Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God

by Timothy Ward

God speaking is also an integral part of God acting to save. Thus, in biblical language and theology, God speaking and God acting are often one and the same thing.

Communication from God is therefore communion with God, when met with a response of trust from us.

the doctrine of Scripture must be articulated in a way that makes explicit its dependence on the doctrine of Christ.

to encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in action.

Thus in the Bible the Father seems to take priority in the act of creation, the Son is the willing and active subject of the incarnation, and the Spirit is the agent of the inspiration of Scripture.

It is now commonly assumed in many areas of thought in the West that meaning is not ‘out there’, but only ‘in us’.

plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture.

Although in some places in Scripture doubt still remains over the precise wording of the original text, no teaching of any significance depends on such a disputed text.

It is of course the case that the words of the earthly Jesus as recorded in the New Testament are already translations into Greek of the Aramaic language he spoke. The words of Christ in our own language have therefore been doubly translated.

Whenever we encounter the speech acts of Scripture, we encounter God himself in action. The Father presents himself to us as a God who makes and keeps his covenant promises. The Son comes to us as the Word of God, knowable to us through his words. The Spirit ministers these words to us, illuminating our minds and hearts, so that in receiving, understanding and trusting them, we receive, know and trust God himself.

For Calvin, the fall did not entirely erase human knowledge of God, and consequently Scripture can serve as the necessary lens for putting into focus for us knowledge of God which is already there, but which without God’s word to us in Scripture is seriously blurred by our sinful perspective.

what has rarely been pointed out is that not only Calvin, but also many of his theological heirs, were primarily concerned with believers’ assurance that their knowledge of God is knowledge of the true God, and not of an idol, and therefore that their relationship with God was genuine and not a fantasy or a sham.

As Calvin summarizes it, a written revelation was necessary to ensure that God’s revelation ‘should neither perish through forgetfulness nor vanish through error nor be corrupted by the audacity of men’ (Institutes 1.6.3).

he has chosen that his primary self-revelation not be in this form, but written for us in the Bible.

It so happened that ‘the necessity of Scripture’ did not grow to be regarded as one of the Reformation’s great summarizing watchwords, as sola scriptura (Scripture alone) did.

He does not reveal himself exhaustively, but the God he shows himself to be in his covenant relationship is the God he really is.

kings and princes normally have their laws written down, to ensure their permanence and ease of propagation.

Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, wrote that ‘the sacred and divinely inspired Scriptures are sufficient for the exposition of the truth’.9

For Augustine, some eighty years later, ‘among the things that are plainly laid down in Scripture are to be found all matters that concern faith and the manner of life – to wit, hope and love’.

the Scripture the Holy Spirit authored in the past receives its authority in the present from the fact that God the Holy Spirit continues to speak in it and through it the same message he once uttered.

would define the sufficiency of Scripture in this way: because of the ways in which God has chosen to relate himself to Scripture, Scripture is sufficient as the means by which God continues to present himself to us such that we can know him, repeating through Scripture the covenant promise he has brought to fulfilment in Jesus Christ.

Augustine famously asserted, ‘almost nothing is dug out those obscure passages which may not be found set forth in the plainest language elsewhere’.

It was unfortunate that, as often happens, their polemical arguments came to be treated as if they were the positive central points of their doctrines.

the fact of diverse interpretations of Scripture does raise questions that we have to face.

‘instruction’ is the controlling model of the nature of Scripture.

Turretin explicitly limits scriptural clarity to things necessary and essential to salvation. A similar limitation is evident in the statement on Scripture’s clarity in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which begins with a clear statement of what clarity does not entail:

Scripture is the written word of the living Word, God’s communicative act, and the Spirit who authored it chooses to continue to speak most directly through it. • Therefore we are right to trust that God in Scripture has spoken and continues to speak sufficiently clearly for us to base our saving knowledge of him and of ourselves, and our beliefs and our actions, on the content of Scripture alone, without ultimately validating our understanding of these things or our confidence in them by appeal to any individual or institution.33

The phrase ‘the authority of Scripture’ must be understood to be shorthand for ‘the authority of God as he speaks through Scripture’.

