What Kind of a Book is the Bible . . .

IT IS DIFFICULT!

I was sitting with Ouida recently in a gathering of believers where a young brother read the whole of Eph. 3, which he did rather well. Once it was done, I was reminded once again of the profundity of Paul’s thought in such places as Ephesians. I whispered to Ouida, And what does all that mean?, which was my way of referring once more to the difficulty of scripture. Chances are the lad who read had but the slightest notion of the meaning of what he was reading, and the congregation that listened probably comprehended but little more.

It is common to see people going to meeting with their Bibles, and this is as it should be. But it is a good guess that, with but few exceptions, they are bearing along a volume that they know little about. We all believe in the Bible —we are for it, so to speak but if we are honest with ourselves about it we find a great deal of it terribly boring and still more of it completely incomprehensible. We therefore have our special sections and favorite passages, which we can handle fairly well, though we often see these apart from their contexts, and it is doubtful if even these are really understood.

One reason for this is that the church has not taken the teaching of scripture seriously. Modern sermonizing may be pleasant and encouraging, but it is hardly an effective method of instruction. Kids in school do not learn reading, writing and arithmetic that way. If a professor should attempt to teach Shakespeare at the superficial level that our churches handle the scriptures, his students would be denied the deeper insights into the likes of Hamlet and King Lear. And surely much of the Bible is as difficult or more difficult than Shakespeare.

Another reason is that the Bible is viewed more as a symbol or an idol rather than as a study text for believers. Many churches have an open Bible on the lecturn or on a table, opened perhaps to Psa. 119, which happens to be the middle, as if in itself it were something holy. No one ever reads such a Bible, or hardly ever. Bu t it is not there to be read. It serves as a symbol of some kind. Bibles often grace tables and mantles at home for the same reason, and of course the bride must carry one, a white one, between her palms as she walks to the altar. Such bibles may as well have blank pages, for surely they are never read. It is ludicrous in a way, to see a bride stepping down the aisle to the wedding march, with Daddy on her arm and the book of Leviticus in her hands!

Should the Bible really be that kind of a book? These symbolic and idolatrous (?) uses of the scriptures are at best questionable. It is as if the scriptures as a book were “a channel of grace,” the term Roman Catholics are pleased to attach to the Virgin Mary. They do not really worship her, they tell us, but she stands between them and God as “a channel of grace.” The theologians call this hypostasis, which results from man’s hesitancy to come face to face with God. He can handle it better if it is something closer to himself, like another person — or a book!

People must get the impression, from the way we view the Bible, that we are inviting them to believe in a book. The Book is the big deal. But this could not have been the case with the earliest disciples, for they had no such book that we now call the Bible. Many of them lived and died without such a book. They had a Person, and it is to this Person of the scriptures that we are to invite people. The book points to him, not he to the book. It was out of their experience with Jesus that the New Covenant scriptures came to be written.

A lot of our mishandling of scripture might be corrected if we will but accept one obvious fact: the literature that makes up the Bible is for the most part very difficult material to handle. If those of us making up Churches of Christ are divided 15 or 20 different ways because of our inability to interpret alike, and if this is multiplied twenty times over in the larger Christian world, how can we go on glibly parroting the old refrain, “If people would just be honest and take it for what it says, we would all understand it alike.”

Perhaps you haven’t thought about it, but the idea of everybody having a Bible is a new thing in the history of the church, being no earlier than the early 1800’s. It not only took the invention of movable type, which did not come until the 15th century, but the means of mass production and the affluence to go with it, which came much later. Even if the Bible had been available on mass basis through all those centuries, the people would have been too poor to have owned one and too ignorant to have read one if they did own one.

So it is a comparatively new experience for the church for everyone to have his own copy (or several copies) of the scriptures. Of all those untold millions that have made up the community of God through the centuries, we who have our own volume of scriptures to read for ourselves are a very small minority. Many would of course have heard the scriptures read, some would have portions of them in hand, and some would have scriptures reflected in hymns, poems, catechisms, and the like. But for the most part, through most all of history, the church has not had the Bible in anything like the way we do now.

When we take our own Bible into hand to study for ourselves, we should recognize, therefore, that we are sharing in something new. We should not be too surprised if all does not go smoothly. If we presume that it is God’s will for everyone to have a Bible, we must concede that He has been a very long time getting around to it, 1800 years in fact.

