Scripture, Authority, and Faith

An an Evangelical Christian, one of the things I just love to say, is that I take the Bible seriously. One of our great-grandaddy’s, John Stott, once said that this is the hallmark of Evangelical Christianity – the disposition to believe whatever the Bible can be accurately shown to teach, and to allow it to shape your life.

However, this statement has its limits. It is clearly polemical, implying that all other Christians don’t take the Bible seriously. It is also not that illuminating. ‘What exactly would it be to take the Bible seriously?’ you might genuinely ask. Here is one of the more thought-provoking treatments of this question that attempts to fill out the notion.

If we need to say more about the Scriptures than that they are authorized, perhaps we may follow John Webster in speaking of their ‘sanctification’ for their work. That means simply that God has set them apart. As he  has set apart a particular member of the that race for the salvation of the world, so he has set apart particular  writers to bear a definite and decisive  testimony to what he has done. It was, of course, a human testimony they had to bear, a work performed in human ways by human servants. In a thousand ways, the texts that lie between the covers of our Bibles show that they are the product of painstaking and creative human labor and reception. But we must be careful what we make of that word ‘human’. If we glide from speaking of their humanity into implying some kind of inadequacy in them, as though their being human were a shameful secret we have laid bare, a deficiency we are now in a position to patch up, then it is we, not they, that must stand  charged with ignorance and superstition. The humanity of the Scriptures does not entitle us to patronize them. Just as we speak of the sinlessness of the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and some Christians speak of the immaculate human conception of the Virgin Mary, so we may speak quite appropriately of a perfection of Holy Scripture. Its perfection is sui generis, a fitness for its own assigned task. The perfection of the Psalms does not consist in their being the most perfectly metrical verses or containing the most perfect poetic imagery. The perfection of the letters of Paul does not consist in their being the highest examples of epistolary elegance. Neither does the perfection of the historical books consist in their being the most unambiguous records or the  most discerning evaluation of sources.

The only perfection that counts is this: that God truly attests himself and his deeds through this poetry, these letters, this history. The faith required of the reader of Holy Scripture  is obedience to the testimony that God bears within them, and that is one and the same as the faith that  leads to salvation.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis (2008), p. 55-56