To proclaim ‘the authority of Scripture’ does not add anything substantive to all this. It is, rather, one way in which we can usefully talk about the sum of all these parts. It is really a way of summarizing all that this book outlines. It states that we believe that all of this is true, that the sovereign God has indeed authored Scripture this way and chooses to relate to us in this way through Scripture. It commits us to giving the Bible the sovereign place in our lives that must follow from its central place in relation to God and his actions.

the claim that Scripture is inerrant is an outworking of the authority of Scripture.

The idea that the Bible is ‘infallible’ means that it does not deceive. To say that the Bible is ‘inerrant’ is to make the additional claim that it does not assert any errors of fact: whether the Bible refers to events in the life of Christ, or to other details of history and geography, what it asserts is true.

it is a doctrine that can be shown to be a clear implication of what Scripture says about the character of God, and about the way his character shapes his action as the author of Scripture. God has chosen to tie Scripture to himself as his word in action, and therefore (as we saw in the biblical outline chapter) Scripture’s speech acts are an aspect of God in action in the world. It is therefore right to conclude that Scripture’s words will borrow their qualities from God.

inerrancy is no more and no less than a natural implication of the fact that Scripture is identified as the speech act of a God who cannot lie, and who has chosen to reveal himself to us in words.

Tertullian, regularly referred to something he called ‘the Rule of Faith’.

The Rule did not strike at the root of the sufficiency of Scripture; it was presented in order to uphold the ultimate authority of Scripture. To depart from the Rule was to depart from Scripture.

he sees the church not as adding to the clear message of Scripture, but as reinforcing and teaching it. Indeed it has been debated whether or not Basil, in his statements on tradition, saw himself as actually establishing the church as an authority separate from Scripture.

Charles Hodge at Princeton Seminary in the nineteenth century.15 He suggests that this mostly unintentional drift into the Anabaptist ‘Tradition 0’ was fuelled in America by two underlying factors: (1) Enlightenment philosophy, which stressed the individual as the arbiter of truth, distinct from traditions of thought, and (2) a strong belief in the democratic rights of the individual.16 In Europe the second of these factors may not have been as strongly politicized as across the Atlantic, but the first was certainly as influential.

they largely saw themselves as wanting to reform the church from within, rather than abandon it.

it ensures that all those traditions serve Scripture, the supreme authority, rather than compete with it. Sola scriptura means ‘Scripture supreme’.

‘But all these’, concludes Turretin, ‘imply a ministerial only and not a magisterial power.’

a strong doctrine of sola scriptura can fit perfectly well with a high view of the authority of the visible church.

it is perfectly possible to fit alongside it a strong practice of church discipline and a robust view of the authority of the elders of the church.

In sermons like these the preacher comes not proclaiming, declaring, exhorting and rebuking, but sharing, musing, reflecting and imagining.

It is not just that the Spirit is at work in the actual delivery of a sermon. He has also gone before the preacher. At the moment of the delivery of the sermon, the three elements of preaching (the biblical text to be preached, the preacher himself and the listening congregation) all derive their true identity from the work of the Holy Spirit in and on them.

the way the biblical language functions as language is ordinary and human.

Preaching obviously fails to be faithful to Scripture if it follows Scripture’s purpose without being fully shaped by its content.

the faithful biblical preacher should always be someone who has been formed through personal encounter with the Holy Spirit.

‘In preaching we do not merely report what was once said or relate something we have overheard. Biblical preaching flows from a renewed listening to scripture.’31 The graciousness of God is evident in the consistency of the Spirit’s work through the text. He acts in the preacher’s life with the same intention as he did in the original audience, and he acts upon the hearers of the sermon with the same intention as he acted on the preacher.

At heart he is reminding them of the one thing that has been undeniably true of them ever since they first devoted themselves to the apostolic gospel: that by the work of the Spirit of God they are not what they once were.

At every point the preacher is hemmed in by the work and life of the Spirit.