One thing this has to mean is that a believer does not necessarily have to understand the scriptures in order to be saved. Good for us all that it is that way! If our brethren through the ages did not even have a Bible of their own, then they could hardly be held responsible for mastering it. But they did have Jesus, and they had means of knowing something of his will for them, especially the oral tradition and what they heard read in the assemblies, and to this they were responsible. It could be argued that since we are blessed with Bibles of our own, and the literacy to read them, that we are all the more responsible. While this is no doubt the case, we can press too far the responsibility of comprehension. Most people do very little reading of any kind that reaches beyond newspapers and magazines. Even college graduates read surprisingly little, according to the surveys. We who are in the education business believe that this should be otherwise, but it is just as well that we face up to the facts.

To impose a book like the Bible upon such a people and expect them to read it and understand it with facility is to be foolish. People who were bored with what little history they had in school are suddenly thrust into thousands of years of intricate history that is unevenly recorded. Literature that calls for some understanding of anthropology, paleontology, zoology, geography, archeology, and the history of cultures, along with loads of background material, is stuff that most people will not even try to handle, and those who do are likely to be both discouraged and baffled.

I am saying that we do not only not have to understand the Bible alike, but we do not have to understand it at all. What people really mean by that silly bromide, We can all understand it alike, is that they can understand the beaten path that some sect makes through the Bible, if they walk in the same party shoes!

But in saying that a certain body of literature like the Bible is difficult to understand is not to say that it cannot be understood. Some in the church, who give a lifetime of study to the task, cultivate a remarkable understanding of the scriptures, and thank God for them. They are our teachers, and we are heavily indebted to them for better translations and helpful commentaries. But the difficulty of their task is seen in the fact that even they, with all their background, do not understand the scriptures alike.

Neither does the difficulty of the Bible mean that there isn’t much that we can all gain by a diligent reading of it, even those of us with limited education. If we pore over our lessons, saturating ourselves with what is said, we will likely all learn more than we will ever appropriate. Somebody said, maybe it was Will Rogers, that he was bothered more by what he did understand in the Bible than by what he did not understand. But if we are serious about learning we should seek out help, for the Bible is a book that needs to be taught.

Old Raccoon John Smith is a good example of this, being as he was a man of limited resources who hungered for understanding. For two hours he heard Alexander Campbell speak on Gal. 4, relative to Sarah and Hagar and the two covenants, the first time he had seen and heard him. The time went so fast that he thought Campbell had taken but half an hour. While he didn’t know what had happened to the other hour and a half, he realized that the reformer from Bethany, be he saint or sinner, had done more to unfold the scriptures to him that evening than all his previous years of study.

This shows how people need help. His background being what it was, old Raccoon almost certainly would have never learned what he did without Campbell’s help. But he didn’t have to understand about the two covenants in order to go to heaven, but he did need the lesson in view of the work God had cut out for him. Knowledge enriches and blesses, and it enables us to help others, but it does not save.

This takes us back to Eph. 3 that the young man read in the assembly. A good teacher could open up that passage in such a way that the hearers would gain insights into it that they almost certainly would never get on their own. And this is why God placed teachers in the church. It is clear that we are not all to be teachers, and if we took this office more seriously we would have better teachers and more responsible teaching.

In saying all this I want to make it clear that it is the Bible that I am describing as difficult, not the gospel, and the difference is most important. If the church through the centuries had the scriptures in only a very limited way, it most certainly had the gospel. It was the New Covenant that made the Body of Christ, and it was that Body that eventually through the centuries gave us the New Covenant scriptures. I am not saying, just as Peter was not saying, that the New Covenant is hard to understand, but that the New Covenant scriptures, written by Paul and others is hard to understand, which some wrest to their own destruction (2 Pet. 3:16).

The gospel is the Message of salvation, the story of what God has done through Christ, the Good News of redemption. As with all good news, its facts are simple, it commands and promises clear. When sinners respond to the Good News and come into relationship with Christ, they are a part of the New Covenant. So it was with the early Christians, long before there were any scriptures growing out of that New Covenant.

Once those scriptures were written, including the “hard to understand” stuff that Peter says Paul wrote, and were then combined with all those scriptures of the Old Covenant, you have a compilation of material that is very difficult to handle. And so we are challenged by a lifetime of study, realizing all along that a perfect understanding is not required of us anymore than it is possible for us.

With this more realistic and relaxed attitude about the Bible we are more likely to get more out of it, without making it either a symbol or an idol. —the Editor