Is the Bible the Word of God?

We may as well cut to the chase here. If you believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, literal word of God you may as well know that I don't. I believe that the Bible is the witness of revelation, not revelation itself.

I believe that we live in a fallen world, separated from God by Sin and that we are redeemed from this estrangement through the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is how God communicates to us, by making these things happen – the Incarnation, the Resurrection, Pentecost – these are where we see God at work. God has done all this and he will do more, I believe in eternal life, I believe that his Kingdom will come. God has acted, he acts and he will act. The Bible is the human record of witnesses to this divine action. That means that it must be read with the utmost seriousness so that we may, as Barth puts it, discover the Word in the words. But it is the record of revelation, not revelation itself.

This doesn’t mean that it can be read in the same way as any other human text. We must take seriously that it is written by men who have heard or seen the Word of God but that does not make their own words divine. We need to reach beyond the words of Paul to the Word of God that was spoken to Paul. We must read the Bible with reverence and with faith but we must not make an idol of it. I don’t wish to insult those who believe in the doctrine of inspiration, what they believe is possible since all things are possible with God but I don’t think that it is necessary or even likely.

All of which makes me perfectly placed to be shot by both sides in the current theological climate. I take the content of the Bible far too seriously for most liberals but I know that evangelicals will find me equally suspect for not believing in total inspiration. The accusation will be that I don’t accept ALL of the Bible because I want to pick and choose from what God has to say to me. My answer would be that I am afraid that by reading the Bible in that way I would actually be importing human ideas into the Word of God by concentrating more on what is said by the apostles and prophets than on what is done that they witness. God acts and humans witness this. God’s ‘speech’ is in the events of revelation not in the texts which describe them.

Ultimately the Bible is important because Jesus is in it, not the other way round.

My view on this, as with many things, is broadly taken from Karl Barth, himself far too evangelical for the liberals and too liberal for the evangelicals. He commented "Were I driven to choose between the historical-critical method and the venerable doctrine of inspiration, I should without hesitation adopt the latter, which has a broader, deeper, more important justification. Fortunately, I am not compelled to choose between the two."