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BIBLE*
Derived from the Greek biblia (“books”), which, though plural, came to be used as a singular noun and to stand for the collection of books known as the Scriptures. The idea of a collection of holy writings developed early in Hebrew-Christian thought. Daniel in the sixth century BC spoke of a prophetic writing as “the books” (Dn 9:2). The writer of 1 Maccabees (second century BC) referred to the OT as “the holy books” (12:9). Jesus referred to the OT books as “the scriptures” (Mt 21:42), and Paul spoke of them as “the holy scriptures” (Rom 1:2).
The Bible is divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament. Of course, there was no OT and NT before the coming of Christ, only one collection of sacred writings. But after the apostles and their associates produced another body of sacred literature, the church began to refer to the OT and the NT. Actually “testament” is the translation of a Greek word that might better be rendered “covenant.” It denotes an arrangement made by God for the spiritual guidance and benefit of human beings. The covenant is unalterable: humankind may accept it or reject it but cannot change it. “Covenant” is a common OT word; of several covenants described in the OT, the most prominent was the law given to Moses. While Israel was chafing and failing under the Mosaic covenant, God promised them a “new covenant” (Jer 31:31).
The term “new covenant” appears several times in the NT. Jesus used it when he instituted the Lord’s Supper; by it he sought to call attention to the new basis of communion with God he intended to establish by his death (Lk 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25). The apostle Paul also spoke of that new covenant (2 Cor 3:6, 14), as did the writer to the Hebrews (Heb 8:8; 9:11-15). The detailed description of God’s new method of dealing with people (on the basis of the finished work of Christ on the cross) is the subject of the 27 books of the NT. God’s dealing with people in anticipation of the coming of Messiah (Hebrew equivalent of “Christ,” meaning “anointed one”) is certainly the major theme of the 39 books of the OT, though they deal with much more than that. Latin church writers used testamentum to translate “covenant,” and from them the use passed into English; so old and new covenants became OT and NT.
At least the first half of the OT follows a logical and easily understood arrangement. In Genesis through Esther the history of Israel from Abraham to the restoration under Persian auspices appears largely in chronological order. Then follows a group of poetic books and the Major and Minor Prophets (“Major” meaning the books that are relatively long; “Minor” meaning the books that are relatively short).
The NT also follows a generally logical arrangement. It begins with the four Gospels, which describe the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ and his training of disciples to carry on his work after his ascension. The book of Acts continues the narrative where the Gospels end and details the founding of the church and its spread through Mediterranean lands. In the latter part of the book the spotlight focuses on the apostle Paul and his church planting activities. Next come letters Paul addressed to churches he founded or to young ministers he tried to encourage. Following the Pauline Epistles come a group commonly called the General Epistles. The last book, Revelation, is an apocalyptic work.
The OT was written almost entirely in Hebrew with a few isolated passages in Aramaic in the latter books. If one accepts the view that Moses wrote the first five books of the OT (the position the Scripture itself takes), the earliest books of the OT were written by about 1400 BC (provided one accepts the early date proposed for the exodus). If the last book written was Malachi (before 400 BC), composition took place during 1,000 years of time. All the writers (some 30 in number) were Jews: prophets, judges, kings, and other leaders in Israel.
The NT was probably written entirely in Greek. If James was the first to write a NT book before the middle of the first century, and if John was the last (composing Revelation about AD 90), the NT was written during a 50-year period in the latter half of the first century. All the writers (probably nine) were Jews, with the exception of Luke (writer of Luke and Acts), and they came from a variety of walks of life: fishermen, doctor, tax collector, and religious leaders.
In spite of great diversity of authorship in the OT and NT, and composition spanning over 1,500 years, there is remarkable unity in the total thrust. Christians believe that God must have been superintending the production of a divine-human book that would properly present his message to humankind.
