The place of the Bible part 1
The Christian faith teaches that it is possible to know God through Jesus Christ. For Jesus is risen from the dead and is alive for evermore. Through the Holy Spirit, he is present in the lives of those who trust and follow him. And so it is perhaps initially surprising that this faith should attach supreme importance to a book, a book which is a collection of documents all written in the ancient world some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. If we can know the living God today, why should we bother with ancient documents? Yet the fact is that Christians do attach, and always have attached, central importance to the Bible. Why is this so?
There is, of course, no need to justify the importance of reading the Bible in general terms. The Bible, more than any other single work, has shaped the development of Western civilization over the last 2,000 years. Without a good knowledge of the Bible, an intelligent understanding of this civilization is not possible. But our present concern is to understand the specific role the Bible has within Christian belief. How does the Bible fit within Christian faith and life today?
What Sort of Book is Bible?
The Bible contains many different writings. At its heart, however, stand the stories which tell how God both spoke and acted in human history.
The early chapters of Genesis set the scene — the world was created by God, but it became twisted and spoiled. The story then tells of how God sought to restore the world by calling the nation of Israel to serve him. The Old Testament recounts the history of Israel from Abraham to Ezra, through its many ups and downs, and shows how God was continually guiding, disciplining and renewing his people.
In the New Testament this whole process reaches a climax — God himself actually becomes a man. When he comes to his people he is rejected and killed by them. Yet he overcomes death and creates a new people to bring a message of forgiveness and new life to all who will receive it.
The importance of this story lies in its being real, historical fact. It is because God has actually done these things that we can know what he is like and receive new life through faith in him. Try setting the Bible history alongside stories such as Superman. However much we might wish to have powers of the kind people have in these stories, we know we never can. The stories are purely imaginary. No one ever has had such powers, and so no one but a child would ever suppose that they could become real for people today.
The new life that the Bible offers is based not on imagination but on fact. It is because certain things happened that the Christian has grounds for belief. Many people misunderstand this. They think that the idea of life after death, for example, is just an attractive idea — something which provides a hopeful perspective for living. But if that is all there is to it, it may ultimately be based upon no more than wishful thinking, a whistling in the dark.
It is because Christ actually did rise from the dead that we can be confident that for others too death will not be the end. But only if it did happen to Christ can we be confident that it can happen again. As the apostle Paul puts it, ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.’ The historical fact provides the basis for belief.
History and interpretation
So then, we know what God is like and we believe in him because of particular things he has done, particular events in which he has acted and made himself known. What do we need to make sense of this knowledge?
We need to know what happened — a reliable historical record, so that we can know what took place, how and when and where. Central to the Bible, therefore, is its historical narrative of how God acted and revealed himself — supremely in the exodus from Egypt and the covenant at Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, and in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in the New.
We need to know what it all means — an authoritative interpretation of the events. Otherwise the events can sometimes be ambiguous; they do not always carry their own interpretation with them. Had we been present at the crucifixion of Jesus, it might have appeared to be just one more public execution among others — perhaps the sad end of a failed revolutionary or idealist.
Even the disciples at the time quite failed to grasp its significance, despite all Jesus had told them. They only saw Jesus suffer and die, and they mourned. They did not see him bearing the sins of the world. It was only later that the full significance of the cross became clear, that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself’.
What we have in the Bible, therefore, is both historical facts and the theological meaning of those facts. The facts alone can be barren or insignificant. The interpretation alone can be arbitrary or ill-founded. Fact and interpretation together provide a true and coherent understanding of God and his dealings with humanity.
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