The Inspiration of the Bible # 2
Paul affirms that the
scriptures are God-breathed, that is, they came from the very mouth of God
almighty. They present one of the
greatest intellectual challenges the human family has ever known. But God did not give his word to help us to
have keen intellects. His word prepares
men and women spiritually and morally to live with God throughout all
eternity. Paul teaches that God's word
is "profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction
in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto
all good works" (2 Tim.
When Paul used the word "perfect" in this context, he was not teaching what is commonly called "perfectionism." The word "perfect" has been grossly misunderstood. Some denominational groups have taught--and some still teach--that it is possible for men to so live by God's word that they achieve in this world a state of sinless perfection. Many of John Wesley’s followers taught that doctrine for years, although most of them no longer teach it. That is not what Paul had in mind when he used the word "perfect." The Greek word is artios and means complete. That is almost always the way it is translated in all versions. What the word teaches is very plain and simple: All anyone needs to know to become a child of God and to remain faithful to Christ can be found in the Bible. We do not need any other source of information, inspiration and comfort. God's book provides it all.
Paul used another form of the Greek artios when he closed his statements about the inspiration of God's book. He affirms that the scriptures furnish us completely unto all good works. The expression, "furnish completely," means to furnish fully, to provide for all our spiritual needs. If a man desires to show that the Bible alone is adequate for man's salvation, how could he do it more plainly than Paul does in these verses? The scriptures make the man of God complete, fully or completely furnished unto all good works. If what Paul has written is true--and there is no reason to doubt it for a moment--how do we explain the attempts on the part of modern men and women--or ancient men and women--to add to what God has revealed in the Bible?
Through the ages there have been many religious leaders who have apparently thought the Bible needed updating and revising. Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, added to the scriptures The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price and Doctrines and Covenants. These books are supposed to bring man into the twentieth century and to correct what the apostles and other New Testament writers did not know or did not record. But these Mormon books not only are unnecessary; they are positively dangerous. They contradict many of the great truths of the Bible. The Mormon books must be rejected since the Bible furnishes us completely unto every good work.
Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford's books and many others are offered as replacements for or additions to the revelation of God in the Bible. While there may be some truth in all of these books, they are not needed for us to learn about God and about his will for our lives. We have in the sacred scriptures every truth about God and about human behavior we need in order to obey the gospel and to walk according to truth. Jude tells us that we have "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). No man can add to the word of God, nor substitute his ideas for it, nor take away from it without having the curse of God resting on his head.
I urge all men to have proper respect for the Bible--to believe all its precepts and to obey all its commands. The apostle John wrote: "Whosoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and everyone who loves him who begot him loves him also who is begotten of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandment is not grievous" (1 John 5:1-3).
Obviously, there are commands in the Bible which were designed for another people in another time. The commands to Noah to build the ark, to Moses to construct the tabernacle and to Abraham to leave his home are not binding on us. There are literally hundreds of commands in the Bible which do not apply to Christians, but the commands to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, to repent of our sins, to confess our faith before men and before God, and to be baptized in the name of Christ for the remission of sins are binding on us. These commands must be obeyed if we want to be forgiven of our alien sins and to have the promise of eternal life. These commands are not optional; they are essential to our salvation.
The need for our discussion of the inspiration of the Bible should be plain to anyone who knows the problems we face in the world and in the church. Worldly scholars have always attacked the inspiration and authority of the Bible. The devil himself provides the motivation for those who seek to destroy the influence of God's inspired revelation. The very first assault against God and against his people was Satan's question to Adam and Eve: "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of every tree in the garden'” (Gen. 3:1)? The devil wanted to plant doubts in the minds of Adam and Eve. He wanted them to question the integrity and the authenticity of God's word. He operates in the same manner in our day.