The OT and NT are component parts of one divine revelation. The OT describes man and woman in the first paradise on the old earth; the NT concludes with a vision of the new heaven and new earth. The OT sees humankind as fallen from a sinless condition and separated from God; the NT views believers as restored to favor through the sacrifice of Christ. The OT predicts a coming Redeemer who will rescue men and women from eternal condemnation; the NT reveals the Christ who brought salvation. In most of the OT the spotlight focuses on a sacrificial system in which the blood of animals provided a temporary handling of the sin problem; in the New, Christ appeared as the one who came to put an end to all sacrifice—to be himself the supreme sacrifice. In the OT, numerous predictions foretold a coming Messiah who would save his people; in the New, scores of passages detail how those prophecies were minutely fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ: the “son of Abraham” and the “son of David” (Mt 1:1). As Augustine said more than 1,500 years ago, “The New is in the Old contained; the Old is in the New explained.”
The Authority of the Bible
Judge of men and nations, the self-revealed God wields unlimited authority and power. All creaturely authority and power is derived from that of God. As the sovereign Creator of all, the God of the Bible wills and has the right to be obeyed. The power God bestows is a divine trust, a stewardship. God’s creatures are morally accountable for their use or misuse of it. In fallen human society God wills civil government for the promotion of justice and order. He approves an ordering of authoritative and creative relationships in the home by stipulating certain responsibilities of husbands, wives, and children. He wills a pattern of priorities for the church as well: Jesus Christ the head, prophets and apostles through whom redemptive revelation came, and so on. The inspired Scriptures, revealing God’s transcendent will in objective written form, are the rule of faith and conduct through which Christ exercises his divine authority in the lives of Christians.
Revolt against particular authorities has in our time widened into a revolt against all transcendent and external authority. The widespread questioning of authority is condoned and promoted in many academic circles. Philosophers with a radically secular outlook have affirmed that God and the supernatural are mythical conceptions, that natural processes and events comprise the only ultimate reality. All existence is said to be temporal and changing, all beliefs and ideals are declared to be relative to the age and culture in which they appear. Biblical religion, therefore, like all other, is asserted to be merely a cultural phenomenon. The Bible’s claim to divine authority is dismissed by such thinkers; transcendent revelation, fixed truths, and unchanging commandments are set aside as pious fictions.
In the name of man’s supposed “coming of age,” radical secularism champions human autonomy and creative individuality. Man is his own lord and the inventor of his own ideals and values, it is said. He lives in a supposedly purposeless universe that has itself presumably been engendered by a cosmic accident. Therefore, human beings are declared to be wholly free to impose upon nature and history whatever moral criteria they prefer. In such a view, to insist on divinely given truths and values, on transcendent principles, would be to repress self-fulfillment and retard creative personal development. Hence, the radically secular view goes beyond opposing particular external authorities whose claims are considered arbitrary or immoral; radical secularism is aggressively hostile to all external and objective authority, viewing it as intrinsically restrictive of the autonomous human spirit.
Any reader of the Bible recognizes rejection of divine authority and of a definitive revelation of what is right and good as an age-old phenomenon. It is not at all peculiar to contemporary man to “come of age”; it was found already in Eden. Adam and Eve revolted against the will of God in pursuit of individual preference and self-interest. But their revolt was recognized to be sin, not rationalized as philosophical gnosis at the frontiers of evolutionary advance.
If one takes a strictly developmental view, which considers all reality contingent and changing, what basis remains for humanity’s decisively creative role in the universe? How could a purposeless cosmos cater to individual self-fulfillment? Only the biblical alternative of the Creator-Redeemer God, who fashioned human beings for moral obedience and a high spiritual destiny, truly preserves the permanent, universal dignity of the human species. The Bible does so, however, by a demanding call for personal spiritual decision. The Bible sets forth man’s superiority to the animals, his high dignity (“a little lower than God,” Ps 8:5, nasb) because of the divine rational and moral image that he bears by creation. In the context of universal human involvement in Adamic sin, the Bible utters a merciful divine call to redemptive renewal through the mediatorial person and work of Christ. Fallen humanity is invited to experience the Holy Spirit’s renewing work, to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, and to anticipate a final destiny in the eternal presence of the God of justice and justification.
Contemporary rejection of biblical tenets does not rest on any logical demonstration that the case for biblical theism is false; it turns rather on a subjective preference for alternative views of “the good life.”
