The Commentary

In October Britain’s Catholic bishops published a document, The Gift of Scripture, in which they say that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

While we need to allow for the different genres within Scripture — we would not expect poetry to be necessarily taken literally, for example — yet the bishops are indicating something far more drastic. They say the Bible must be seen to be ‘God’s word expressed in human language’, and that, while it is true when it speaks about salvation, we should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters. It is then a Bible with holes.

So basically we have a pick-and-choose approach to Scripture, with (surprise, surprise?) the Catholic hierarchy telling us which bits to believe and which not. Not a lot of doubt there about where ultimate authority lies.

Jesus and the Bible

But this approach has been tried by others before and easily unravels, leading to an undermining of confidence in all of Scripture. For example, at the end of The Times’s report on the bishops’ document, examples are given of what can be taken as true and what untrue in the Bible. In the ‘untrue’ column we find references to the Genesis creation account, whereas under the ‘true’ heading we find the Ten Commandments. But, of course, the Ten Commandments assume the truth of a six-day creation (Exodus 20.11). No inconsistency there then! Or, again, while the Sermon on the Mount is categorised as true, we find that in it the Lord Jesus expressed his total confidence in the whole Old Testament (Matthew 5.18,19), and, for example, took Genesis 2 literally in his teaching on divorce in Matthew 19.4-6. Does this mean that the Lord Jesus got it wrong? Do the bishops know better than Christ?

The attitude of Jesus to the Old Testament is an insurmountable problem for those who adopt a pick-and-choose view of Scripture. Logically, if the Bible is not inerrant, though Jesus thought it was (John 10.35), he can hardly be the trustworthy incarnate God he claimed to be. If, on the other hand, we say that Jesus did know the Bible wasn’t inerrant, but simply went along with the Jewish mindset of his day which thought it was, then where does that leave us? We contemplate a Jesus who was content to go along with what he knew to be a lie. How can such a Jesus be trusted? The downgrading of Scripture perpetrated by the bishops actually turns into an attack on Jesus himself.

Human language?

Yes, there is a sense in which the Bible is God’s word in human langu-age, but we must not think that this gives any licence to see it as unreliable. Language is not in itself a human construct. In Scripture God is the first one to speak in language a human could understand (Genesis 1.28, 2.16). Further, the apostles assure us that the writers of Scripture were superintended by the Holy Spirit so that they wrote ‘the word of the LORD’. What the Bible says is what God says (2 Timothy 3.16, 2 Peter 1.20,21). The question then is not whether we be-lieve in a reliable Bible, but whether we believe in a reliable God.

It is probable that the bishops’ approach will lead to the Bible having even less credibility in the minds of ordinary people. And do I detect here a political positioning of the Catholic Church with respect to the ‘religious hatred’ legislation? They will not now have to take any stand over awkward biblical statements. They will simply put them into the ‘untrue’ tray.

Holey Bible?

Jesus and the Bible

Human language?

John Benton

Main Articles

Other articles