Can we trust the Bible to be God’s living and holy word? The most direct response to this question is, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
In July of 1961 the Green Bay Packers were returning to training camp after losing to the Philadelphia Eagles 17-13 in the NFL championship game where they squandered the lead late in the 4th quarter. The Packers coach was Vince Lombardi, and a biographer wrote that the Packers had been thinking about this brutal loss for the entire off-season and now, training camp had arrived, and it was time to get to work. The players were eager to advance their game to the next level and start working on the details that would help them win a championship.[1] Lombardi had a different idea, however. As the team gathered for their first practice Lombardi held up the football and he said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” He began with the most elemental statement of all, and then he took these professional athletes back to the basic fundamentals of their craft. Lombardi told them, “if you see a football on the ground pick it up, if somebody hands you the ball run with it, if you see a football in the air catch it!”
That day in training camp became the beginning of a football dynasty as the Packers would go on to win 5 NFL championships, including the first two Super Bowls, over the next 7 seasons.
Lombardi makes a good case for a consistent commitment to practicing the fundamentals. In the past generation (or so), there has been a chorus of theological voices, including the late Tim Keller that have encouraged the Church, in various ways, toward a “gospel-centered” or “cross-centered” faith. One of Keller’s more famous quotes was, “The gospel is not the A B Cs of the Christian life; it is the A-Z of the Christian life.” So, rather than moving on from the basics of the Christian faith these voices would have us go deeper into the basics and find true Christian maturity in the basics of the Christian faith.
From seminary Professor of Preaching, Jeff Arthurs’ book, Preaching as Reminding: Stirring Memory in an Age of Forgetfulness[2]: Preachers “remind the faithful of what they already know when knowledge has faded, and conviction cooled. We “fan the flames” (p. 3). We see this for example through what Peter says in 2 Peter 1:12-13 “…to stir you up by way of reminder…” And so, “Ministers must learn to stir memory, not simply repeat threadbare platitudes” (p. 5).
Martin Luther, famously said that we are to preach the gospel to ourselves every day (and even to the Devil, when we need to resist him!).[3]
Three simplified degrees of perceived inspiration related to the Bible:
- Natural Inspiration says, the Bible is human writing with great insight into the human condition—on a par with the Greek Philosophers, or Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky.
- Partial Inspiration says, the Bible is true in matters of faith but not necessarily true in matters of science, archaeology, history and/or ethics. What we don’t want to do is make the same mistake the Church made when Copernicus and later, Galileo, discovered the earth actually revolved around the sun. Contemporary theologians rigidly concluded that a moving earth and a stationary sun were in conflict with literal interpretations of Scripture and moved to debunk the scientific discoveries and threaten the scientists.
- Full Inspiration states the Bible is accurate and authoritative in all matters.
A typical church with a commitment to the historic Christian creeds would have a doctrinal statement that reads something like this, “We believe that all Scripture, by which we understand the whole book called THE BIBLE, is given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; that it is inerrant in the original writing and that its teaching and authority is absolute, supreme, and final.”
Does that mean the translation that you read is free from error? No. We rely on Greek, Hebrew and contextual scholars to help us translate and determine the best way to transliterate a word or phrase from the original language into English. Sometimes it’s best said in a phrase-by-phrase translation like the NIV, or a word-for-word translation like the NASB, or the ESV.
An important question that deserves an answer is, should we believe in full inspiration?
The doctrine of Full Biblical Inspiration (or plenary inspiration) states that the human writers and the canonizers of the Bible were led by the Holy Spirit with the result that both the Old and New Testament writings are what Paul told Timothy: “All Scripture is God-breathed” and asserts that every part of the Bible is equally inspired by God.
There are four considerations regarding Full Inspiration (with the understanding that a lot more could and should be said) …
The Unity of the Bible, Fulfilled Prophecy, Our Understanding of God, and the Trust Jesus showed in the Old Testament Scriptures
Let’s consider them one at a time…
1. The Unity of the Bible. The Bible is a really remarkable book written over approximately 1,500 years (1400 BC to AD 90) by approximately 40 different authors, on 3 different continents [4] and in 3 different languages, and yet it all blends together as one story of salvation, one metanarrative.
Because of this prolonged internal consistency, it really seems like there was a single person writing, and guiding the different narratives of Moses, Isaiah, the Gospel writers, and Paul, et al.
Consider how the Declaration of Independence was written. The Continental Congress commissioned a committee of five to write it—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and two other lessor known guys. But when the five of them got together they couldn’t make any headway, so the other four asked Jefferson to write the first draft and the others would edit it and then they’d present it to the Continental Congress. So, five guys in the same room, all of whom agreed on the basics of our emerging republic, but they still couldn’t write it as a committee. And yet here we have this book that took 1,500 years to write and the majority of the authors didn’t even know each other and yet our Bible contains one grand metanarrative of creation, fall, and redemption with a free and total salvation offered to every tribe and tongue through The Messiah, Jesus Christ, who condescended to leave the beauty, majesty and perfection of heaven to come down into our brokenness and live a perfect, sin-free life and die a criminal’s death so that we could have free and total access to a holy God.
