DO WE HAVE A COMPLETE BIBLE?

The older I grow in the work of restoring unity among our divided people the more persuaded I am that much of our problem stems from a Fundamentalist approach to the Bible. Strictly speaking, the Churches of Christ/Christian Churches are not Fundamentalists, if for no other reason the Fundamentalists would not accept us as such (because of our views on baptism), and also because we would have nothing to do with the Fundamentalists. There are other reasons, such as our people having a much more rationalistic approach to the Bible and being more open to modem biblical research, sort of.

Our people take a strong position on the authority of the Bible, but this does not make them Fundamentalists. Even believing in the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible does not make one a Fundamentalist. The essence of Fundamentalism, as James Barr observes in his study of the subject, is that the authority of Scripture is necessarily tied to its inerrancy. The Bible stands as authoritative only if it is without error! This is why the faith of people of this mindset is threatened when they are confronted by a single possible error in the Bible. Our people since the days of Stone and Campbell have never taken this position even though we have always been “people of the Book” and have highly esteemed the Scriptures as the word of God.

But still we have some other Fundamentalist traits, such as our exclusivism and in some of the ways we treat the Bible. I refer to such ideas as the Bible being a complete and perfect book, and the notion that “We just take the Bible for what it says” and “It means what it says.” All this is not only uncritical and unthinking but irresponsible. No one always takes the Bible for what it says, and no one is satisfied to let the Bible always mean just what it says. Example: We all concede that Jesus did not really mean that one is to pluck out an eye or cut off a hand if they tempt him to sin, but that is what he said. And we all know that the Bible is sometimes wrong, if we’ll face up to it, such as in Lev. 11:6 where it says hares chew the cud, and in Mt. 23:35 where Jesus is reported to have used the wrong name for the father of Zechariah (2 Chron. 24:20-21).

Fundamentalists create a safety net by blaming such errors on copyists, for the original writings (autographs) were inerrant. They insist that the errors are only in the copies (apographs)! One wonders how they know this since the autographs no longer exist and cannot be examined. They are asking us to believe that God, for whatever reason, preserved the autographs without error but didn’t bother to do the same for the apographs, which is the only Bible the church has ever had!

The Bible is not the kind of book Fundamentalists make it out to be, nor was it ever intended to be. It makes no such claims for itself. It would be far more Christian and much more defensible to argue for a perfect Savior rather than a perfect book. We can believe in a perfect and inerrant Lord and Savior without having to believe the same about the “earthen vessels” that reveal him to us. God did not give us a book to save us, but a Person. His “unspeakable gift” is Jesus Christ, not literary documents, however important those documents may be.

It should be enough to allow the Bible to speak for itself: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). The next verse says the Scriptures are “perfect” in the sense that “the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” But the Scriptures nowhere claim for themselves perfection in the sense of being inerrant or even “complete,” if that is made to mean a clearly defined canon of documents. Biblical writers appear to be indifferent to such issues as infallibility, inerrancy, or even a defined canon of Scripture. They are rather consumed by a story to tell and experiences to relate.

To insist that the church must have a complete and perfect Bible is to go against the facts of history. Even if we assume that the Bible as we now know it is complete, which we cannot as we shall presently show, the church did not have such a Bible until 367 AD. Some books, such as Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, and Revelation were not accepted as canonical until the fourth century. Others, such as the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), I Clement, Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas, were considered inspired and bordered on being canonical, but finally were not accepted.

For a time there were rival canons, part of the church accepting one list, another part a different list. Only the Christians in the eastern church had to bother with trying to interpret the enigmatic book of Revelation, for the rest of the church did not accept it. It was not until Bishop Athanasius wrote a letter in 367 listing all the books of the New Testament as we now have them that there was general acceptance of what made up the canon. It was formally accepted by the church at the Council of Rome in 382.

So, the makeup of the Bible was determined by the church—bishops and councils—not by divine fiat. The Holy Spirit never revealed a list of the documents that should make up the Bible. The Bible did not produce the church but the church produced the Bible, and that after many, many years and with no little controversy. That is why it is difficult to argue that the true church is to be restored according to “the pattern” in the New Testament, for the earliest churches had no such pattern.

