Scripture NDT by Packer

Scripture (Lat. scriptura, rendering the Gk. grapheœ, which means 'a writing' and is used some 50 times in the NT for some or all of the OT) is the historic Judaeo-Christian name for the specific literature that the church receives as divine instruction, that is, as God's own witness to himself in the form of human witness concerning his work, will, and ways, and how mankind should worship him. 'Bible', by contrast, is a latter-day Western coinage, the fruit of a medieval misreading of the Gk. biblia ('books') as a feminine singular Lat. noun. 'Scripture' is used in essentially the same sense in both the singular and the plural: 'the Scriptures' are all the items that make up the Bible, viewed as carrying divine content, and 'Scripture' is the same material viewed as one organic unit of divine teaching.

1. Scripture and canon

Scripture expresses and mediates the authority of God, which means, formally, his right to be believed when he speaks and obeyed when [628] he commands; and, materially, the sum total of declarations and directives by which he requires us to live. Hence Scripture is called 'canonical' (Gk. kanoœn, a rule, measure, or standard). The use of 'canon' for a list of books that are canonical in the defined sense is secondary and derivative. The church has always known, more or less clearly, that it did not create a canon by discretionary fiat but received the canon that God created for it. The OT canon (i.e. the 39 books of the 1st-century Palestinian canon, Jesus' Bible) came to the church from the hands, as it were, of Christ and the apostles, for whom Christianity's credentials presupposed the divine authority of the Jewish Scriptures which the Christian facts fulfilled (Mt. 5:17; 26:56; Lk. 4:21; 18:31; Acts 3:18; 13:27–33; Rom. 1:2; 16:25–27; 1 Pet. 1:10–12; 2 Pet. 1:19–21; etc.). The NT canon came from the same source, for it was the Holy Spirit whom Christ sent who enabled the apostles to speak and write divine truth about Jesus and who all along has brought about recognition of apostolic documents containing this truth as canonical. The basis of that recognition was and is a. apostolic authorship or authentication, b. Christ-honouring doctrinal content, in line with the known teaching of other apostles, and c. continuous acknowledgment and spiritually fruitful use of the books within the church from the apostolic age on—a consideration that becomes weightier and more compelling with every passing year. The Protestant claim, that the Holy Spirit decisively authenticates the canonical Scriptures by causing them to impose themselves on believers as a divine rule for faith and life, should be understood in corporate terms—as meaning that at no time has the great body of the church rejected any book now in the canon, and that divine authority is constantly experienced by the faithful when canonical Scripture is read and preached in the congregation.

On the extent of the canon there has not been perfect unanimity: Protestants hold to the list of 66 books found in Athanasius's Festal Letter of 367, in Jerome, and in the canons of the provincial council that met at Carthage in 397; the Council of Trent defined 12 apocryphal (OT) books into the Roman Catholic canon in 1546; the Synod of Jerusalem defined four of these (Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus) into the Eastern Orthodox canon in 1672; Luther rejected James; and so on. But in truth these are small matters: Luther's trouble was simply that he misunderstood James, supposing him to contradict Paul, and the Apocrypha is not important for doctrine. Much more important is the fact that the principles of canonicity to which, however unconvincingly, appeal was made each time, remained constant throughout. Thus, b. above was Luther's warrant for rejecting James and c. was the Catholic and Orthodox warrant for canonizing apocryphal books which, though no part of Christ's Bible, had been both in the lxx. (the Gk. version of the OT, which the church took over in the apostolic age) and in the Vulgate.

2. Scripture and revelation

The historic Christian view, that Scripture is verbal revelation in writing, is largely out of favour today; most theologians will only speak of Scripture as a human record, exposition, and celebration of God in history which is also the instrumental means of God's self-revealing encounter with us in the present. This formula, though true so far (unless 'human' is taken to imply inadequacy, incoherence, or incorrectness), is theologically incomplete. That Scripture is intrinsically revelation must also be affirmed (see next section). But when this affirmation is not related to God's saving work in history and to the illumining and interpreting work of the Spirit, it too is theologically incomplete. Bible writers depict revelation as a complex work of grace, whereby the creator-become-redeemer brings sinners into relational saving knowledge of himself, and the nature of Scripture as revelation has to be understood within this functional frame of reference.

In revelation, according to Scripture itself, God acts at three linked levels. Level one is revelation on the public stage of history, in a series of redemptive events of which God's verbal predictions and explanations at each stage formed part. This series reached a penultimate climax in the incarnation, atonement, and enthroning of the Son of God and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit. Awaited now is the final climax of Christ's return for judgment and cosmic renewal, which will end history as we know it.

