What is Scripture? What are our scriptures?
Wordnet from Princeton Uni defines Scriptures as ‘any writing that is regarded as sacred by a religious group’. Scripture is the religious writings that help form the basis of a religious group. For Christianity scripture (or the scriptures) is the Bible.
Now that might seem pretty simple. What is Scripture for followers of Jesus? It is the bible. However the issue can get a little bit more complicated if we ask some different people. Imagine if we went on a journey and started across the road and went to the local Greek Orthodox Church and asked the priest, how many books make up the Bible? We might get the answer something like, ‘well I think that there are 66 books that make up the Bible’. If then carry on a little further and asked another Greek Orthodox priest he might tell us, ‘well I think that there are 69 books that make up the bible’. Again a little further on and we might get the answer ‘I think that there are 81 books in the bible’. If we asked a Catholic priest he would tell us – no there are 73 books in the bible.
One of the basic questions for us as followers of Christ is what are actually the books that are ‘scripture’? For us as evangelical Protestants, we believe that there are 66 books of the Bible. The others some include and others don’t. We as Protestants believe can be helpful but not authoritative. One of the major differences between the catholic, orthodox and protestant churches is their understanding of the list of books that makes up the bible. And I’ll explain a bit about why that is later on.
What makes this collection of books, or writings so special for us? What do they represent? The short answer is that they represent the things that God has said. However they are the things that God said to certain people at certain times.
A fuller answer deals with the New Testament and the Old Testament separately. The New Testament consists of those writings which are linked to the eyewitnesses of Jesus and contain information about his teaching and life as well as how that information is worked out in the lives of those that follow Jesus. Or in short, it contains the revealing of the person of Jesus, what he did, and how that plays out in life. The Old Testament contains the records of God speaking to the people of Israel, the chosen people of God (until the coming of Jesus). For us as Protestants it is as accepted by those people. Ultimately these books contain the information God has chosen to reveal to us about himself.
How is that authoritative?
The short answer is that God said it! To put it in terms of American foreign policy, he has the biggest guns so therefore we better do what he says.
A fuller answer to the question is that God has made as in his image. It is our responsibility to live up to that image. We are to live in a way that ‘images’ his character. We see this in a number of places in Scripture. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:48) Jesus tells us that we are to be ‘perfect as your heavenly father is perfect’. We are to be as God is. God is love. We are to love. God is truth. We are to ‘walk in the truth’. We, our lives, our characters, need to reflect God’s character. In this way we can understand that all of Scripture reveals to us God’s character and therefore all of Scripture is binding on us. The Old Testament law doesn’t pass away. The nature of the way it relates to us now is different. It shows to us how God’s character was to be lived out in a community of people in the ancient times. The difference in culture, language, history (with the revelation of Jesus’ death and the way it deals with our sin and makes a way open for directly to God) means that we live out God’s character in a different way today. But that doesn’t change the fact that the ancient laws of the Bible reveal God’s character.
However the Scriptures record God’s way of revealing his character and this is God’s way of ruling our lives. If we start with the concept of God’s law we see that this is God’s way of ruling our lives. He chose to start revealing himself through a story and then a law. He related to Abraham and showed he was faithful. He didn’t set up Abraham as a King to rule. He related to him in his life and recorded it as story. He then revealed himself to Moses and gave him the law. He didn’t set up Moses as a King. He gave him laws through which people would be ruled by God. And it wasn’t up to Moses to enforce the laws; it was up to the people of the community. It was only much, much later when people had shown they didn’t really want to be directly ruled by God that God first set up Saul and then David as a king. God’s chosen way to rule his people is through his scriptures.
However for us as a Baptist church it is helpful to put this in an historical context and see how this is part of the characteristics that make up Baptists. Historically for Baptist what the authority of Scripture and scripture only meant was that it wasn’t up to people to have authority over other Christians. It didn’t take long from the start of the church to have some people starting to assert their authority over others in the church. The church went the way of Israel.
In some ways this was necessary. After Christ’s death it was necessary for the apostles to teach about Jesus. It was necessary for them to say what was true and what wasn’t true in the things that relate to our relationship with God and relationship to each other as a community. We see thing played out in various letters of the New Testament. This then was entrusted to the next generation of those responsible to teach and lead the others and so on and so on.
