Verbs and Paradigms

Now the hand of the Lord was on me there, and He said to me, “Get up, go out to the plain, and there I will speak to you.”  Ezekiel 3:22  NASB

He said – According to some researchers, the phrase “God said” or its equivalent is used 1900 times in the Bible.  When you think about it, the phrase “God wrote” is extremely rare.  The first set of tablets, the writing on the wall, maybe a few other times but by a very wide margin, God’s communication is oral, not written.  The written text is a record of what God said.  It is not the experience of hearing His voice.  If our present religious experiences had to be based on the spokenword of God, we’d be in very bad shape (or we’d be waiting a very long time).  Don’t you find it odd that Israel before the Captivity was a culture of the prophetic voice but after the Captivity that culture was eventually replaced by a written text?  Does that mean God stopped talking?  Or did we decide that oral transmission wasn’t reliable?

Whatever the answer to those questions, what has happened since the age of the prophets is a movement to secure the written word as the final authority.  This leads to some very interesting arguments; arguments that require a great number of unproven, and perhaps unproveable, assumptions.  Arguments that are essentially completely paradigm dependent. Consider the following.

There are those who say that the Bible we have today cannot be trusted. They say that it was written by men and, therefore, contains errors. They also suggest that during the centuries of copying, men introduced many errors.  However, one important goal of anyone who defends the Bible is to give evidence that we have in our hands exactly what God said and exactly what He wants us to have. One such evidence that the Bible has been copied accurately in the past is shown in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls, found by a shepherd boy in 1947, are dated from 250 to 150 BC. This discovery pushed back our available oldest Scripture text almost 1,000 years. And when the content of the scrolls was compared to later copies, no significant differences were found. That means scribes had been copying with great precision for almost ten centuries. This amazing discovery moved us one millennium closer to the originals.

But there is another, internal argument for the accuracy of Scripture, based on the character and attributes of God, and this argument is supreme.

The Scriptures claim that God Himself breathed out Scripture (using human instruments, 2 Peter 1:21) and that it can be trusted to be His Word. His wisdom is infinite, and He is all-powerful and holy, so everything He says is trustworthy, accurate, and without error. Since God’s work will image His own nature, the accuracy of Scripture is guaranteed.

But this argument goes even further, including the faithfulness of God to preserve the record of His work through Christ. God sent His own Son, the second person of the trinity, to take human form for the purpose of redemption. What was the cost of God’s incredible gift of salvation offered to man? His own Son’s life!

The Bible is the record of Christ’s coming, His payment for our sin, and all the truths we need to know about Him.  So here is a question. If God sent His Son, paid the highest price imaginable for the redemption of human beings, and made a record so all future generations could know, would He allow the text to be adulterated and the message ruined by error? Impossible!  If God allowed the text to be lost and the message to be muddled, He would then be unfaithful to His own purpose and to His own Son and His sacrifice on the Cross. Logically, theoretically, practically, that is impossible.

God will not and cannot allow the record of the perfect work of His Son to be lost to mankind. Otherwise, He would void—for succeeding generations—the payment of His Son, Jesus Christ.

The nature, character, and attributes of God demand a faithful witness of His decrees, promise, plan, and purpose, climaxed in the death, burial, and resurrection of His Son.

The Scripture has authority because God has all authority. And because God is the author of all Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16), Scripture is authoritative. God is the basis for the Bible’s authority. Since God has ensured the transmission of the message of His Son and since He reinforces this message by His own authority, mankind has only two choices: to obey Him or reject Him. The fact that God gave us the Scripture is the reason we know that it is accurate and that it is exactly what He wants us to have. And because God has spoken it, we can be confident in the Scripture’s authority. It is true and represents faithfully His offer and promise of forgiveness and eternal life to those who meet His criteria of belief in His Son.[1]

What can we say about this line of reasoning?  Well, first, it’s very common.  I’ve heard it over and over through the years.  God wouldn’t want us to be confused so He must ensure the integrity of the text.  He must supervise all human interaction with the material so that there aren’t any errors.  This, of course, depends entirely on the presumption that we know God’s intention and action.  But is that true?  How many times in the same collection of documents do we find that God hides His purposes, that His will is not clearly revealed, that He expects His followers to diligently seek Him and sort out the good from the bad?  Must God meet our requirement about clear communication for us to know Him?  Or is He shrouded in mystery (sometimes)?  Furthermore, this line of reasoning depends on written authority, and if we no longer hear His voice, how can we be sure that the record of His past communication is absolutely without error?  Oh, and what does “error” mean?  Does it mean that everything written must be factually accurate?  Scholarship doesn’t seem to support that claim?  Does it mean that the written text was accurately transmitted?  That doesn’t seem to be the case either despite the claim (above) that there are no “significant” differences in the DSS.  But if God supervised the text, there should be absolutely no differences—yet there are.  The argument pretends that the written record is what God said but we know this isn’t the case.  There are hundreds and hundreds of verses that are not what God said.  They are records of human actions, explanations, divine reflections, historical accounts, etc.  When we turn the entire text into God’s voice, we incorporate God’s authority over all the written text despite the fact that God wrote only a very small part of this  corpus.

Ultimately the argument that the text must be what God wants it to be is based on a Christological claim, that is, if we can’t rely on the accuracy of the text then the claims about life and death of Jesus are at risk, and since our theological paradigm depends on those claims, we cannot allow the possibility that they might not be exactly correct.  And the argument that God is the author of all “Scripture” is a thoroughly modern one because it treats Scripture as writtendocuments which was clearly not the case when Paul penned that remark.  The authority of Scripture is a paradigm issue, not an apodictic one.  In fact, the claim that “we can be confident in the Scripture’s authority” because God spoke it overlooks that fact that most of what we have in the Bible wasn’t spoken by God.  Most of it is the record of human beings in interaction with God.  “And God said” might be used 1900 times, but those 1900 times amount to far less than the 700,000 plus words in the Book.

Where does this leave us?  Are we going to throw out the Bible because it might not meet our standard of accuracy?  Or do we pretend that it does and ignore the scholarship?  I suggest that we stop looking for certainty and start appreciating the text for what it is—a recounting of the experience of God’s involvement with humanity.  Conditioned by culture, history, and language.  Worthy of veneration.  Insightful.  Of ultimate importance to the believing community.  None of which requires divine supervision or the assertion of perfect accuracy.

Consider the culture of Israel prior to the Captivity.  That culture relied on prophetic input.  In fact, a prophet (or prophets) was required to be part of the government.  Without vocal instruction the written words could not be fully understood.  Hebrew itself is filled with ambiguous words and words with multiple meanings.  The act of interpretation is the attempt to clarify this ambiguity.  Human intervention is required.  Are we going to suggest that God oversees all these interpretations as well so that everything is clear?  If so, which of the 40,000 Protestant denominations is the right one?  Undoubtedly, the one you belong to.

Topical Index: said, certainty, authority, canon, ambiguity, Ezekiel 3:22

[1] https://answersingenesis.org/is-the-bible-true/and-god-said/