Through the years, modernistic scholars and reprobates--or in some cases, scholars who are reprobates--have labored diligently to undermine men's and women's faith in the Bible as the word of God. Dr. Harold Lindsell's excellent books, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1976) and The Bible in the Balance (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1979), have documented some of the problems we face in regard to the nature of divine inspiration. Virtually all churches, seminaries and Bible colleges have been plagued by those who pretended to love God's word but all the time were promoting their liberal agenda.
The churches of Christ--like all other conservative religious groups--have always had and always have had some preachers and professors who leaned in the direction of theological liberalism. One preacher and professor among churches of Christ calls the model of family relationships promoted by the church, that is, the husband as the head of the wife and the wife into subjection to her husband dysfunctional and pathological. He is saying, in effect, that God's pattern for the home does not work and it is sick. Another preacher accuses the churches of Christ of paying too much attention to Acts, the epistles and Revelation and not enough to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He calls the gospel "primary sources" and the rest of the New Testament "secondary sources." His approach to scripture reminds me of Martin Luther's "canon within a canon." Luther did not regard all the Bible with the same reverence. For Luther, Romans and Galatians were primary sources, but James was not primary because it did not exalt Christ. As you can understand without any further explanation, this view of scripture is subjective. The preacher's ideas determine what is of greatest value. No man has such knowledge. This approach to scripture is destructive and diabolical.
My friends,
there has never been a greater need among churches of Christ and in other
religious groups to speak on the evidence of Christianity. We must prepare ourselves to discuss
archaeology, the miracles of the Bible, biblical criticism and related
topics. We must not abandon the Bible
just because liberal theologians have decided that God did not miraculously
reveal his will to man. Most of the
criticisms of modern liberal theologians have been offered for years and all of
them have been answered over and over,
although many preachers and theologians act as if there are not answers to
their objections to divine inspiration The modernists
are neither being fair nor scholarly in their attacks against the Bible.
Many years ago, Colonel Robert Green
Ingersoll traveled widely across the United States lecturing on the
"mistakes of Moses." His
attacks against the scriptures were vicious, and, in many cases, juvenile. Eventually, he quit speaking out against the
Bible. When he was asked why he no
longer attacked the scriptures, he replied: "There is no need for me any
longer. The liberal theologians are
doing a better job of denying inspiration that I could." If Colonel Ingersoll
could have lived into the late 1980s and into the 1990s and could have read the
writings of men like Bishop John Shelby Spong, he would have been delighted to
resign his responsibility of trying to debunk the Bible to such radical
theologians. Bishop Spong comes very
close to making fun of the Bible and of Bible believers. I will give you some examples in just a
minute of Bishop Spong's attacks against the Bible.
Atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and other unbelievers are still making a concerted effort to destroy men's faith in the Bible. Steve Allen, a secular humanist but not an atheist, has recently published a two books dealing with biblical inspiration. He calls his books, Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990) and More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1993). Steve certainly is not a Bible scholar--not even a Bible student--and simply parrots the various criticisms of ancient and modern scholars--not realizing in most cases that the charges of the critics have been thoroughly refuted. If Steve Allen had read from conservative and evangelical scholars, he would not have made so many inexcusable blunders in his statements about the Bible, religion and morality. Steve Allen simply had not done his homework.
Steve calls the Old Testament's portrayal of God as "too loutish and brutal to be worthy of worship by any theist who accepts the ethics of altruism or who is familiar even marginally, with modern science and biblical criticism" (Allen, 1990, p. xiii). If Steve Allen had read the scholarly works of Robert Dick Wilson, Carl F. H. Henry, John Gresham Machen, Oswald T. Allis and hundreds of other conservative scholars, he could have know better than to make such unfounded statements. If the God of the Old Testament were so vicious and loutish, why were the moral values of the Jews so much above those of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Hittites, Philistines and Greeks? Does Steve Allen know that a stream cannot rise above its source? The moral values of the Jews had to come from some source. Were the Ten Commandments and other moral laws created in a vacuum? How would Steve Allen explain the ethical values of the great prophets of the Old Testament? Besides, why did not our Lord Jesus Christ--acknowledged even by secular humanists to be a great model of virtue and goodness--expose the corruption of the God of the Old Testament? Is there any doubt in your mind that Jesus called the God of the Old Testament his Father?
