After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age, Part 7

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Today's entry was written by Kenton Sparks. Kenton Sparks is professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University and author of several books, including his latest God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship , in which he argues that evangelical biblical scholarship has largely failed in not appropriating critical scholarship as it should.

This is the seventh and final part of a seven-part series, which has been adapted from a Scholarly Essay of the same title. The first entry can be read here.

In his previous post, Sparks discussed how to approach Scripture in light of this revised understanding of inerrancy, and concluded that “a healthy use of Scripture should recognize that theology can by no means depend on Scripture only.” In today’s post, Sparks clarifies what other “voices” should be listened to, if not only Scripture.

12. Theology Beyond the Bible: Cosmos, Tradition and Spirit

If Christian theology should move beyond the Bible in some form or fashion, to what other “voices” must we attend? Space does not allow me to provide a full-orbed answer to this question, but I would like to offer three important biblical answers to the question.

a. The Voice of Creation

First, the Bible explicitly says in Ps 19 that the cosmos speaks for God: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard (Ps 19:1-3).” The Apostle Paul expands the valence of creation’s “word” to include not only words of wisdom but also a witness to God’s existence and his divine nature (Rom 1:20).

When the voice of creation is taken this seriously, and when we add to the mix that Scripture is written by inspired but finite and fallen human beings, then it becomes clear that Christian approaches to theology and scholarly inquiry should never pit “God’s word in Scripture” against “human science.” Rather, we must listen carefully to what God has said through the sacred but broken Bible and to what he is saying through his beautiful but broken world.

b. The Voice of Tradition

The postmodern turn has revealed that tradition is our human way of grasping and perpetuating the truth. This is certainly right, and it suits Luke’s belief that Christian history is important (see Acts) and Paul’s admonition that we should “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught … by word of mouth or by our letter” (2 Thess 2:15). So the Christian tradition should count in our theological reflection. And this is how it actually plays out even for Christians who supposedly reject “tradition.” The doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, is not clearly expressed in Scripture. Rather, the doctrine was deduced from Scripture (and Greek philosophy!) and enshrined as creedal orthodoxy in the 4th century Nicene Creed. Even the canon itself is a product of tradition. Early Christians debated for several centuries what books should be included and excluded.

My main point is that nowadays everyone in the Theological Interpretation movement—Evangelicals included—believes that traditional creedal orthodoxy provides a fundamental touchstone for our interpretation of Scripture. We cannot read the Bible without tradition.

c. The Voice of the Spirit

In addition to Scripture, cosmos, and tradition, the Church must “listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Rev 2:7 et al.). The voice of the Holy Spirit is repeatedly accentuated in the New Testament. It convinces the world “concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:17-18). It bears witness “with our spirit” that we are children of God (Rom 8:16). The Spirit “leads us” (Rom 8:14) and “helps us in our weakness” (Rom 8:26), and by it we have and exercise spiritual gifts for the encouragement of the Church (cf. Rom 12; 1 Cor 12). In the book of Acts the Spirit speaks directly to human beings, not only to apostles (Acts 10:19) but also to Christians who are not apostles and to non-Christians (Act 8:29; 10:1-3; 22:9-10). So if we take the Bible with any seriousness we will recognize that the voice of the Spirit is a crucial voice in the Church’s theological reflection.

If the Spirit’s activity is a dependable theological compass, why not simply dispense with Scripture and tradition and “let the Spirit lead?” This is an approach that has been advocated in some theological circles (Schwenkfeldian theology being a good example), but it has at least one obvious strike against it. Scripture presents the Spirit’s activity as closely related to God’s written word and to those who teach it. God sent Philip, not an angel or his Spirit, to help the Ethiopian understand the book of Isaiah (Ac 8:26-40). And in Paul’s theological appeals to the Spirit’s witness in Galatians, and in the similar appeals made at the council in Acts 15, we should notice how prominently Scripture figured in those discussions.

That the Spirit might speak to the Church wholly apart from Scripture is not entertained in these cases. While I have no desire to say what God can and cannot do in this or other matters, it seems to me that the Spirit’s activity in God’s self-disclosure, and in his guidance of the Church, is closely tied to Scripture and to other sources that mediate God’s word to us, such as the cosmos and tradition. I freely admit that the situation might be different in the interior of Mongolia, where the Spirit speaks to men and women who have never seen a Bible. But for those of us who have God’s written word at our disposal, that word is sanctified by the Spirit as a primary source of divine discourse. The objective nature of Scripture—as tangible words written in a book—provides an additional point of stability for the Church’s theological reflection. This is precisely why the canon was assembled and embraced by the Church.

So this is our situation: we derive our theology from the broken voices of Scripture, tradition and cosmos, and with the mysterious help of the Spirit. Good theology pursues the truth by listening to and coherently ordering all of these important voices. May God help us to do this well.

Conclusions

God sanctifies and uses broken human beings to extend his grace to broken human beings. He uses me, and he uses you. And in doing so, though he in some sense cleanses us from sin, and though his Spirit is at work in us, he does not render us sinless nor does he protect us from the foibles of errant judgment and the consequences of living in a fallen world. That he uses these “vessels of clay” for his purposes is remarkable but not wholly mysterious, for Paul tells us that he does so “that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor 4:7). In other words, there is a theological purpose behind God’s choice to use us as we are … namely, that the glory for redemption would truly be his. “Our competence is not our own doing; our competence is from God” (2 Cor 3:5).

The approach to Scripture that I have sketched out here, and the doctrine of Scripture implicit in it, assumes that the same pattern holding for humanity in general holds as well for the biblical authors. God sanctified broken human beings, fallen and finite though they were, and used them to convey his message of redemption in writing. The men involved (and perhaps a few women) included countless authors and editors, as well as those who were involved in the canonical processes that created Scripture. Insofar as they were human beings, they were no more perfect than we are, and in some cases—having lived even before the appearance of Christ—they probably knew less about theology and God’s character than we know. But each contributed in ways conscious and unconscious to God’s redemptive work, offered a vantage point or angle on things divine, and was selected by God’s wisdom as a distinctive voice that contributes in some way to our understanding of God’s unfolding redemptive plan and, hence, to our spiritual nourishment.

The problem supposedly precipitated by this untidy situation is not as serious as it first appears. We might at first suppose that, as a result, there will be error and vice in Scripture and that this will render it useless as a vehicle of grace and, in the process, impugn God’s character by association. While it’s quite true that human error and vice do thereby insinuate themselves into Scripture, these human properties of Scripture, and of humanity and the cosmos generally, have no bearing on God’s goodness. Everything that is truly terrible in our world, and in us, can be traced back to human culpability, and all that is good and true—and all that is good and true in Scripture—are his doing. “Who will rescue me from this body of death?… Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25).