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The Bible is not the “Word of God.” That language trains Jesus followers to implicitly worship the Bible almost as the fourth member of the Trinity. Let’s not pretend that confusing the two doesn’t reek of idolatry. The Bible is not God nor is it a part of the Godhead. No, that designation–the Word of God–belongs to Jesus alone as the incarnate Word who, along with the Father and Spirit, is worshiped and glorified. The Bible is a signpost. Like John the Baptist, the Bible bears witness to the light but it is not itself the light. It is a gift from God intended to point us to God.
The Bible is like a library. It’s a wide assortment of texts spanning genres and compiled into a single book. The Old Testament contains Ancient Near Eastern creation myths, governing laws, historical accounts, wisdom literature, apocalyptic, prophecy, lament, and poetry. The New is a fascinating hybrid of Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Greco-Roman influence. Its starts with layered accounts of a messianic figure, then tells the origin story of an infant religious movement, moves to a series of personal letters, and concludes with a complex, genre-blending final work.
The Christian scriptures are a diverse collection of sacred texts as communicated by human authors and editors living in a wide range of ancient cultural-historical contexts. They contain absolutely nothing Western, Modern, or Postmodern, though. The Bible was largely written by Ancient Near Eastern people and it was largely written to Ancient Near Eastern people, so we shouldn’t be at all surprised that the Bible is a largely Ancient Near Eastern library that doesn’t play by modern scientific, historical, and philosophical rules about what constitutes truth.
In much the same way Jesus is fully God and fully man such that we cannot alleviate the tension, so the Bible is fully the product of divine inspiration and fully the product of human authorship. What the Bible is not is a modern handbook of morality, a clear user’s manual for godly living, a straight-forward encyclopedia of incontestable, authoritative answers, or a precise road map of transcendent truths. As Peter Enns put it, the Bible is “ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.” Today my primary metaphor for the Bible is a compass. It leads us to the true north of spiritual wisdom.
The original beatniks appreciated the wanderings of a good story as much as anyone. Often times as I read them I think to myself, ‘For the love of all that is good and holy, will you please get to the point?’ My recent epiphany was that, oh right, I often feel the exact same way when I’m reading the Bible. That caused me to think maybe the Beat Generation understood something about spiritual wisdom that has eluded my grasp. Perhaps the Bible’s wandering is the point… or is at least part of the point. Maybe it’s showing us the path as much as telling us the destination.