2. Fulfilled Prophecy. The Bible contains thousands of prophecies that were fulfilled with uncanny precision, including 300 specific prophecies in the OT that have been fulfilled in detail through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most of these prophecies were written thousands of years before Christ, all of which were realized. We need to keep in mind that these OT authors didn’t have full awareness of what they were writing. Here’s what it looks like: somebody is standing outside of the time space continuum and inspiring the authors. Here’s one example: David in Psalm 22 (14-18), which is a prophetic overview of the crucifixion, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It is melted within me. 15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; and You lay me in the dust of death. 16 For dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me; They pierced my hands and my feet. 17 I can count all my bones. They look, they stare at me; 18 They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” –Psalm 22:14-18 This was written about 1,000 years before Christ and the earliest historical record of crucifixion dates to approximately the 6th century BC.[5]
The odds of this depiction of the crucifixion happening by chance are less than one followed by 2,000 zeros. Here’s what one scholar said: “The very dimension of the sheer fulfillment of the prophecies of the OT Scriptures should be enough to convince anyone that we are dealing with a supernatural piece of literature.”[6]
So, this topic of fulfilled prophecy is essential, and I would say, we need to let it affect how we grapple with theology, morality, and ethics.
3. Our Understanding of God. So, if there is a God, Full Inspiration would rest in the belief that an eternal God would be active and intentional in communicating. Not just some force like Star Wars and not a distant God that created the world and then sits back to let it spin. Active and intentional Jesus followers believe that God is an active and intentional communicator. Another way to say this is God is love (1 Jn 4:16) and so we’re not surprised, that God would communicate through the beauty and wonder of creation as well as personal encounters, and through inspired writings.
For years, I would relate that my conversion took place on July 24, 1974. Eventually, my study of theology revealed that I was not converted on July 24, 1974. What happened at that (Cru) gathering was a realization that the Bible was true—and I was actually kind of angry about it.
God longs to be known, yet we don’t have the ability in ourselves to know God fully on this side of heaven. The best we can do is to position ourselves to encounter God—mainly through the overlapping disciplines of study, meditation, and worship. Some of the best advice that I have tried to put into practice is, “don’t just read the Bible but let the Bible read you.”
And finally, in terms of our understanding of God, one of my mentors used to relate the Bible to a menu at a restaurant. He would say we don’t eat the menu, but the menu guides us as we seek to satisfy our hunger and longing. The Bible is intended to be a menu to satisfy the hunger and longing of our souls to know and be known by God.
The Trust that Jesus Showed in the Old Testament Scriptures. Jesus quoted the OT often, and here’s just one example: Mark 12:36. Jesus quotes Psalm 110, “David himself speaking by the Holy Spirit declared…” While Jesus did spend some time reinterpreting (and intensifying) the OT, as we see with the six “you have heard it said…but I say to you…” in Mat 5, we see repeatedly that Jesus had full confidence that what we know as the OT was “God-breathed.”
In conclusion, I would acknowledge that there is SO much more that we can say about the belief in the full inspiration of the Bible, but allow me to close with two thoughts…
1. I think CS Lewis can be quite helpful here… “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.” –CS Lewis[7]
And finally,
2. I hope your church can be a community that is generous and patient with those who are currently deconstructing their faith. Deconstruction is not necessarily synonymous with deconversion. I hope your church can be a safe space for skeptics, strugglers, and doubters.
My view of the last 5-years… With all that has happened—the pandemic, the deep cultural and political polarization’s, here’s what I believe happened, and is still happening, I see Jesus in the Temple turning over tables. Jesus is still turning over tables in denominations, in churches, and in our own lives. I believe we are being provided with an opportunity to reset, to re-focus, to pray, and to listen. If I had the opportunity to prophesy to the American Church, I would take us to 2 Cor 11:3: “But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”
My hope is that the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ will be the basis from which we will apprehend God’s heart for the next season of exceptional ministry fruitfulness.
[1] When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, by David Maraniss.
[2] IVP Academic: 2017.
[3] Tappert, Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel: 116.
[4] Most was written in what is modern-day Israel (Asia). But some passages of Jeremiah were written in Egypt (Africa) and several New Testament epistles were written from cities in Europe.
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14750495/
[6] R.C. Sproul.
[7] From a letter to Mrs. Johnson on November 8, 1952, and in response to several questions that she asked of him. As noted in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 3 she had inquired “Is the Bible Infallible?”
Gregg A. Caruso 