Within this frame emerged level two, revelation in the public records of Scripture. [629] Written public records (Calvin's description of Scripture) are for accuracy and permanent availability. As redemptive revelation unfolded, God caused narrative, explanatory, celebratory, and anticipatory writing to be done that would preserve and spread true knowledge of, and evoke response to, his ongoing work of grace. Canonical Scripture is a providentially given collection of such material in two parts, the OT spanning many centuries as it looks forward and leads up to the Christ who was to come, and the briefer NT garnering the one generation of apostolic witness to the Christ who came and will come again.

Level three is revelation in the personal consciousness of individuals: that is, the gift to sin-blinded humans of a responsive understanding of the God of history and Scripture, whom Jesus disclosed (Mt. 11:25–27; 16:17; 2 Cor. 4:6; Gal. 1:12–16; Eph. 1:17–20; 1 Jn. 5:20). This present and continuing reality of revelation through each believer's life occurs under the enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit, who interprets to us the contents of Scripture, however these are met. The Reformers rightly insisted that as only Scripture, unaugmented from any philosophical or religious source, can bring us to know God, so it is only as the Spirit opens Scripture to us and write its teachings on our hearts that this knowledge becomes reality for us.

Undergirding Scripture's instrumental function at level three is the total trustworthiness that its divine origin guarantees (see Infallibility and Inerrancy). Were the 'public records' incoherent and misleading, the knowledge of God based on them would be correspondingly incoherent and uncertain too. The many who nowadays affirm this to be the case call in question not only the veracity of God as Scripture's primary author, but also his wisdom and competence in communication. If documents designed to make God in Christ known to all generations are untrustworthy and thus inadequate for their purpose, God has indeed failed badly. But only liberal, modernist, existentialist, and process theologies ever require such a conclusion.

3. Scripture and inspiration

The historic description of Scripture as inspired means not that it is inspiring (although it is) but that it is 'God-breathed' (theopneustos, 2 Tim. 3:16), a product of the creator-Spirit's work, always to be viewed as the preaching and teaching of God himself through the words of the worshipping human witnesses through whom the Spirit gave it. Both testaments view the words of Scripture as God's own words. OT passages treat Moses' law as God's utterance (1 Ki. 22:8–16; Ne. 8; Ps. 119; etc.); NT writers view the OT as a whole as 'oracles of God' (Rom. 3:2), prophetic in character (16:26; cf. 1:2; 3:21), written by men whom the Spirit moved and taught (2 Pet. 1:20–21; cf. 1 Pet. 1:10–12). Christ and the NT constantly quote OT texts not merely as recording what men such as Moses, David or Isaiah said through the Spirit (Mk. 7:6–13; 12:36; Rom. 10:5, 20; 11:9), but also as recording what God has said through men (Mt. 19:4–5; Acts 4:25; 28:25; 1 Cor. 6:16; 2 Cor. 6:16; Heb. 1:5–13; 8:5; 8), or what the Holy Spirit says (Heb. 3:7; 10:15). Paul's citing of God's promise to Abraham and threat to Pharaoh as the utterance of Scripture to both (Gal. 3:8; Rom. 9:17) shows how completely he equated statements of Scripture with words of God. And when Paul taught and commanded in Christ's name (2 Thes. 3:6), claiming Christ's authority because he was Christ's apostle (1 Cor. 14:37) and maintaining that both his matter and his words were Spirit-given (1 Cor. 2:9–13), he presented a paradigm of apostolic inspiration that requires the same attitude towards the NT writings that the NT teachers took towards the OT (cf. Christ's own promise and expectation regarding apostolic teaching, Jn. 14:26; 15:26–27; 16:13–15; 17:20, where the present tense is inchoative—'are shortly to believe', 20:21–23). As Scripture, being God-given, 'cannot be broken' (Jn. 10:35), so with apostolic testimony: whether oral or written, it is the guaranteed truth of God, which those who know God and are 'of God' will hear (1 Jn. 4:6; cf. 2:7, 20, 27).

Since the God who created Scripture by sanctifying the authorial efforts of his servants is true and no deceiver, biblical infallibility becomes an article of faith. It was no more necessary that the Bible, being human, should be wrong sometimes than it was for Jesus, being human, to go astray in conduct or teaching. Those who confess a sinless Christ (see Sinlessness of Christ) cannot consistently dismiss this analogous belief in an inerrant Bible. To treat the witness of Christ and the [630] vapostles to the nature of Scriptures as not settling the matter, and to go against them on the point, is in itself illogical, irreverent, and indefensible, quite apart from the way that it undermines the concept of revelation stated above. The right path is to deal with the phenomena of Scripture on the assumption that, being God-given, it is faithful to physical, moral and spiritual fact; for that is the approach that Christianity's founders modelled in their own ministry and authoritatively taught their followers.