However as any one who has played Chinese whispers will attest, after a while things that aren’t written down tend to change. They might be changed a bit, or something added, or something lost. Fortunately for us, in God’s foresight, he prompted people, the apostles and some people associated with them, to write down the teaching about Jesus, who he was and what he did and taught.
The Key thing here for Protestants is the understanding that those people who were entrusted with passing on the message somehow lost some of the thrust of the message in certain ways. They saw that it was time to return to the original recorded message – the scriptures. Starting with Luther, the Protestants basically said it is not good for someone else to have to tell me what is right and wrong, or more importantly who is or is not going to hell when I have the scriptures here for myself. They seem pretty clear about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.
This is basically the difference between the Protestant churches and the Catholic and Orthodox churches. This is why it is important for the Protestants to have a definite list of what books are Scripture and what books aren’t. For those of the other Christian faiths, the key issue is the teaching of those who were entrusted with the message, not the teaching of the books. Those who teach explain the meaning of the books. For the Protestants we let the books speak to us as they were written.
So for Baptists it isn’t up to the Pope, or the archbishop, or the local priest to say how we should live, or who is or isn’t going to hell. In the past the Pope’s power lay in his ability to control kings through saying, if you don’t do what I say you will go to hell. That sort of power is rejected by Protestants and this church as well.
However we shouldn’t confuse the authority of Scripture with the authority that people within the church have been delegated. As a minister of this church certain authority has been delegated to me. I can spend church money. I can use church facilities. I can teach people. I can lead people. However the way I do these things is to be under God’s authority, under the authority of the Scriptures. And anyone can challenge what I, or John, Church policy, or anybody else does in an official church capacity if it contradicts a clear understanding of Scripture.
The second thing that was historically rejected by the Protestants, lead by Luther is that authority doesn’t lie in Church councils. Luther realised that in the past church councils had made mistakes. They weren’t infallible. Basically the comparison is between one person deciding what is right and true for people, who will and who won’t get into heaven, or getting a group of people together to make that decision.
We aren’t affected by what other churches might do when they get together and make a decision of this or that. It is about what Scriptures says, not what this church, or that teacher might say. If the World Council of Churches get together and say that Jesus didn’t really die, or that Mary wasn’t a virgin, or whatever they might say, it isn’t binding on us. We understand that it is the Bible, not what somebody says about the Bible that is really important for us.
The third and final thing I want to briefly mention that doesn’t hold authority is tradition. My dad used to say if you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one and tell it often. The more often you say it the more people will believe it. If we continue to do something over and over again people tend to start believing the truth of it. One of the things that the reforms did was question why the church did the things it did and just doing it because we have always done it wasn’t a good answer, if it didn’t stack up to the teaching of Scripture.
So for us today, it isn’t in the way we have done things in the past, or what people used to say in the past. It is the way we understand the Bible speaking to us today. So the fact that we’ve had pews in the church for the pas hundred years doesn’t mean that we have to continue to have pews in the church for the next hundred years, unless we decide that this is what Scripture tells us to do. Likewise what we do in our services doesn’t have to be dictated by tradition but by the Scriptures. This doesn’t mean that we don’t take tradition into consideration but ultimately authority lies in the Scriptures not tradition.
You also see this in the way Baptists or other Protestants teach. We start by teaching that this is what the Bible says. Other Christian faith traditions might start teaching on a topic by saying what this person or that person said, way back a hundred years because for them the tradition of the church does have authority. We, as Baptists, as Protestants, don’t hold tradition as authoritative.
Over the next few weeks we will be working out what these means for us as individuals, for us as a community and finally for us as members of a national state. But there are two things that I think we can take home from today.
Firstly if it is true that the Scriptures are the things that are authoritative for us, if it is true that Jesus is our ruler through the scriptures, then it is important that we gain some knowledge of the scriptures. It is important for each one of us to find out what we think God’s character is like, because that should determine how we live out lives.
Secondly the things we do and the way we do things should be determined by our understanding of Scripture. And each one of us has the right and responsibility to challenge the things we do.
