Continued from Section I

Section II - Two Objections: Can God Write? Can the Bible be God's Word(s)?

It has been an integral part of the Christian church’s tradition to regard the Bible as one Book – not merely as sixty-six books which happened to be published together in one binding. Though this view has not enjoyed wide consensus in recent Biblical scholarship, it is worthwhile asking why the church through its formative stages regarded the books of Scripture not as distinct but as organic parts of a whole and often in full awareness of apparent discrepancies between various books of Scripture. In large measure, the reason was that the church affirmed God’s authorization of the Scriptures. In some sense, the story narrated in and through Scripture was construed as one story held together by the fact that God was the narrator behind the drama as well as the central actor on the stage of that drama. This is to affirm that the drama of redemption is the major plot to the Scriptures and the Triune God stands as the central figure in the drama. And yet further, God has authorized the drama to be written and enacted in the manner recorded in the Scriptures.

A major objection is close at hand however. God is not the sort of being who writes so what sense can be made of the claim that the Bible is God’s Word in written form. Borrowing tools from Nicholas Wolterstorff, let me suggest that we understand the Scriptures as an instance of double-agency discourse. These are forms of writing in which a person is credited with authorship though they have not actually written the words themselves. Examples are abundant. The President signs a document that was prepared by one of his assistants. The President has not written the document itself, but nonetheless the document expresses the intentions of the President and so the text “belongs” to the President.

On stage, an actor speaks words which “appear” to be his own, though in an important sense the words spoken are those of the playwright. The news anchor “reads” the words that appear on her teleprompter, nonetheless the words “belong” to another – a particular news writer in this case. In these instances, there are two agents involved and yet only one set of words.

Suppose we introduce not simply the notion of double agent discourse but double-authored discourse – namely those words which correctly are not only authorized but authored by two agents. Again, examples are near at hand. The collaboration involved in the production of most movies suggests that the final “product” is not primarily the work of one agent but of many, and further it would be wrong to suppose that different “strands” could be “unwound” so that distinct parts of the movie belong to one agent and other parts belong to another agent. More nearly we say in ordinary parlance (and hear in abundance at the Oscars) that such and such a movie is the collaborative effort of many people all of whom deserve a good deal of credit. Might this not be an appropriate ‘analogy’ to the way in which divine inspiration has been understood throughout the first 18 centuries of the church’s life?

But then another objection follows quickly. It goes something like this: the Bible cannot be considered as one book because we are not entitled to believe that there is one divine author to the text and this is so because God is not the sort of being who can write. He has no fingers and there are no heavenly writing tools. The objection supposes that it would be a category mistake to claim that the divine being is the sort of being who engages in the kind of human activity like writing. In response the category mistake appears to be the other way around. The claim that ‘God writes’ has not traditionally been associated with the further claim that God has a set of fingers and writing utensils. Rather the claim that ‘God writes’ is contingent upon the notion that God is able to express himself through the medium of humans using their fingers and the appropriate writing utensils available to them. God may not be the sort of being who performs physical acts of writing (leaving aside the doctrine of the incarnation for now) but why should we suppose that God could not perform other sorts of actions which do communicate. Could not God “create” beings who do communicate, or bring about actions by human agents without God himself being a human agent? God does not need fingers and writing utensils to perform communicative actions. He may use “means” to accomplish the ends of communicating without thereby possessing physical characteristics. It must also be said in this regard that the oft-defended dichotomy between divine speaking and divine acting is a false dilemma. Claiming that God can act but that God cannot speak is to miss the manner in which “speaking” is itself always a form of action. If God can act, He can “speak”. We should also not miss the number of times that the Bible does attribute words themselves to God. “Thus saith the Lord . . . “ is not infrequent throughout the canon. Though these direct divine verbal attributions are not the predominant form of divine communication in Scripture, they do happen.

Given this preliminary clearing of the underbrush, it is now time to turn our attention to an account of Scripture which affirms the dual (divine/human) authorship of those Scriptures and which has the consequence that these Scriptures read us rather than merely being read by us. To that concern we turn in the next section. 

Continue to Section III: Being Interpreted by The Drama of Redemption.

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