4. Scripture, authority and interpretation

Authority is the basic theological issue into which discussions of revelation, inspiration, infallibility and inerrancy, and the necessity, sufficiency, and clarity of Scripture (three classic themes), and also of biblical interpretation, eventually run. What is at issue is the nature and extent of the control that canonical Scripture should exercise over the doctrine, discipline, and devotion of the church and its members. That Scripture mediates the authority of the God who gave it and the Christ to whom it testifies, that it does this by presenting the realities of salvation-history in their universal significance, and that it cannot have authority further than it is in an appropriate sense true (for falsehood has no right to rule) are points of widespread agreement. That the church has no right to read into Scripture, or graft on to it, traditional ideas that cannot be read out of it, and that the individual Christian has no right ever to back his judgment against the Bible, are principles that ought to be generally conceded, though sometimes they are not. (Nor is the helpfulness of the church's heritage of interpretation always recognized, nor is the obligation to maintain rational coherence when interpreting always heeded.) But none can deny that only when rightly interpreted does Scripture actually exercise its rightful authority. A false approach to interpretation will frustrate that authority completely. So some comment on interpretation is needed to round off this article (see also Hermeneutics).

The interpreter's task is to draw from Scripture and apply to thought and life today that body of universal truths about God, humanity, and their mutual relations that the texts yield. Since the biblical books are occasional writings addressed to people and situations of long ago, interpretative method involves unshelling those truths from the particular applications in which we find them embedded and reapplying them to ourselves. But to travel thus from what the text meant historically, to what it means as a word from God for today, is not always easy, certainly not when accuracy is a concern.

To grasp what the text meant (the first step in interpretation) requires grammatico-historical exegesis that takes account of the text's linguistic idiom and literary genre, its geographical, cultural and historical milieu, and the particular life-situation of both writer and first readers, so far as this can be known. One therefore needs to ask where, when, by whom, for what reason, to what end, and with what resources, each book and each part of each book was written. These are the questions of biblical criticism, which thus at a certain level becomes everyone's concern. Answers that treat scriptural writers as deceitful or deluded, however, as a number of critical theories do, should be dismissed as needless and unjustified.

Discerning what the text means in application today (the second step in interpretation), then requires of us two things. The universal truths excavated by exegesis should first be checked to make sure that they square with the covenantal, Christocentric, redemptive, holiness-oriented framework of canonical revelation as a whole (only so dare one believe that one has perceived them aright). Then they should be set to interrogate us 'for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness' (2 Tim. 3:16) as they confront our inadequacies, clarify to us our calling and our hope, and animate us to the activities whereby God's truth is obeyed.

The help of the Holy Spirit must be sought throughout, for only the Spirit enables us to see the meaning and bearing of scriptural principles and to realize the reality of God as the texts set him forth. Without the ministry of the Spirit as authenticator and interpreter of the Scripture that he authored, we shall at best be locked into a barren and mechanical biblicism. Through the Spirit, however, life under the authority of Scripture becomes what it was meant to be—namely, realized communion with the Father and the Son (cf. 1 Jn. 1:3). Living under biblical authority is a prescription not only for theological rectitude but also for spiritual life.

[631]

Bibliography

R. Abba, The Nature and Authority of the Bible (London, 1958); J. Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (London, 1973); K. Barth, CD I.1–2; D. A. Carson and J. Woodbridge (eds.), Scripture and Truth (Leicester, 1983); idem., Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (Leicester, 1986); N. Geisler (ed.), Inerrancy (Grand Rapids, MI, 1979); R. Laird Harris, The Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI, 1957); C. F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, vols. I–IV (Waco, TX 1976–79); idem. (ed.), Revelation and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI, 1958); A. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 1954); B. M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987); J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken (London, 1979); C. Pinnock, Biblical Revelation (Chicago, IL, 1971); idem., The Scripture Principle (San Francisco, CA, 1984); E. Radmacher and R. Preus (eds.), Hermeneutics, Inerrancy, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI, 1984); A. C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons (Exeter, 1980); B. Vawter, Biblical Inspiration (London, 1972); B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia, 1948).

J.I.P.