This evening a very good question came in from one of our small groups, which I’ll try to answer below.  Here’s the question:

Hi Eric,

Our group met Wednesday evening and have a question. what is the reason for how the following was phrased?

“…studying the ancient testimonies which we call scripture”

The reasoning behind this wording is that those who contributed to the Phoenix Affirmations were coming from the perspective that the scriptures are not the literal, inerrant Word of God.  Rather the scriptures are “words about the Word.”  That is, the scriptures contain words that bear testimony to people’s experience of God in the world, rather than containing God’s actual words themselves.  This does not in any way denigrate the value of the scriptures.  Rather, it increases scripture’s value, freeing its message from being locked in the ancient world so that it may confront and inspire us in ever new ways.  Let me explain:

In the middle of the last century, theologian Karl Barth once offered a helpful metaphor for the relationship between the “words of scripture” and the “Word of God.”  He said that reading the scriptures is like standing in a basement with an upper window above one’s head that looks out onto the street.  From your vantage point in the basement, you can see people walking by, but can’t see anything above the them, like the sky.  As you observe this window, you notice that suddenly people are quite excited. They are scurrying about, then congregating in one particular spot and pointing up toward the sky in the same direction.  They see something magnificent above them but you can’t make anything out.  Instead, you can only overhear their excited chatter.  Each person is describing what she or he sees in different ways, though it is clear that everyone is seeing the same thing.  They’re simply responding to the sight of something quite foreign by describing it terms that are familiar to them, using categories that reflect their particular social, historical and cultural context.

As readers of scripture, we receive the testimonies of the ancients regarding their experiences of God much like someone standing in that basement room.  While the terms the ancients used to describe their experiences may be colored (and sometimes even warped) by their social, historical, and cultural context, this does not mean their experiences aren’t real.  Our job as modern readers of scripture is to try to understand the ancient context as best we can so that we can retranslate their experiences into terms that are more familiar to us, in our particular context.  In every age, therefore, interpreters of scripture have sought to retranslate the anceint testimonies into their own world, thereby renewing the “words about the Word” in every generation.

Finally, by using the phrase “which we call scripture,” we were trying to signal that many testimonies exist regarding authentic experiences of God – ancient and modern – that never made it into the Bible.  Yet we call this particular set of testimonies “scripture” (those contained in the Old and New Testaments) because they have proven themselves to be particularly effective, generation after generation, at pointing people toward where God may be found in their own lives.

I hope this is helpful.  Keep those questions coming!

- Eric