The art of biblical interpretation: Inspiration and unity

In this series so far, we’ve looked at the implications of the doctrine of inspiration for reading the Bible. Since the Bible is God’s word, we don’t read it ‘just like any other book’. We revere it as we revere God. We can’t understand the Bible without knowing the Author. We receive every part of the Bible as God’s word, no picking and choosing. This final discussion of inspiration and interpretation focuses on the unity of the Bible.

The whole Bible?

I finished the last post with the point that the Christian takes every part of the Bible as from God. I quoted JI Packer that we have to take all that Scripture declares “without remainder” as God’s word to us.

What does it mean to take all that the Bible declares as God’s word? Does that mean we obey every command and follow every example? How can we take every part of the Bible as God’s word when there is so much variety? The key is to realize that the whole Bible is God’s word, so it has a unified message. That means we have to understand the various parts in light of the whole. The whole Bible is the word of the one Triune God, and its meaning is the total meaning of the entire canon. When we say that “what the Bible says, God says”, we mean the Bible as a whole, the Bible as a total, single piece of communication.

Interpreting the Bible as a unity

This has very important implications for reading the Bible. It is the basic theological reason why we can hold that the Old Testament laws about sacrifices are God’s word, but they do not show Christians what they must do. They are ‘shadows’ of a reality which came in Jesus (Col 2:17), so they ended with the coming of Jesus (Col 2:17; Acts 10:9-16: Heb 9:1–15). You may be familiar with the argument that the Old Testament ceremonial law is fulfilled in Christ and so doesn’t apply to Christians. Notice, though, that it only makes sense if the Bible is a unified whole so that we should understand the Old Testament in light of the New. If that is not so, then either we have to say that the Bible is a jumble of different ideas or that (in this case) the New Testament is God’s word, but the Old Testament isn’t.

So Packer says that accepting the Bible as God’s word means “harmonizing and integrating all that Scripture declares”. It means assuming that there is a unity and harmony in the Bible and that what God says is, finally, the full message in its unity.

Complex unity and the rule of faith

This unity is complex. This is another way in which the study of the Bible is inexhaustible—its riches are found not just in the various parts of each book but also in the connections and tensions between the parts. The very size of Psalm 119 (all 176 verses) reflects the unending riches of God’s word.

Unfolding the meaning of the Bible is never complete, yet that does not mean we never get a handle on its message. Christians have recognized that the gospel—the message of God’s redemption of his people by Christ—is the central message of the Bible. From early times this was summarized in formulations such as the Apostles’ Creed. A gospel summary or the Apostles’ Creed do not say everything that the Bible says, but give an outline of the burden of the biblical message and so guide how we understand it.

In the early church, summaries like the Apostles’ Creed were taken as the ‘rule of faith’, the guide for how to interpret the Bible. The early church writer Irenaeus used the illustration of the Bible as a mosaic. When a mosaic was shipped in small pieces it could be put together in all sorts of ways. It could be a king or a dog. The pieces came with a plan of the right way to make the picture. Bible readers can find different messages in the Bible, but the rule of faith shows what the message is meant to be. Heretics, who reject the rule, come up with apparently plausible pictures that are not what the Bible means. (The illustration is only partial. Unlike the plan of a mosaic, the rule of faith is itself found from the Bible. And it doesn’t dictate every detail about the message of the Bible.)

Going beyond the rule of faith, the disciplines of biblical theology and systematic theology give a wider description of the overall message of the Bible. Biblical theology traces how the message of the Bible develops through the history of God’s work, leading to the climax of Jesus. Systematic theology looks at how the total message of the Bible gives a coherent description of God and his work. These disciplines are only valid because the Bible has a single author, God, and so has a consistent message. When done well, these disciplines are key to helping us keep track of the meaning of the whole Bible.

The unity of the Bible and expository preaching

The unity of the Bible as an overall message leaves a question about those approaches to expository preaching which insist resolutely that a sermon must deal only with a single text or passage. A genuinely Christian sermon can never truly do this, but I have heard it presented as a principle of expository preaching. Clearly every sermon must have some limits: it cannot say everything that could be said. (Indeed the implication of my argument is that a whole lifetime of preaching can never say all that could be said!) However, to insist that the preacher should focus on one passage alone is artificial and untrue to the nature of the Bible. Rather, a preacher’s task is to unfold the passage in its significance within the whole Bible.

When we receive the Bible as God’s word, we are committed to receiving it all with reverence, seeking to know God as we read it and interpreting it as a unity. The next few posts will explore further what God is doing with the Bible—establishing and maintaining a covenant relationship with his people.

Further reading:

K Greene-McCreight, ‘Rule of Faith’ in KJ Vanhoozer (ed), Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 2005, pp. 703-4.