Revelation, Inspiration and Interpretation

In thinking about the inspiration and authority of the Bible, one thing that I think it’s good to keep in mind is the purpose for which the Bible was written. 2 Timothy says that “all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” That is, it is fundamentally a religious book, concerned with leading us to salvation.

With that understanding in mind, maybe it’s more helpful to see the inspiration of Scripture not as a “micro-level” phenomenon (e.g. getting every word, detail, and fact exactly right) but as a “macro-level” phenomenon (i.e. giving us a true and reliable understanding of God’s character, relations with humankind and acts of salvation).

One theory offered by those uncomfortable with inerrantism is that the Bible’s value lies chiefly in being a witness to God’s mighty acts – i.e. a record of the revelatory events contained in the stories of Israel, Jesus and the Church. The Spirit then can use this witness to make the Bible a means of revelation for us. Some interpreters ascribe a position like this to Karl Barth.

A problem with this theory, I think, is that it doesn’t do justice to the belief that the Scriptures themselves are a source of revelation, rather than just a witness to revelation.

Why is this a problem? Because events in and of themselves need to be interpreted to become meaningful. It requires interpretation to see the crossing of the Red Sea as an act of divine deliverance or Jesus’ death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice that reconciles us with God.

So, I would tentatively suggest that what we have in the Bible is the inspired interpretation of those events. That is, the apostles and their followers provided us with the divinely inspired meaning of, e.g. the life and death of Jesus. And consequently this interpretation is authoritative for the church.

This doesn’t mean that the historical facts are unimportant or that it doesn’t matter if the Biblical authors got the basic facts right. But many people witnessed the events of Jesus’ life without coming to believe that he was the Messiah. There is a “gap” between the basic facts and seeing those facts as God’s saving acts.

Obviously the Resurrection was crucial in the apostles’ coming to understand the significance of Jesus. And I believe that the Resurrection was a public physical event (not just a private vision had by Jesus’ followers). But it still requires an act of interpretation to understand the meaning of these events. And since God would presumably want us to understand the proper significance of these events, it seems reasonable to think that the Spirit was at work in guiding the early Christians in their understanding, an understanding that was eventually recorded in the books of the New Testament.

One advantage of this way of looking at the Bible is that it seems, in many cases, to match with what the Biblical authors took themselves to be doing. It’s long been recognized, for instance, that the Gospel writers did not set out to write “objective” biographies of Jesus. What they saw themselves as doing was setting forth the proper theological meaning of the events of Jesus’ life (Which obviously required setting forth the basic facts of that life).

This also shows, incidentally, the limitations for Christian faith of any “quest for the historical Jesus.” If the NT provides us with the inspired and authoritative interpretation of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, then this will exclude certain competing interpretations (the cynic philosopher Jesus, the revolutionary Jesus, etc.). To confess the Bible as inspired is to confess this understanding of Jesus as authoritative for our lives and the life of the church.

I wouldn’t claim that this way of looking at the issue is without problems. But it does seem, at least at first blush, to be a coherent way of speaking about the Bible’s inspiration and authority that avoids the pitfalls of both conservative inerrantism and a liberal view that denies that the Bible is divinely inspired.