Steve Allen affirms that there are enough atrocities in the history of the church to give grounds to unbelievers for their criticisms of religion and to shame all decent Christians ("Introduction," 1190, p. xiii). Does Steve Allen not know that much of what has gone on in the name of Christianity has nothing to do with genuine Christianity? Does he believe the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition were encouraged and endorsed by Jesus Christ and the apostles? A great number of violent acts in France, in Germany and in other countries have been done in the name of humanism which Steve Allen would condemn, although he has no absolute standard by which to condemn anything--whether committed in the name of Christ or in the name of secular humanism. Humanism recognizes no absolute standard of moral behavior. Steve Allen and other secular humanists can only respond to any evil by insisting they do not like it. They cannot be consistent and oppose any behavior as being absolutely wrong.
Steve Allen would do much better if he would stick to his music and to comedy. His ignorance of the Bible and his lack of acquaintance with the world of biblical scholarship shine brightly through his books. "Prejudice" and "ignorance" are the two kindest words I can employ in speaking of Steve Allen's books on the Bible, religion and morality. But here is the real tragedy of Steve Allen's attacks against the Bible: He has learned many of his views of the scriptures from the most liberal theologians in the world. As you can readily understand, there is not a very fair approach to any book--including the Bible.
Books by unbelievers, such as, Robert Green Ingersoll, Sigmund Freud and Steve Allen, ought not to surprise anyone. We should expect these. If they believed the Bible to be the word of God, they would not be unbelievers. While their books have unquestionably appealed to some and have done some harm, they are not so destructive as the books written by those who claim to be preachers, Bible scholars and bishops. In other words, books by Bishop John Shelby Spong have done ten times--maybe a hundred times--the damage to New Testament Christianity than books by atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and other unbelievers have done. I have time to mention only one book by Bishop Spong of the American Episcopal Church, Newark, New Jersey diocese.
In 1988, Bishop Spong wrote a book with the title, Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers) Bishop Spong recognizes the place of the Bible as a major influence on the moral values and ethical decision-making by Christian people. But he finds many contradictions, a great number of expressions of prejudice and unchristian or subchristian attitudes (p. 25). He maintains that the claims of biblical inerrancy or infallibility simply are not relevant. The academic world, he argues, has long ago dismissed all claims of the inerrancy of the scriptures (p. 25).
As you can see from my examination of Bishop Spong's words, his writings are full of bias against the scriptures and against thousands of reputable Bible scholars. The Evangelical Theological Society has hundreds and hundreds of nationally and internationally known Bible scholars who are committed to the total inerrancy of the Bible. Did you notice Bishop Spong's emotionally loaded language? He insists that reputable Bible scholars and thoughtful men and women in the pews have dismissed the biblical doctrine of scriptural inerrancy. If you have not abandoned biblical inerrancy, you know where that leaves us. You are not a very scholarly or thoughtful person.
Bishop Spong criticizes those of us who constantly quote the Bible to sustain what we believe and how we act. He thinks that quoting the Bible is inadequate and inept response to any issue. He affirms there are contradictory versions of the creation, conflicting accounts of the Ten Commandments, many misunderstandings of who Jesus was, contradictions in the details surrounding the resurrection of Christ, and even on when, or if, the end of the world will be (pp. 111-112). Obviously, these are serious charges against the Bible, but every one of them has been soundly refuted for many decades by reputable scholars.
I shall not take the time now to answer all the charges and criticisms which John Shelby Spong has mentioned, but I assure you that answers are available--if one wants to find the answers. Bishop Spong could have resolved the difficulties if he had been willing to throw aside his prejudices and accept the evidence. But how could he sell so many books if he really taught the truth about the truth?
Winford Claiborne
The International Gospel Hour
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