Do we have a “complete” Bible? That this question has no simple answer threatens the very foundation of Fundamentalism, for it is amiss to contend for a perfect, inerrant Bible when we can’t be sure what makes up the Bible. Paul implies that there was a letter to the Corinthians that we do not have (1 Cor. 5:9), and he refers to a letter to the Laodiceans (Col 4:16) that we do not have. Should the spade of an archaeologist turn up these documents should they be added to our present Bible, along with Paul’s other letters? If so, is our present canon “complete”?

It really gets sticky in the Old Testament, for there are books all over the place that are referred to that we do not have. Notice some of them: the book of Nathan the prophet (1 Chron. 29:29), the book of Gad the seer (1 Chron. 29:29), the visions of Gad the seer (2 Chron. 9:29), the Book of the Wars of the Lord (Num. 21:14), the Book of Jashur (Joshua 10:13), the chronicles of King David (1 Chron. 27:24), the book of the acts of Solomon (1 Kgs.11:41), the book of Shemaiah (2 Chron. 12:15). All of these are referred to as being authoritative but none is in our Bible.

The Jewish church determined the Old Testament canon, but there was no final agreement until 90 A.D. at the Council of Jamnia. And even then some rabbinical scholars refused to accept Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, and for very good reasons we Christians have to admit. Esther is vindictive, Ecclesiastes is pessimistic, and the Song of Solomon is a sensual love story. One can only be amazed that the latter ever became a part of anyone’s Bible! Had it not been for the magic name of Solomon it would not have been.

While the Christian church accepted the Jewish canon for the Old Testament, there are two different canons. The Roman Catholics, along with the Greek Orthodox and other eastern churches, accept the Apocrypha, which adds some 18 books to the OT canon. But the Protestant Bible, the one used by most Fundamentalists, does not include these books. Which is the “complete” Bible? If one bothers to read such enlightening books as the Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, he is left to wonder how such writings could be rejected—while accepting Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon!

If you are not yet sufficiently confused, the writers of the New Testament will confuse you further, for they quoted, not from the old Hebrew Bible (the inspired one!), but from the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (about 200 B.C.), which contained the Apocrypha. So, the early church (probably Jesus as well) used a more “complete” Bible than the one we have!

If I have confused you, it is OK to be confused, for it is confusing. And you don’t have to be un-confused, for the Bible is not your God. It doesn’t all have to be perfectly ordered. We don’t have to have a “complete” Bible, for what is complete to one is incomplete to another. And it doesn’t have to be exact and inerrant. What. it intends to do—convey the message—it does, and nothing else matters all that much.

There is no indication that God’s eternal purpose was to give us a bunch of documents or a book, but to give us himself in the form of his own Son. No prophet or apostle set out to write a Bible. God raised up a nation in order to produce that Person who would be in his own image. He was a covenant-making God who created a covenant people. Those people, in both OT and NT, created documents along the way, lots of them, describing their experiences. This they did by the inspiration of God, though we can’t know what all that meant. It at least means that God made it happen.

And so we have the holy Scriptures, not necessarily an exact canon, but it doesn’t have to be and can’t be. We can believe that God superintended events in such a way that we have all the Bible we need. We have all the truth we need and more than we will ever practice, but that doesn’t mean there may not be truth that we do not have. The Bible as we have it tells the story God wants told, especially in reference to Jesus Christ. We may not have Paul’s lost letters or the book of Jashur or the Apocrypha, but we don’t have to have. In what we do have there are jars and clashes along the way, errors if you please, but there is nothing that blunts the message that Jesus is Lord. In fact the jars and clashes accentuate the message all the more.

It is like the old phonograph records that depict the faithful dog with its ear close to the megaphone. There may be static in the recording but “the Master’s voice” comes through clear and loud: “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (Jn. 20:31).—the Editor

Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger people! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for power equal to your tasks.—Phillip Brooks

God calls His followers to be courageous, fearless, and confident. He will neither abandon nor forsake us … Faith in the marvelous, provisionary Lord will bring the gentle hand of hope to these lands.—Terry Rush