#christopher bryan

What then does it mean when we say that God speaks to us through Holy Scripture? It means that God has accepted the risk of being revealed to us through words, through texts, through literary genres, through the weaknesses and fallibilities of human authors, the errors of scribes and translators, and all the flaws, fallacies, and fantasies of human speaking and human hearing. It means the willing vulnerability of God who here and now, in the pages of a book I can hold in my hands, as in the blessed sacrament, as in Mary’s arms in Bethlehem, as before the Sanhedrin and on Calvary, does not think Godhead a thing to be exploited, but humbles himself, being obedient in all things, even to death on a cross (compare Philippians 2:5-11). It means what our fathers and mothers in faith called condescensio Dei, the marvellous ‘condescension of God’—the act of one who deliberately abandons power and privilege, in order to identify with the weak and the deprived. Nevertheless—and how important that biblical ‘nevertheless’ always is!—nevertheless, this same Bible also tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead, and through our baptism promises to raise us, if we will have it so. And that means that this same God will not allow even stupidity, overconfidence, and disobedience as great as ours to have the last word, unless we insist on it.

It is deeply distressing to me, even when a cause that I support seems to ‘win’ in the councils of the church, if I see that ‘victory’ accompanied by a refusal on the part of the ‘victors’ to sympathize with the defeated, by a lack of concern for their pain, and even by a crowing over them, as if they were no longer our brothers or our sisters. Such an attitude seems very far indeed from that of the apostle: ‘Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?’ (2 Corinthians 11.29).

[It is] important that we do not simply ignore what happened between Malachi and the coming of Jesus. If we do ignore it, then we (so to speak) fall asleep one evening in a largely Semitic and Persian world, and wake up on what appears to be the following morning in a Greco-Roman world. We fall asleep in one kind of Israel, and wake up in another that faces us with innumerable puzzles. It is not surprising that we should be confused, because it is as if we had been like Rumpelstiltskin, asleep for four hundred years! Much happened to God’s people in that four hundred years, and the apocryphal books tell us something of what it was. That is why we need them. We read them, as the framers of [Anglican] Article VI pointed out, because they provide us with ‘examples of life’ that spring from a part of our story, our memory—not, of course, so important a part as Creation and Fall, the call of Abraham, the giving of the Law, or the sending into exile (as the framers of the article noted, we do not use them ‘to establish my doctrine’), but a part of our story nonetheless, and therefore not to be ignored or forgotten.

Biblical inerrancy—the sense in which the Scriptures cannot be ‘annulled’ or ‘set aside’ (John 11.35)—does not lie in some supposed incapability of error on the part either of its human authors or its copyists, but in the fact that through the Scriptures, for all their human fallibility (‘warts and all,’ as we say) God nevertheless unerringly tells us what we need to know of Jesus Christ, the divine grace, and God’s calling us to obedience and faith. As for the warts—it is with the Scriptures as Saint Paul said it was with the entire apostolic ministry: ‘we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us’ (2 Corinthians 4.7). […] To put it another way, if God is not embarrassed by the fallibility of the human words of the Bible, by their historic and scientific inaccuracies and ideological contradictions, but has adapted and made use of them in their fallibility, we do not need to be embarrassed by them either.

Those who uphold the view of total inerrancy that I am challenging sometimes put the question (as it was put to me recently), ‘Why would God choose to use a book that contained errors?’ It is tempting to answer along the lines of Paul’s response to those who question God’s right to condemn human sin: ‘But who are you, a human being, to answer back to God?’ (Romans 9.20). In this case, however, there is a more precise response that lies in the very nature of the biblical story. Throughout that story, we see God choosing again and again to use limited, fallible humanity in the service of grace. […] To desire a ‘perfect’ Bible is to be like those who desire a ‘perfect’ Church. It is to show ourselves finally unwilling to accept that God’s perfection of love expresses itself precisely through God’s identification with our weakness and fallibility.

When we speak of the Scriptures as ‘inspired’ we are making an affirmation of faith, similar to the kind of affirmation we make when we say that God created the universe, or that God was in Jesus Christ, or that Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament. That is to say, in all these cases we are presented with an empirical reality—the created universe, the man Jesus, the bread and wine—that can be explained and experienced without any reference to God at all, as it is by many people. As the writer to the Hebrews says of the entire apostolic proclamation: ‘You have not come to something that can be touched’ (12.18a). You can examine the bread and wine of the sacrament any way you like: you will never succeed in identifying conclusively the ‘Christ’ part. So it is with Jesus. So it is with the universe. And so it is with the inspiration of Scripture.

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