DOCTRINAL BELIEFS
THE BIBLE
BIBLIOLOGY IS THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE IN WHOLE AND NOT IN PARTS
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The Bible tells a collective and unified story, from start to finish, about the fallen state of mankind and God's promise to provide salvation to those who would believe into Him. Therefore, all Scripture must be studied within the context of all Scripture.
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Attempting to study parts of the Bible without first understanding the whole of it is like trying to study the totality of truth in a given movie scene without understanding how the rest of the movie fits together. This necessarily leads to interpretive error.
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In The Lion King, for example, Simba's rendition of Hakuna Matata appears to be a celebration of peace, joy, and relaxation. In the context of the story, however, it becomes clear that Simba uses the philosophy to suppress and avoid the truths surrounding his father's death and his own responsibility to answer the darkness.
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So it is with Scripture. The whole must be appropriately known if the part is to be appropriately understood.
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The term God-breathed refers to the literal words that God designated for the literal pages of the canonized Scripture, for better or for worse.
The term does not refer to words spoken by God. John records that Christ Himself said much which was never written down; therefore, those unwritten words are not considered God-breathed. Similarly, the term does not apply to texts which were written by holy men but never found, such as some of Paul's missing letters to various churches around Asia. Even if those letters are theologically perfect, the fact that they are not in Scripture means that we cannot call them God-breathed.
Finally, Scripture records many evils of which God does not approve; yet, the words used to describe these evils are identified as God-breathed because they are recorded in the canon of Scripture. For example, the words used to record Satan's lies are identified as having been inspired by God for no other reason than because God intended for those words to appear on our pages.
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ALL SCRIPTURE IS
THE INSPIRED WORD OF GOD
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That Scripture is infallible means that it cannot fail. That it is inerrant means that it does not contain any error. Because it is infallible, it is also inerrant. We must clarify that our understanding of Scripture is only true when it is interpreted truthfully. Misinterpretations of truth are not truth; therefore, the believer must make every effort to learn how to interpret Scripture appropriately, and most do not.
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Any discrepancy or apparent confusion in Scripture must have a qualified and perfect solution (even if we don't understand it). For example, the timelines of the Israelite and Judean kings do not match perfectly as they are recorded in Chronicles and Kings; however, scholars have been able to determine historical co-regencies which, when applied, allow the timelines to fit together with precision. Further, that the four Gospels are not identical is explained by the reality that the authors were humans with varied but accurate perspectives of the same Christ.
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Scripture's inerrancy does not disallow for figurative writing. It is clear that God often intended to use metaphors, symbolisms, and stories to appropriately communicate His truths. This is never made more clear than in Jesus' use of parables.
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It is important to distinguish that Scripture is true in all that it affirms, but that Scripture does not affirm all that it records. Indeed, the many sins of God's faithful are recorded in Scripture as signs of their fallenness, not their perfections. And many fools and evil men in Scripture are recorded as liars.
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SCRIPTURE IS
INFALLIBLE AND INERRANT
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The words which the authors of Scripture scribed were not dictated by God, meaning that the Holy Spirit did not control the authors and manipulate their words. God allowed each author to maintain his personality and writing style, and He supernaturally managed the words that they penned to ensure their accuracy and inerrancy.
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It is surely a mystery but the distinction is significant. For example, it was God's pleasure and ordinance to allow John to brag about his footrace with Peter while recording the events of Christ's resurrection in perfect detail. John's personality is clearly seen while the integrity of spiritual truth is supernaturally maintained.
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Even recorded conversations with God are still dependent on the human authors who remembered them and wrote them down in literary form. Truly, the only words in Scripture which were dictated (written) by God Himself are the ten commandments carved into the stone tablets by God's own finger. Everything else was recorded by human authors who were supernaturally carried along by God in the process.
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THE AUTHORS OF SCRIPTURE WERE CARRIED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT, NOT POSSESSED
Only the original manuscripts are given the distinction of being divinely inspired; therefore, only the original manuscripts are infallible and inerrant. Our modern, English Bible cannot be called inspired, infallible, or inerrant.
The authors were carried along by the Holy Spirit but the transcribers and translators were not. The manuscripts from which we derive our modern bible are not the originals, and some of them differ slightly in their content. Further, translations into English or any other language necessarily lose some of the original meanings, and indeed many different translations assume different meanings of the original text. It should be obvious that if two translations quote the same verse to mean different things, they cannot both be divinely pure. To clarify, there is no translation which is found to be perfect.
Considering all of this, we still count our modern Bible as wholly reliable as it is known to be 99.99% faithful to the original manuscripts. Like (or perhaps unlike) the age-old game of Telephone, we can trust our transcribed, translated Bible to be a reliable reconstruction of the original inspired, infallible, and inerrant manuscripts while confessing that it might not be exactly what was originally written.
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OUR BIBLE IS NOT GOD'S ORIGINAL WORD BUT IS A RELIABLE COPY OF IT
God has chosen to reveal Himself to humanity in various ways whether through dreams, teachers, miracles, or creation itself. To say that Scripture is authoritative means that all forms of revelation must submit to and align with the Bible, which is God's highest standard of revelation next to the person of Jesus Christ. We can have false dreams, false visions, and false teachers, but we can never have false Scripture. The Bible is authoritative because every dream, vision, and teacher must agree with a truthful interpretation of
Scripture to be true.
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Calling Scripture authoritative does not mean that it is prescriptive, meaning that not every verse was written to communicate some kind of moral instruction. When Paul writes that all Scripture is useful for teaching, encouraging, correcting, and training, he means that none of it is wasted in the overall story of who God is and what He cares about. He does not mean that every verse has a hidden meaning for us to apply behaviorally.
Sometimes the Bible gives us instruction, sometimes it records instructions given to a specific person for a specific reason, and sometimes it just tells stories about other people in other lands at other times. It is important for us to understand this so that we can avoid making Scripture about ourselves. It is about God and the history of His interactions with humanity, and we are only on the back end of that history. We must not forcefully squeeze applications out of the Bible which God never meant for us to apply.
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SCRIPTURE IS AUTHORITATIVE,
NOT UNIVERSALLY PRESCRIPTIVE
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Scripture is not about modern believers because is it already about God and the history of His people. That history, from start to a future end, concerns the person and the purpose of Jesus. His Hebrew name, Yeshua, means "God saves". It is true that the Bible has respectively little to do with you and me but has everything to do with Christ as the One who God sent to save us.
Though God already told Adam and Eve about His plan in Genesis 3:15-16, the religious people of Israel had forgotten it by the time Christ arrived on the scene. Jesus' main frustration with them was that they had taken their Old Testament scriptures and used them as dogmatic instructions for their own godly living instead of reading them to learn more about why and how God cared enough to save them from the curse of sin. Because they used their scriptures to focus on themselves, they were unable to recognize Christ when He finally came to fulfill those same scriptures.
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While we are instructed to devote ourselves to sound doctrine by thoroughly knowing Scripture, we as modern believers must remember that our Bible is not about us and our own behavior; it is about how Jesus has saved humanity just like God said He would. Understanding that, God has also given us the grace to respond to that gospel work in our godly living which many of Paul's letters teach. The greatest expression of godly living, forever and always, is that we would be love toward those around us whether believer or unbeliever, friend or foe. Amen.
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