If you would now comment on the following theological subjects.

  While I have no problem believing everything the Scriptures say about God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, I suppose I would not be an orthodox Trinitarian – such as using terms like "triune God," "Very God and Very Man," and "God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit." These are not biblical terminology, and may not be biblical concepts. I prefer the way Paul the apostle puts it in l Cor. 8:6: "Yet for us there is only one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live."

  I am pleased to be part of a tradition that seeks to call Bible things by Bible names rather than the terminology of papal encyclicals and church councils. I join Peter the apostle in confessing Jesus of Nazareth as "the Christ, the Son of the living God," not as God himself. And I follow Jesus in identifying the Holy Spirit as "the Comforter" or "the Helper" and not as God himself. In Eph. 4:4-6 Paul writes about "one God the Father" and of "one Lord" and "one Spirit." I can accept this – along with such language from Jesus as "My Father and I are one" – without speculating on the nature of the relationship between God and Christ. I find theological terms like "hypostatic union" unnecessary if not meaningless.

  Unlike Trinity, millennium is a biblical term in that it is Latin for a thousand years, a subject of Revelation 20. And I am a millennialist in that I believe there will one day be new heavens and a new earth. I believe in a future conversion of the Jews, and that the kingdoms of this world will one day be the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. I rejoice in the promises that the meek will inherit the earth, and that one day "the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea." Again I join the great apostle in the assurance that "the sufferings of this present time are in no wise to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed" (Rom. 8:18).

  But again I don’t think it is necessary to speculate on the when or the how of millennial promises. God’s tomorrow will come in God’s own time and in God’s own way.

Inspiration of scripture (your "the Spirit of Christ Rule")

  My "Spirit of Christ Rule" of interpretation is that no passage should be interpreted in a way that runs counter to the spirit of Christ, however appealing it may be otherwise. I have applied this to the way passages have been interpreted in reference to the ministry of women. When Scripture is used to subjugate our sisters, make them less than equal to men, and to obstruct their Spirit-given gifts for ministry, those interpretations are contrary to the spirit of Christ and must be rejected.

  But the rule applies more generally. When the Bible is used to justify division among believers or to approve of shooting our own wounded, or to disenfranchise the divorced who have remarried, it is to place legalistic interpretation over the spirit of Christ. Jesus is the Lord of Scripture as well as the Sabbath, and the Bible must yield to his authority, not the other way around.

  As for the inspiration of Scripture in general I subscribe to no particular theory of inspiration, save that obscure reference in 2 Tim. 3:16 – "All Scripture is God-breathed," or is "given by the inspiration of God." No one knows just what "God-breathed" means. Perhaps 2 Peter 1:21 serves to interpret: "holy men spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." But even this allows for no hard-line theory. It is enough to say that inspired Scripture means that it is in some way of and by the leading of God.

  We are to distinguish inspiration from revelation. While all – or most -- Scripture is inspired, it is not all revelation. Luke’s writings are a good example of Scripture that is inspired but not revealed. He makes it plain in his preface (Lk. 1:1-3) that he gathered his information from various sources – as if writing a thesis. But the church has always believed that the doctor was "led by the Spirit" in his research. Inspiration but not revelation.

  Paul, on the other hand, makes it clear that he sometimes received information directly from heaven, as in Eph. 3:3: "by revelation was made known to me the mystery." And yet in other instances in Ephesians – such as references to his imprisonment and what he says about Tychicus – he is clearly on his own as an inspired apostle. So Ephesians, unlike Luke, has both inspiration and revelation.

  We also do well to distinguish between inspiration and Scripture, unless we are so bold as to claim that everything in the Bible is inspired. If inspiration implies "instruction in righteousness," as 2 Tim. 3:16 indicates, then some portions of the Bible must be seen as uninspired – such as some of the speeches in Job (which God himself reproved when he spoke), the deprecatory Psalms (e.g. Ps. 137:8-9), and especially the Song of Solomon, which was understandably questioned as being inspired Scripture by some of the rabbis who created the Jewish canon.

  It was questioned not only because there is no reference to God in the book, but, taken literally, it reads like a sensual, passionate love encounter between a man and a woman. Since they are yet unmarried it could be used to encourage premarital sex. Traditional attempts to allegorize the Song, making it a love story between God and Israel, have impressed modern scholars as contrived and unsupportable. But there may be a purple passage in 8:6: "Love is strong as death, jealousy as cruet as the grave." And its exaltation of sexual love may be a needed lesson for us puritanical Christians, but it is nonetheless difficult to find any spiritual value in the book. And if we are to learn to sweet-talk our lover from this book, as some suggest, we’d better think twice before we use 1:9: "I compare you, my love, to a mare of Pharaoh’s chariots."

  If we use the 2 Tim. 3:16 test for inspiration – "instructs in righteousness" – it is evident that parts of the Bible appear to be much more inspired than other parts, and some parts not at all. And yet all the Bible is Scripture – if for no other reason because the church made it so. It was this distinction Luther drew between James and Romans, the former he called an epistle of straw. He did not mean that James is not Scripture, or even that it is not inspired to some degree, but that in comparison to Romans, which he deemed to be gold, James was but straw, of considerably less value.

  We don’t have to agree with Luther to say that we have the same experience, for we too find ourselves partial to certain books and verses, while some mean little or nothing to us. To be sure, that may be our fault, as it may have been Luther’s, and we must remain seekers after truth in all of Scripture.

  But it remains a helpful thesis for all Bible study, that while all truth is equally true, all truth is not equally important. This means that parts of the Bible are far more important than other parts. And might not the Bible differ in its degrees of inspiration, with some parts not inspired at all? Thus we distinguish between inspiration and Scripture. While all – or most all -- Scripture is inspired, all inspired writings are not Scripture. Shakespeare may well have been inspired of God, but that doesn’t mean we are to canonize his works as Holy Scripture.

  There were numerous writings that the ancient church considered inspired that were not canonized or accepted as Scripture – Hermas, Barnabas, Didache, Clement are examples. While they were "instruction in righteousness" and worthy to be read, they were rejected as Scripture because they were not apostolic – either written by an apostle or by one close to the apostolic tradition, as is the case with the documents that make up the New Testament.

  I first came to realize this distinction in an embarrassing moment in graduate work at Harvard. When Prof. Krister Stendahl asked me what determined the inclusion of a document into the New Testament canon, I replied that it had to be considered inspired by the Holy Spirit. He said no, inspiration was not sufficient. The test was apostolicity. But the embarrassment was worthwhile, for it gave me a higher view of Scripture. A document had to be more than inspired to be canonized. It had to be the work of an apostle or one close to an apostle.

  This explains why some books were slow in being canonized, not that their inspiration was questioned, but their authorship – such as Hebrews, Revelation, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John. It also explains why early on most of the New Testament – the writings of Paul and the gospels and Acts – were accepted as Scripture without question. Their apostolicity was readily acknowledged. Mark and Luke were not apostles, but they were within the apostolic circle. That is why we do not canonize Shakespeare – or multitudes of other inspired writings through the centuries. They do not meet the test of apostolicity.

  We may now better understand the depth of the meaning of an ancient creedal affirmation – We believe in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

                                                   (To be continued)

  All back issues of these Soldier On essays are available at leroygarrett.org