The Bible is not the only significant reminder that human beings stand daily in responsible relationship to the sovereign God. The Creator reveals his authority in the cosmos, in history, and in inner conscience, a disclosure of the living God that penetrates into the mind of every human being (Rom 1:18-20; 2:12-15). Rebellious suppression of that “general divine revelation” does not succeed in wholly suspending a fearsome sense of final divine accountability (1:32). Yet it is the Bible as “special revelation” that most clearly confronts our spiritually rebellious race with the reality and authority of God. In the Scriptures, the character and will of God, the meaning of human existence, the nature of the spiritual realm, and the purposes of God for human beings in all ages are stated in propositionally intelligible form that all can understand. The Bible publishes in objective form the criteria by which God judges individuals and nations, and the means of moral recovery and restoration to personal fellowship with him.
Regard for the Bible is therefore decisive for the course of Western culture and in the long run for human civilization generally. Intelligible divine revelation, the basis for belief in the sovereign authority of the Creator-Redeemer God over all human life, rests on the reliability of what Scripture says about God and his purposes. Modern naturalism impugns the authority of the Bible and assails the claim that the Bible is the Word of God written, that is, a transcendently given revelation of the mind and will of God in objective literary form. Scriptural authority is the storm center both in the controversy over revealed religion and in the modern conflict over civilizational values.
The Bible’s View of Itself
The intelligible nature of divine revelation—the presupposition that God’s will is made known in the form of valid truths—is the central presupposition of the authority of the Bible. Much recent neo-Protestant theology demeaned the traditional evangelical emphasis as doctrinaire and static. It insisted instead that the authority of Scripture is to be experienced internally as a witness to divine grace engendering faith and obedience, thus disowning its objective character as universally valid truth. Somewhat inconsistently, almost all neo-Protestant theologians have appealed to the record to support cognitively whatever fragments of the whole seem to coincide with their divergent views, even though they disavow the Bible as a specially revealed corpus of authoritative divine teaching. If God’s revelational disclosure to chosen prophets and apostles is to be considered meaningful and true, it must be given not merely in isolated concepts capable of diverse meanings but in sentences or propositions. A proposition—that is, a subject, predicate, and connecting verb (or “copula”)—constitutes the minimal logical unit of intelligible communication. The OT prophetic formula “Thus saith the Lord” characteristically introduced propositionally disclosed truth. Jesus Christ employed the distinctive formula “But I say unto you” to introduce logically formed sentences that he represented as the veritable word or doctrine of God.
The Bible is authoritative because it is divinely authorized; in its own terms, “all Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tm 3:16, niv). According to this passage, the whole OT (or any element of it) is divinely inspired. Extension of the same claim to the NT is not expressly stated, but it is not merely implied. The New Testament contains indications that its content was to be viewed, and was in fact viewed, as no less authoritative than the Old. The apostle Paul’s writings are catalogued with “other Scriptures” (2 Pt 3:15-16). Under the heading of “Scripture,” 1 Timothy 5:18 cites Luke 10:7 alongside Deuteronomy 25:4 (cf. 1 Cor 9:9). The book of Revelation, moreover, claims divine origin (1:1-3) and employs the term “prophecy” in the OT sense (22:9-10, 18). The apostles did not distinguish their spoken and written teaching but expressly declared their inspired proclamation to be the word of God (1 Cor 4:1; 2 Cor 5:20; 1 Thes 2:13).
The Bible remains the most extensively printed, most widely translated, and most frequently read book in the world. Its words have been treasured in the hearts of multitudes like none other’s. All who have received its gifts of wisdom and promises of new life and power were at first strangers to its redemptive message, and many were hostile to its teaching and spiritual demands. In all generations its power to challenge persons of all races and lands has been demonstrated. Those who cherish the Book because it sustains future hope, brings meaning and power to the present, and correlates a misused past with the forgiving grace of God would not long experience such inner rewards if Scripture were not known to them as the authoritative, divinely revealed truth. To the Christian, Scripture is the Word of God given in the objective form of propositional truths through divinely inspired prophets and apostles, and the Holy Spirit is the giver of faith through that word.
Preview
Several other major articles on the Bible follow:
• Bible, Manuscripts and Text of the (Old Testament)
• Bible, Manuscripts and Text of the (New Testament)
• Bible, Quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament