Some time ago, someone asked me what I thought about inerrancy and what those thoughts had to do with the way in which I approach Scripture. In general, I really don't find the notion of inerrancy all that helpful, precisely because it underwrites an understanding of Christian faith that divides those of us who follow Jesus into a couple of "positions" -- liberal and conservative. Those kinds of divisions really aren't helpful (I know I don't fit neatly into those boxes). So I tend to let the whole thing go and aim for more helpful approaches to Scripture.
But what are those approaches, and what do I really think about the Bible.
Let me begin with confessing: There really is no way forward for Christians other than taking the Bible seriously. If we're not going to take Scripture seriously, I don't see how we're going to remain followers of Jesus. So I read and talk about the Bible. A lot. There simply isn't anywhere else to begin and there certainly isn't anywhere one might end in being Christian that avoids the complexities of Scripture.
That means for me, as for every other Christian, the Bible is authoritative.
But where does its authority derive from? What sets this particular collection of texts apart from other collections of other texts?
In earlier times, theologians often said that the Bible is authoritative because it is "inspired", or because it has been authored word-for-word by the Holy Spirit. Thus the Bible qua text was believed to be qualitatively different from all other texts. According to this theory, the authority of the Bible is purely formal. What the Bible actually says is authoritative only because it is written in this particular book -- and this book would still be authoritative no matter what it actually said.
I think that theory is fundamentally flawed. On the one hand, it is historically flawed: Historical criticism has demonstrated that the Bible qua text is no different from other historical texts -- it's just as conditioned and contingent as all other texts. On the other hand, this theory of authority is also theologically flawed. For the important thing about the Bible is precisely what it says. Any theory of inspiration or authority is legitimate only to the extent that it gives primacy to the Bible's message.
In its text-character, the Bible is no different from other texts. The distinctive thing about the Bible is simply what it says, i.e., its message. And this means that the authority of the Bible derives solely from its message.
Let me say that again: The distinctive thing about the Bible, I think, for Christians, is its message. Or, to put it more accurately, what the Bible says about Jesus Christ. Because it witnesses to Jesus Christ -- or, in other words, because it communicates the Gospel -- the Bible is the word of God. In the Bible we hear the Gospel; therefore the Bible is authoritative.
That means the Bible is distinctive materially, not formally. The Bible is not unique because the text itself has a miraculous origin. Rather it's unique because it says something unique, it has a unique message. In other words, the Bible is unique because of the Gospel.
If you approach the Bible this way (which is the way I approach the Bible), you're affirming that the Bible has a kerygmatic core. An evangelical core. Some things in the Bible are simply more important than other things in the Bible.
I'm less concerned with "what the Bible says" (it says lots of things) than I am concerned "what the Bible means" (I think it means only one thing -- Jesus Christ).
If we were to approach the Bible via the seventeenth-century doctrine of inspiration, then a priori it would be impossible to identify a biblical center. If our starting-point was a notion of the word-for-word inspiration of the biblical texts, then we would have no criterion for saying that 1 Corinthians 15 is more central than Jude, or that the Fourth Gospel is more significant than Ruth. (This is the problem every adherent of inerrancy falls into. They construct a house of cards theology in which one card is as necessary as the next card -- and if one card goes, the whole thing just collapses.) Thus the notion that the Bible is formally unique actually tends to reduce everything in the Bible to a single level, so that we are left with no internal criterion by which to interpret the Bible as a whole.
On the other hand, if we approach the Bible with this evangelical core (because the whole Bible is centered in the Gospel from/about Jesus Christ) then the biblical text is (as RPC Hanson puts it somewhere) "a circle of light, with dazzling brightness at the centre and twilight at the edges". I'm not disparaging the edges, but I am saying you can't observe the brilliance of Scripture without seeing its dazzling beauty at its very heart -- the message it conveys about Jesus Christ.
That's what keeps me coming to Scripture again and again.
What does it mean for me to speak of the "inspiration" of Scripture, then?
Christian theology has long spoken of the "inspiration" of Scripture -- so it's a term I think is absolutely essential for claiming the importance of Scripture. The term is adopted from the Vulgate's translation of 2 Timothy 3.16: "omnis scriptura divinitus inspirata". Literally of course, the term θεοπνευστος means "breathed by a god", so that "God-breathed" is a better term than "divinely inspired". I much prefer "God-breathed" to "inspired".
According to the writer of 2 Timothy, then, "all Scripture is God-breathed". This has often been interpreted as a technical statement about the origin of Scripture, as though the biblical texts exist because of a miraculous event of divine authorship. But such an interpretation is really impossible in the context of 2 Timothy 3. For the author is not concerned at all with the origin of the γραφαι, but only with the function and usefulness of these writings within the Christian community. The concern here is not with an event of "inspired authorship" (where it came from) at a specific moment in the past, but rather with the fact that the biblical writings, right here and now among us, are "God-breathed" (what they're good for).
Again, this means that the concept of θεοπνευστος should not be interpreted formally, as a statement about the unique textual character of the biblical writings. It should rather be interpreted materially, as a statement about the unique power and function of these writings.
Let me offer this theological formulation then: When we say that Scripture is "inspired", we mean that God himself breathes out the message of Scripture. The message of Scripture comes to us here and now by the very breath of God. This has nothing to do with a static concept of how Scripture originated in the past, but it has everything to do with how Scripture functions among us in the present.
Or, let me put it even more explicitly: In Holy Scripture, God himself speaks (or "breathes" in the Spirit) the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is "the inspiration of Scripture".
Every word about of the "God-breathed" character of the Bible would be meaningless if Holy Scripture is not understood relative to its pointing to Jesus.
This is the point at which nearly every systematic theologian goes wrong. If we put the doctrine of Scripture as the foundation of theological reflection, we're putting it in the wrong place. The "doctrine of Scripture" is not a fundamental doctrine (this is why those who demand inerrancy are so wrong-headed). Instead, "the doctrine of Scripture" is a derived doctrine. A "consequential" doctrine. It's a doctrine drawn out of the consequences of what we have to say about God in Jesus Christ. The "doctrine of Scripture" comes out of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and the salvation from/about God in Jesus Christ. Those two doctrines come first -- they're the foundation upon which the "doctrine of Scripture" is built.
We don't start with a theological conception of Scripture, but we start with the Gospel of God's saving act in Jesus, and from this standpoint we develop a theological account of Scripture. When a systematic theology (or a course of theological lectures) begins with a "doctrine of Scripture", the result is a formalized and distorted view of Scripture that has lost all contact with Scripture's own subject-matter and significance.
Instead, I think Scripture is itself a trinitarian practice. That's what I meant here.
Our knowledge of God is not derived from a certain collection of supernatural texts; rather our knowledge of God arises from God's own saving self-revelation in Jesus Christ (to which the biblical texts bear witness). In other words, Scripture is not the "foundation" of our knowledge of God, but rather our knowledge of God through the Gospel is the "foundation" of our understanding of Scripture.
My reading Scripture is only made possible by my confession of faith that "Jesus is Lord". That means the only proper basis for the authority and inspiration of Scripture is the Gospel itself.
The Christian Bible begins and ends as the book of Christ. Christ speaks in both Testaments and is their true content. This alone is what makes the Bible the Christian Bible, the book of the Christian Church.
Christians have always considered the Bible is "trustworthy", and I whole-heartedly agree.
But what does that mean?
Here, again, the Bible is important in what it means, not in where it comes from. When we confess that Scripture is trustworthy, we are saying that the message of Scripture is trustworthy, that it is a true and reliable message. (That's another problem with "inerrancy", insisting that the biblical texts has some miraculous nature to them in a way that totally disregards the message itself.)
The Bible is trustworthy because its message is trustworthy. It's trustworthy in the way that preaching is trustworthy -- and this is, of course, entirely different from the trustworthiness of scientific or historical textbooks. In short, the Bible is a trustworthy witness. It is trustworthy because the One to whom it witnesses is faithful and true.
I always go one step further than "inerrancy" and insist that the Bible's trustworthiness is totally outside itself (extra se). The Bible's trustworthiness is the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ himself. The Bible isn't trustworthy on its own. It's trustworthy because it witnesses to Jesus, the Truth of God made visible and known. If the Bible proclaims Jesus, it is trusted. Only in that sense, I think, is the Bible "infallible". The infallibility of the Bible doesn't reside within its own pages. The infallibility of the Bible resides in God made known in Jesus Christ. It is nothing more (or, more accurately, nothing less) than the infallibility of Jesus Christ himself.
It's precisely at this point that I think a number of Reformers got Scripture right. How can we place our confidence in the authority of Scripture? How can we be sure that Scripture is truly the Word of God? To quote Calvin: Scripture requires the witness of the Holy Spirit (again why I prefer the phrase "God-breathed" to "inspired"). We can be sure the Scripture is God's word because God witnesses to God's Self in these words that are spoken through the Spirit. "Our faith", Calvin wrote in the Institutes, "is not established until we have a perfect conviction that God is its author. Thus the highest proof of Scripture is ... the character of God whose speaking it is (a Dei loquentis persona sumitur)" (1.7.4).
We become certain of the authority of Scripture only when we hear God’s voice in Scripture -- i.e., when we hear God himself personally speaking the Gospel. Certainty comes from hearing this voice. To look for certainty anywhere else -- in rational proofs, or in the authority of the Church -- is to betray the authority of Scripture. And to betray the authority of Scripture is to betray the authority of God himself.
I realize this is a rather risky way of putting things. Because there's a great deal of stress put on the connection of Scripture and preaching. But despite those (Bultmannian) risks, I think it's an accurate description which does justice to the kerygmatic character of the biblical writings. I would add, though, that precisely in order to be kerygmatic the Bible must also have a definite historical core, just as preaching itself must have some historical core in order to be true "kerygma" and true "Gospel". (At least in principle, this entails only a minimal historical requirement, even though it does not necessarily limit the scope of historical inquiry. Theologians will notice that I'm taking Käsemann's and Ebeling's critique more seriously than I'm taking Bultmann.)
To describe this connection, this moment between Bible and preaching, quite simply: The Bible is the Word of God because God himself speaks through it, because through it God "breathes" the Gospel. As Karl Barth put it, the Bible is God's Word because it becomes his Word again and again.
I'm less concerned to detect a particular moment that the Bible "became" the Word of God historically than I am that God speaks to us and through this text each time we Christians turn to this text.
The essential point here is that the Word of God is an event that happens. It is not a fixed text, not an object that we could master and possess. The Word of God is God himself speaking and acting; the Word of God is God himself encountering us here and now with a word of salvation. Because this Word happens through the Bible, because God himself elects to speak through this particular text, it is true to say that "the Bible is the Word of God".
Putting it that way makes folks nervous and uncomfortable, I admit. It does me, too. It means that the Bible is normative for us because the Bible is God's election. God has chosen the biblical writers and the biblical texts to be the primary witnesses to the history of his saving act. God has chosen to speak his own Word through the word of these witnesses. God has chosen to assume these witnesses, to take their human words up into his own saving history. God has chosen that these witnesses should be the rule and guide (κανων) for all subsequent speech about himself, so that these witnesses will in turn bring forth new witness, new speech, in each successive historical moment.
Through the Bible -- and through the Bible alone (this is why I could never be a theological liberal) -- we learn what it means to speak the Gospel. And in so far as, guided by the Bible, we do speak the gospel, the Word of God also takes place through our speaking (this was Bonhoeffer's point in his Preaching lectures). This is not a different or lesser Word from the Word that takes place in Scripture. It is the very same Word of God which takes place both in Scripture and in our own Gospel-speaking. But it takes place in our contemporary speaking only to the extent that this speaking remains guided by the primary witnesses of the biblical canon.
I cannot say about Jesus things I have not heard God saying about Jesus in the breathing God breathes in Scripture. At the center of all Christian speech is the Gospel. And any talk about Scripture has to take place from within that evangelical center.
Scripture itself, I think, demands that we take the centrality of this message of (in the dual sense of about and from) Jesus as its own message. In other words, Gospel is not a preconceived theological category we bring to Scripture. It's something we encounter in Scripture itself. It demands to be taken seriously as the very center of everything these texts say. The whole biblical witness is silent if it does not speak "Jesus". That's the point of the apostolic preaching found throughout the New Testament.
In other words, our identification of the Gospel as the core of Scripture is nothing more than an attempt to follow the ancient hermeneutical rule: Scripture interprets itself (Scriptura sui interpres). And this means that we should aim to use the word "Gospel" as it is used in the New Testament itself -- not as a narrow theological slogan but as a fundamentally open concept which remains always related to the decisive saving act of Israel's God in the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Hans Küng offers a useful discussion of the centrality of the gospel in his important book The Church. He notes that "[i]t is certainly possible to look impartially for a 'centre' in Scripture, by working exegetically from the New Testament texts rather than dogmatically from established preconceptions". After all, what was form criticism except a massive (one-sided, but still largely successful) endeavor to identify the Bible's central "Gospel" using critical tools?
But what is this gospel? Küng continues: "On the one hand the word 'gospel' is not restricted to a particular doctrine ... but is fundamentally open; on the other hand, the word 'gospel' in the New Testament is indissolubly linked to the saving event in Jesus Christ". Thus we can identify the Gospel through critical and exegetical research, but this identification will always remain provisional. Precisely because the Gospel is the center of the Bible itself and not some external theological preconception, any identification of the Gospel will always remain open to revision in light of further research into the biblical texts. (Putting it that way will annoy any number of historical critics, but will also make fundamentalists squirm. I realize that. But, again, I think both those camps need to think long and hard about how narrow their view is.)
Küng is also right to point out that the word "Gospel" refers not just to one part of the Bible in isolation from other parts, but to the biblical witness as a whole. And it is precisely the evangelical center of Scripture which allows us to take seriously the witness of Scripture as a unified whole. Without this evangelical center, we would undermine the unity of Scripture either by selecting certain portions of Scripture in isolation from others (as in Marcionism), or by reducing all Scripture to a single "harmonized" level (as in fundamentalism). I don't have any room for either of those options.
The whole Bible -- with all its tensions and divergencies -- is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
This raises the question of the relationship between exegesis and theology. And that's probably, to my own approach, the most important question to answer.
The history of modern theology has been the history of the widening chasm between theology and exegesis. It is, after all, the point at which some of my mentors (especially Stan Hauewas) and I have parted company.
Exegetes would be paralyzed if they had to limit their investigations to the terrain sketched out by dogmatics; and theologians would be paralyzed if they had to wait for all the exegetical problems to be cleared up before making a theological decision.
I think both fields have interrelated, even if distinct, tasks. The task of exegesis is to ask what the Bible says, while the task of theology is to ask what we must say on the basis of the Bible (to paraphrase Karl Barth). In times such as our own, pastors have something to say because our speech has been honed by speaking Jesus such as we have heard in Scripture.
Let me close with a quote from Barth: "God himself not only is the truth and the whole truth, but he is also the revelation and the whole revelation that he is the truth. How could the statement that the Bible is his word be proved in any other way than by an act of free grace by which he himself makes the proof? Would it be the word of God if it could be verified except by him?" (Word of God and the Word of Man).
But what are those approaches, and what do I really think about the Bible.
Let me begin with confessing: There really is no way forward for Christians other than taking the Bible seriously. If we're not going to take Scripture seriously, I don't see how we're going to remain followers of Jesus. So I read and talk about the Bible. A lot. There simply isn't anywhere else to begin and there certainly isn't anywhere one might end in being Christian that avoids the complexities of Scripture.
That means for me, as for every other Christian, the Bible is authoritative.
But where does its authority derive from? What sets this particular collection of texts apart from other collections of other texts?
In earlier times, theologians often said that the Bible is authoritative because it is "inspired", or because it has been authored word-for-word by the Holy Spirit. Thus the Bible qua text was believed to be qualitatively different from all other texts. According to this theory, the authority of the Bible is purely formal. What the Bible actually says is authoritative only because it is written in this particular book -- and this book would still be authoritative no matter what it actually said.
I think that theory is fundamentally flawed. On the one hand, it is historically flawed: Historical criticism has demonstrated that the Bible qua text is no different from other historical texts -- it's just as conditioned and contingent as all other texts. On the other hand, this theory of authority is also theologically flawed. For the important thing about the Bible is precisely what it says. Any theory of inspiration or authority is legitimate only to the extent that it gives primacy to the Bible's message.
In its text-character, the Bible is no different from other texts. The distinctive thing about the Bible is simply what it says, i.e., its message. And this means that the authority of the Bible derives solely from its message.
Let me say that again: The distinctive thing about the Bible, I think, for Christians, is its message. Or, to put it more accurately, what the Bible says about Jesus Christ. Because it witnesses to Jesus Christ -- or, in other words, because it communicates the Gospel -- the Bible is the word of God. In the Bible we hear the Gospel; therefore the Bible is authoritative.
That means the Bible is distinctive materially, not formally. The Bible is not unique because the text itself has a miraculous origin. Rather it's unique because it says something unique, it has a unique message. In other words, the Bible is unique because of the Gospel.
If you approach the Bible this way (which is the way I approach the Bible), you're affirming that the Bible has a kerygmatic core. An evangelical core. Some things in the Bible are simply more important than other things in the Bible.
I'm less concerned with "what the Bible says" (it says lots of things) than I am concerned "what the Bible means" (I think it means only one thing -- Jesus Christ).
If we were to approach the Bible via the seventeenth-century doctrine of inspiration, then a priori it would be impossible to identify a biblical center. If our starting-point was a notion of the word-for-word inspiration of the biblical texts, then we would have no criterion for saying that 1 Corinthians 15 is more central than Jude, or that the Fourth Gospel is more significant than Ruth. (This is the problem every adherent of inerrancy falls into. They construct a house of cards theology in which one card is as necessary as the next card -- and if one card goes, the whole thing just collapses.) Thus the notion that the Bible is formally unique actually tends to reduce everything in the Bible to a single level, so that we are left with no internal criterion by which to interpret the Bible as a whole.
On the other hand, if we approach the Bible with this evangelical core (because the whole Bible is centered in the Gospel from/about Jesus Christ) then the biblical text is (as RPC Hanson puts it somewhere) "a circle of light, with dazzling brightness at the centre and twilight at the edges". I'm not disparaging the edges, but I am saying you can't observe the brilliance of Scripture without seeing its dazzling beauty at its very heart -- the message it conveys about Jesus Christ.
That's what keeps me coming to Scripture again and again.
What does it mean for me to speak of the "inspiration" of Scripture, then?
Christian theology has long spoken of the "inspiration" of Scripture -- so it's a term I think is absolutely essential for claiming the importance of Scripture. The term is adopted from the Vulgate's translation of 2 Timothy 3.16: "omnis scriptura divinitus inspirata". Literally of course, the term θεοπνευστος means "breathed by a god", so that "God-breathed" is a better term than "divinely inspired". I much prefer "God-breathed" to "inspired".
According to the writer of 2 Timothy, then, "all Scripture is God-breathed". This has often been interpreted as a technical statement about the origin of Scripture, as though the biblical texts exist because of a miraculous event of divine authorship. But such an interpretation is really impossible in the context of 2 Timothy 3. For the author is not concerned at all with the origin of the γραφαι, but only with the function and usefulness of these writings within the Christian community. The concern here is not with an event of "inspired authorship" (where it came from) at a specific moment in the past, but rather with the fact that the biblical writings, right here and now among us, are "God-breathed" (what they're good for).
Again, this means that the concept of θεοπνευστος should not be interpreted formally, as a statement about the unique textual character of the biblical writings. It should rather be interpreted materially, as a statement about the unique power and function of these writings.
Let me offer this theological formulation then: When we say that Scripture is "inspired", we mean that God himself breathes out the message of Scripture. The message of Scripture comes to us here and now by the very breath of God. This has nothing to do with a static concept of how Scripture originated in the past, but it has everything to do with how Scripture functions among us in the present.
Or, let me put it even more explicitly: In Holy Scripture, God himself speaks (or "breathes" in the Spirit) the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is "the inspiration of Scripture".
Every word about of the "God-breathed" character of the Bible would be meaningless if Holy Scripture is not understood relative to its pointing to Jesus.
This is the point at which nearly every systematic theologian goes wrong. If we put the doctrine of Scripture as the foundation of theological reflection, we're putting it in the wrong place. The "doctrine of Scripture" is not a fundamental doctrine (this is why those who demand inerrancy are so wrong-headed). Instead, "the doctrine of Scripture" is a derived doctrine. A "consequential" doctrine. It's a doctrine drawn out of the consequences of what we have to say about God in Jesus Christ. The "doctrine of Scripture" comes out of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and the salvation from/about God in Jesus Christ. Those two doctrines come first -- they're the foundation upon which the "doctrine of Scripture" is built.
We don't start with a theological conception of Scripture, but we start with the Gospel of God's saving act in Jesus, and from this standpoint we develop a theological account of Scripture. When a systematic theology (or a course of theological lectures) begins with a "doctrine of Scripture", the result is a formalized and distorted view of Scripture that has lost all contact with Scripture's own subject-matter and significance.
Instead, I think Scripture is itself a trinitarian practice. That's what I meant here.
Our knowledge of God is not derived from a certain collection of supernatural texts; rather our knowledge of God arises from God's own saving self-revelation in Jesus Christ (to which the biblical texts bear witness). In other words, Scripture is not the "foundation" of our knowledge of God, but rather our knowledge of God through the Gospel is the "foundation" of our understanding of Scripture.
My reading Scripture is only made possible by my confession of faith that "Jesus is Lord". That means the only proper basis for the authority and inspiration of Scripture is the Gospel itself.
The Christian Bible begins and ends as the book of Christ. Christ speaks in both Testaments and is their true content. This alone is what makes the Bible the Christian Bible, the book of the Christian Church.
Christians have always considered the Bible is "trustworthy", and I whole-heartedly agree.
But what does that mean?
Here, again, the Bible is important in what it means, not in where it comes from. When we confess that Scripture is trustworthy, we are saying that the message of Scripture is trustworthy, that it is a true and reliable message. (That's another problem with "inerrancy", insisting that the biblical texts has some miraculous nature to them in a way that totally disregards the message itself.)
The Bible is trustworthy because its message is trustworthy. It's trustworthy in the way that preaching is trustworthy -- and this is, of course, entirely different from the trustworthiness of scientific or historical textbooks. In short, the Bible is a trustworthy witness. It is trustworthy because the One to whom it witnesses is faithful and true.
I always go one step further than "inerrancy" and insist that the Bible's trustworthiness is totally outside itself (extra se). The Bible's trustworthiness is the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ himself. The Bible isn't trustworthy on its own. It's trustworthy because it witnesses to Jesus, the Truth of God made visible and known. If the Bible proclaims Jesus, it is trusted. Only in that sense, I think, is the Bible "infallible". The infallibility of the Bible doesn't reside within its own pages. The infallibility of the Bible resides in God made known in Jesus Christ. It is nothing more (or, more accurately, nothing less) than the infallibility of Jesus Christ himself.
It's precisely at this point that I think a number of Reformers got Scripture right. How can we place our confidence in the authority of Scripture? How can we be sure that Scripture is truly the Word of God? To quote Calvin: Scripture requires the witness of the Holy Spirit (again why I prefer the phrase "God-breathed" to "inspired"). We can be sure the Scripture is God's word because God witnesses to God's Self in these words that are spoken through the Spirit. "Our faith", Calvin wrote in the Institutes, "is not established until we have a perfect conviction that God is its author. Thus the highest proof of Scripture is ... the character of God whose speaking it is (a Dei loquentis persona sumitur)" (1.7.4).
We become certain of the authority of Scripture only when we hear God’s voice in Scripture -- i.e., when we hear God himself personally speaking the Gospel. Certainty comes from hearing this voice. To look for certainty anywhere else -- in rational proofs, or in the authority of the Church -- is to betray the authority of Scripture. And to betray the authority of Scripture is to betray the authority of God himself.
I realize this is a rather risky way of putting things. Because there's a great deal of stress put on the connection of Scripture and preaching. But despite those (Bultmannian) risks, I think it's an accurate description which does justice to the kerygmatic character of the biblical writings. I would add, though, that precisely in order to be kerygmatic the Bible must also have a definite historical core, just as preaching itself must have some historical core in order to be true "kerygma" and true "Gospel". (At least in principle, this entails only a minimal historical requirement, even though it does not necessarily limit the scope of historical inquiry. Theologians will notice that I'm taking Käsemann's and Ebeling's critique more seriously than I'm taking Bultmann.)
To describe this connection, this moment between Bible and preaching, quite simply: The Bible is the Word of God because God himself speaks through it, because through it God "breathes" the Gospel. As Karl Barth put it, the Bible is God's Word because it becomes his Word again and again.
I'm less concerned to detect a particular moment that the Bible "became" the Word of God historically than I am that God speaks to us and through this text each time we Christians turn to this text.
The essential point here is that the Word of God is an event that happens. It is not a fixed text, not an object that we could master and possess. The Word of God is God himself speaking and acting; the Word of God is God himself encountering us here and now with a word of salvation. Because this Word happens through the Bible, because God himself elects to speak through this particular text, it is true to say that "the Bible is the Word of God".
Putting it that way makes folks nervous and uncomfortable, I admit. It does me, too. It means that the Bible is normative for us because the Bible is God's election. God has chosen the biblical writers and the biblical texts to be the primary witnesses to the history of his saving act. God has chosen to speak his own Word through the word of these witnesses. God has chosen to assume these witnesses, to take their human words up into his own saving history. God has chosen that these witnesses should be the rule and guide (κανων) for all subsequent speech about himself, so that these witnesses will in turn bring forth new witness, new speech, in each successive historical moment.
Through the Bible -- and through the Bible alone (this is why I could never be a theological liberal) -- we learn what it means to speak the Gospel. And in so far as, guided by the Bible, we do speak the gospel, the Word of God also takes place through our speaking (this was Bonhoeffer's point in his Preaching lectures). This is not a different or lesser Word from the Word that takes place in Scripture. It is the very same Word of God which takes place both in Scripture and in our own Gospel-speaking. But it takes place in our contemporary speaking only to the extent that this speaking remains guided by the primary witnesses of the biblical canon.
I cannot say about Jesus things I have not heard God saying about Jesus in the breathing God breathes in Scripture. At the center of all Christian speech is the Gospel. And any talk about Scripture has to take place from within that evangelical center.
Scripture itself, I think, demands that we take the centrality of this message of (in the dual sense of about and from) Jesus as its own message. In other words, Gospel is not a preconceived theological category we bring to Scripture. It's something we encounter in Scripture itself. It demands to be taken seriously as the very center of everything these texts say. The whole biblical witness is silent if it does not speak "Jesus". That's the point of the apostolic preaching found throughout the New Testament.
In other words, our identification of the Gospel as the core of Scripture is nothing more than an attempt to follow the ancient hermeneutical rule: Scripture interprets itself (Scriptura sui interpres). And this means that we should aim to use the word "Gospel" as it is used in the New Testament itself -- not as a narrow theological slogan but as a fundamentally open concept which remains always related to the decisive saving act of Israel's God in the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Hans Küng offers a useful discussion of the centrality of the gospel in his important book The Church. He notes that "[i]t is certainly possible to look impartially for a 'centre' in Scripture, by working exegetically from the New Testament texts rather than dogmatically from established preconceptions". After all, what was form criticism except a massive (one-sided, but still largely successful) endeavor to identify the Bible's central "Gospel" using critical tools?
But what is this gospel? Küng continues: "On the one hand the word 'gospel' is not restricted to a particular doctrine ... but is fundamentally open; on the other hand, the word 'gospel' in the New Testament is indissolubly linked to the saving event in Jesus Christ". Thus we can identify the Gospel through critical and exegetical research, but this identification will always remain provisional. Precisely because the Gospel is the center of the Bible itself and not some external theological preconception, any identification of the Gospel will always remain open to revision in light of further research into the biblical texts. (Putting it that way will annoy any number of historical critics, but will also make fundamentalists squirm. I realize that. But, again, I think both those camps need to think long and hard about how narrow their view is.)
Küng is also right to point out that the word "Gospel" refers not just to one part of the Bible in isolation from other parts, but to the biblical witness as a whole. And it is precisely the evangelical center of Scripture which allows us to take seriously the witness of Scripture as a unified whole. Without this evangelical center, we would undermine the unity of Scripture either by selecting certain portions of Scripture in isolation from others (as in Marcionism), or by reducing all Scripture to a single "harmonized" level (as in fundamentalism). I don't have any room for either of those options.
The whole Bible -- with all its tensions and divergencies -- is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
This raises the question of the relationship between exegesis and theology. And that's probably, to my own approach, the most important question to answer.
The history of modern theology has been the history of the widening chasm between theology and exegesis. It is, after all, the point at which some of my mentors (especially Stan Hauewas) and I have parted company.
Exegetes would be paralyzed if they had to limit their investigations to the terrain sketched out by dogmatics; and theologians would be paralyzed if they had to wait for all the exegetical problems to be cleared up before making a theological decision.
I think both fields have interrelated, even if distinct, tasks. The task of exegesis is to ask what the Bible says, while the task of theology is to ask what we must say on the basis of the Bible (to paraphrase Karl Barth). In times such as our own, pastors have something to say because our speech has been honed by speaking Jesus such as we have heard in Scripture.
Let me close with a quote from Barth: "God himself not only is the truth and the whole truth, but he is also the revelation and the whole revelation that he is the truth. How could the statement that the Bible is his word be proved in any other way than by an act of free grace by which he himself makes the proof? Would it be the word of God if it could be verified except by him?" (Word of God and the Word of Man).