Julie

I think it’s contextual, isn’t it? I think we want to recognise that the different books, the different genres, were written in a specific place and time. And so the danger is that we don’t understand the culture in which the Bible is rooted and we then take something out of context and apply it wrongly. And we can see the damage that’s done throughout the centuries. So one way the Bible is unique is that it’s contextual. We’ve got to remember that.

But yet miraculously there are phrases, verses and passages that I think contain an eternal truth. God is love. That is true and will eternally be so. So there’s also something mysterious about it. 

Craig

I suppose another of the very obvious ways in which it’s unique is the fact that it’s written by many different people over a very long period of time, and there aren’t any other documents I can think of that are formed like that. And so I guess our confidence has to be that somehow those who wrote it were inspired by the Spirit. We’ll dig a bit more deeply into what we might mean by that as we go on, but although there are some contradictions, there’s also a sense of coherence. And that’s incredible, isn’t it?

One of the big mistakes people make when viewing the contradictions is to conclude that this means the Bible is somehow unreliable. It all depends what we understand the document, or documents, to be. If they were somehow type-written by God using humans as his typewriter, mistakes or contradictions are indeed a major problem. But if the Bible contains eye-witness accounts, and records the developing theologies of its various writers, we shouldn’t be surprised that there are disagreements within it.

If the four of us were walking along the street and witnessed an event which we were later asked to describe it’s obvious that, whilst we might agree on the basic facts, there would be some factual details that would tax our memories, and we would be very unlikely to agree when it came to interpreting what we’d seen.

In much the same way, the Bible contains accounts of individuals who believe so passionately that their lives need to match up with their convictions. So we read about people wrestling. Wrestling with ideas, both about God and about how they should live. And we read about good people disagreeing. They disagree because they think living their faith is so vitally important. So when we use the Bible in discernment it is really important to recognise that we are joining the characters we read about, and like them, we are trying to make sense of how we should live.

Roy

Yes, there is so much diversity in it. I think it’s amazing that the Bible comprising of 66 books, written over a period of something like 1600 years by about 40 different authors, nevertheless has a consistency in the narrative that speaks of God’s love for the world, and there is also a clear redemptive plan. I think there is a unity in scripture, in the midst of its diversity, which is just kind of amazing.

And that touches on the inspiration thing. The combination of ideas of God the divine, together with human elements, which I think adds weight and authority to scripture. Despite the span of years over which the scriptures were written and compiled there is such harmony of thought. I think that’s quite profound.

Dave

Yeah, and that leads on to two further ways in which I see the Bible being unique or special: compilation and preservation. So the fact is that it has been put together by this enormous array of people and yet it reads like a novel, in a manner of speaking, which is one way I think we should read the Bible. We should read it as a novel. We tend to read it as a textbook and yet we should read it as if it’s a love story.

It was put together by the early church and this process led to big arguments over who had the authority to pick the books that were reckoned to have apostolic authority, and were therefore accepted as genuine.

I think the other thing that makes it special is its preservation because, when you look back, there were various attempts to destroy the scriptures. I’m preparing some thoughts on the book of Hebrews for some teaching at church at the moment, and when you consider the persecutions that went on, which attempted to silence or kill the people who knew the stories. Then, during the Great Persecution set in motion by Emperor Diocletian, a concerted attempt was also made to destroy the written records, and yet somehow it has survived. Largely because copies were hidden by people who valued it, I suspect.

Simon

I’d like to address one of the elephants in the room. As someone who has lived in a Muslim majority country, and currently live in a neighbourhood where the long-term residents are probably majority Muslim, I’ve had lots of conversations with Imams and Muslim friends and neighbours. Although this is an oversimplification, it would be fair to say that Muslims have an understanding of the nature of the Quran which is similar to our understanding of Jesus. The Quran existed eternally in heaven, and was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed as the once and for all single revelation of God’s will. It’s everything that humanity needs to know about God and God’s will. The Quran exists eternally in an unaltered state, and Muslims love that, and they will sometimes pooh-pooh the Christian scriptures because of all this diversity that we have just talked about. They see that as a sign of how human it is, and that becomes a subset of the problems they have with the Christian idea of the incarnation. ‘How could God become a human being? That’s completely impossible.’

I know that over the centuries, Christians have really wanted to bulk up their idea of what the Bible is to try and match this idea of the Quran and I think that’s a terrible mistake because, for me, the uniqueness of the scripture is, as has already been said, this idea of the human and divine meeting. There’s something completely different to it.

As Julie said, it’s something that emerges in history over time. The story of God and God’s people grows and develops and changes over time. Fundamentalist Islamic cultures tend to want to be like the 6th century Arab world, and fundamentalist Christian cultures also seem to want to move backwards, but I think the whole story of the scriptures is of an ongoing conversation and of continuing growth.

For me, that is one of the unique things about the Bible – that there isn’t a single revelation given to us 2000 years ago that we should try to return to. I know there’s a tendency to want that, and I’ve been part of many different communities in which we’ve said, “oh, we want to be just like the 1st century church”, But when you say “What do you mean by that? What does that look like? Do you want to have no antibiotics? What exactly is it that you’re getting at?”, the answer is, “No, don’t be silly”. The Christian anthropologist Charles Kraft says we are not looking to go backwards, but instead to ask ourselves what is the ‘dynamic equivalent’ of Pentecost for us today.

For me, the humanity of the Bible – the multi-vocality and historical specificity – is what makes it unique. If we try to turn it into the Quran, we’re going to create huge, huge problems because it just doesn’t work like that. In fact, if we try to make those claims, we end up making the Bible look bad and ourselves a bit daft.

Craig

Thank you, Simon. That is really helpful because it introduces us to the next question. In the light of everything we’ve said, but especially what you’ve just said, how do we understand the Bible to be inspired?

…to be continued.