would agree that some Christians border on bibliolatry - which I think was one of the points of Leighton’s post.
I just wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to dismiss the Bible’s significance as part of God’s communication to us.
I’m not too sure of Homer’s point in the last few comments for me to respond to them.
April 5th, 2005 at 11:47 pm
Yes I agree with what you have written here Saint. I am certainly not in any hurry to dismiss the bible’s significance as part of God’s commuunication. I merely want to say that God communicates in this way AND other ways.
April 6th, 2005 at 1:22 am
Yep, and once you start ‘unpacking’ that,(just had to throw in another one of my most hated overused words in present day Aussie Christian lingo), how God communicates with us and we with him you really get into amazing territory. And I would say it is always by His Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, Jesus who is the God who speaks, the word of God that is spoken to us, the perfectly obedient human listener to that word, and the one who speaks to God the perfect human response to the word of God, and because of whom and through whom we are able to speak to God the Father, and address Him as Abba, and in whom we are able to…..augh.
I should stop visiting this blog late at night - it hurts my brain but it’s often good exercise for the soul!
April 6th, 2005 at 9:05 am
saint, I know exactly how you feel about that. Late night blogging / blogreading is a dangerous passtime!
With respect to the bible (and trying to veer back on track after my diversion with regards to fear, control, and fundamentalism, which was intended to make no point whatsoever, just the lateral leap of a coffee-deprived brain!!!), as far as I am concerned, one thing is absolutely certain. Were we to lose every copy of the bible, the church would suffer a terrible loss. On some levels it would feel like becoming orphans, that the record of our family history is gone. I think also that it would probably result in even greater disunity throughout the church (if that were possible) as people started to argue about whose memory of the bible was more accurate. Which bible do you trust? The Billy Graham version? The N.T. Wright version? What about Tony Campolo’s version? In practice these things would be even messier than they are now (at present, we can’t agree on how the bible should be appropriately interpretted. How would we be were then???).
But, despite that great and tragic loss, I don’t believe that God would be in any way diminished. I don’t believe that the efficacy of Jesus’ work would be dented by that. And therefore, given that (a) God is still God, (b) God’s action for rescuing humanity through Jesus is undiminished, and (c) the Holy Spirit is still present and active in the church and in the world, I would have to conclude that God’s “creation / humanity project” would not be derailed by such an event.
Obviously such a thing is undesirable - we, the church, would suffer a tremendous loss, were the bible lost to us. But if I am right in saying that it wouldn’t be a show-stopper for God - that he wouldn’t just throw his hands up in the air and say “bugger, now they’ve blown it!” - then perhaps we need to reflect upon the ways in which we approach the bible now. What do you think?
April 6th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
teo things, no-one on here has said that reading the bible is the ONLY way that god talks to us. It is the main way however.
If we didn’t have the bible then we would be no different to the Jews in the O/T in how they acted when they didn’t have just the torah.
Josiah knew instantly what it meant when the scrolls were discovered.
Remember part of the reaon for reading the O/T is not to repeat their ways.
April 6th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
Sorry Homer, then I have misunderstood what you were saying earlier in the thread with comments such as this:
Without the bible god would not be able to talk to you.
So in that case it appears that everyone is in abundant agreement that we can learn of God through the bible and also in other ways. I might start another thread tonight to move onto other aspects of the discussion.
April 6th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
Dan, the two statements are not inconsistent.
without the bible how would you know whether it was god or Satan talking to you in a dream/vision?
April 6th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Good words the_blacke. God indeed would not be thwarted. Not a show stopper at all (nothing is for him!)
Although it seems to me that leaving us the written word (including the whole process of how the documents were written and edited and eventually condified) was part of his plan. Kind of an organic part of his action (words fail me at this point). As to whether his plan this side of glory includes us losing the Bible, well I don’t know and I’m not praying for it!
April 6th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
OK, while I think we are arguing about some strange hypotheticals here, Homer asks: without the bible how would you know whether it was god or Satan talking to you in a dream/vision?
Well Homer, the Pentateuch was written long after the events it described, how did Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and everyone else know it was Yahweh speaking to them?
(yes I know it is a big question …)
April 6th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
I read this post the other day, and dutifully followed the link and left a comment on the original thread, as instructed. Now I come back and find that there are 48 comments here… if I’d known that the coversation was happening here I’d have been on it.
April 7th, 2005 at 8:24 am
Good question Saint.
They had to go by their best judgement.
We aren’t in that situation.
We have something to know whether it is indeed God speaking to us or not.
Mind you given we know the cross and ressurection and Jesus is coming back to judge I wonder what he would add.