Theological Journal – February 4 Torrance Tuesday – Revelation and Holy Scripture

This is a follow-up of sorts to an earlier Torrance Tuesday post on Bible Reading. It is from his Reality and Evangelical Theology (Westminster Press. 1981), 16,17,18).

“Fundamentalism stumbles at the consubstantial relation between the free continuous act of God’s self-communication and the living content of what He communicates, especially when this is applied to divine revelation in and through the Holy Scriptures. It rejects the fact that revelation must be continually given and received in a living relation with God ­ i.e., it substitutes a static for a dynamic view of revelation. …The practical and the epistemological effect of a fundamentalism of this kind is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God’s self-revelation which is mediated to us through the Bible. This effect is only reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the truth itself to which they refer. …The living reality of God’s self-revelation through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit is in point of fact made secondary to the Scriptures.”

Torrance here gets at what remains a fundamental divide between Christians who share an equal respect for and adherence to the Bible as God’s Word. Both types of believers are certain that God communicates with us through the Bible. The difference between them lies in the tense of the verb they use to describe this divine communication in scripture.

-Has God spoken to us in the Bible?                                                                                                                                     or                                                                                                                                                                                                    -Has God both spoken and still speaks to us in the Bible?

Torrance claims that the character of God’s Word as living speech also characterizes his act of communicating it to us. That is what Torrance means by using the word “consubstantial.” “Dynamic” is another word he uses to describe it. More fully, he says this Word “must be continually given and received in a living relation with God.” He clearly aligns himself with the second view above: God has spoken and still speaks to us in the Bible.

Some would speak here of the illumination of the Spirit as necessary to hearing God’s Word in the Bible. And they’re right, depending on how they parse that. If they mean the Spirit gives insight into what God has spoken, that is right, I think, but not quite what Torrance means here. It is more than a matter of epistemology or intellectualization for him. Understanding, we might say. Rather, he suggests that God speaks to us now in his Word seeking our response to his living speech. “Standing under,” more, or at least as much as, understanding is what he is after. Receiving marching orders might be an apt description of what divine communication is for Torrance.

Freezing the Word in an inerrant book is what he wants to avoid. Turning the Bible into a set of inviolable beliefs he rejects. Subordinating the relational basis of God’s communication with us is anathema to him. It’s akin to Barth’s response when asked by an editor of Christianity Today whether he believed in the historical reality of the resurrection. “Are we talking about Christianity today or yesterday? he replied. While Barth certainly believed in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, though not its “historicity” as fundamentalists and many evangelicals understand it, he was pointing to relating to the risen Christ now rather than focusing on his raising then.

Torrance (and Barth) want to keep what God spoke and what God still speaks to us now in the Bible in continual, “dialectical,” conversation. The Spirit mediates both our understanding and our standing under the Word. They do not want to lapse into subjectivism where scripture is merely a nose of wax for whatever we want it to mean, even as they want to avoid an objectivism that leaves us merely scrutinizing an ancient text.

Perhaps I can make this more concrete by using a set of images for the Bible used by Trevor Hart in his unjustly neglected book Faith Thinking. I believe he deploys these images in a way congruent with what Torrance says here. A portion of a blog post I wrote several years ago explains the images Hart uses.

The Bible as Window

The way we read the Bible is largely determined by the expectations we bring to it. We will find what we are looking for (or condemn the Bible for not having what we are looking for). So we better be looking for the right thing!

One way many read the Bible today is as if it is primarily a window.  Now one looks through a window to see what lies behind it.  To read the Bible this way is to take a primarily historical approach to it. We read it to find out what actually happened and when and how it happened. There are many invaluable gains from this approach to the Bible.  It has, however, spawned a tendency to reconstruct how things really were and who people really were (esp. Jesus) in contrast or contradiction to how the Bible presents those things and characterizes those people.  Often this has been done based on assumptions about what could and could not happen in history.  But even with less restrictive assumptions at work, the Bible leaves us with many gaps in, and questions about its historical presentation. The Bibles history is not like our history writing today. Rather its history is in line with the practice of history writing of its time. This history writing aimed at purposes other than strict chronological narrative and those aims shaped the way they wrote history. If history (as we understand the term) is the primary or only way we read the Bible, we will be (and have been) frustrated because the Bible often does not answer our historical questions and thus leaves us to our own devices in theologizing about the meaning and significance of the biblical story.

The Bible is not primarily a window to look through to find out “what really happened” in the past. It is not well-suited to that task. There’s history in it to be sure but the telling of that history is not driven by chronological accuracy. There’s no good reason, in my judgment, for doubting that the biblical story is substantially accurate, just as there’s no good reason to tie its authenticity or reliability to our own canons of history writing.

The Bible as Mirror

 Nor, I think, should we read the Bible as many do as a mirror.   One looks at a mirror to see one’s own reflection, standing in front of the mirror.  It’s our issues and struggles, our lives, which are the chief concerns in this type of Bible reading. There are many and varied types of this approach, both sophisticated and simple.  Some versions of reader response theory in literature, in which the reader creates the meaning of the story, and much devotional reading of the Bible, which seeks to find a direct word of personal meaning for uplift, inspiration, or guidance for the day’s activities and challenges.  In each case, the reader’s interest lies in front of the text on themselves, their situations and questions, needs and desires, for which they seek insight and guidance.

The Bible as Stained Glass Art

          The Bible can also be read primarily as a piece of stained glass art.  Here, one looks into stained glass art to discover the story the variously sized and colored pieces of glass seek to tell. One finds the story in the text itself, artfully shaped and told with interests other than historical exactitude or even personal or existential meaning.  There is, of course, personal, existential meaning throughout all the scriptures, but we come it indirectly by focusing on something else.  Scripture as stained glass art uses the skill of the artist to draw us into its story as the true story of God with humanity (remember The Neverending Story above). Once engaged with the story at this level, we are able to find our identity and significance with it, and engage our lives and God’s mission in the world on that basis.  This pastiche of ancient historiography, myth, poetry, novella, apologetic, shaped and reshaped by use in Israel’s worship is what God has declared as his Word to us (see last post).  Only in this way, I suggest, can we both pay proper attention to historical matters and to existential meaning as we come to this set of literature as God’s love story written to his people (as was advocated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

We’ve tried to read the Bible in primarily historical and personal, existential ways and, by and large, have missed the point!  Perhaps we are ready to begin reading it as designed, as a piece of divine stained glass art in whose story we find our identity, our significance, and our security as God’s people in the world.

The strange new world of the Bible in its stained glass form offers, indeed presses, on us at least the following:

-a different perception of reality that question how we think, speak, and live.

-a different history than the common public history we all think we live in.

-a different view of what it means to be human.

-different gifts and tasks than we imagined we had or were called to do.

This is we need to know to live life as the persons God created us to be, that is, to experience life in a harmonious integrated way. It behooves us, then, to read the Bible as the kind of book it presents itself to be rather than the one we may think or hope it is.