“It is not a good sign for Protestants, or for the depth of their view, if they do not feel the difficulties that afflict the Scripture principle as compared to the church principle of Roman Catholics. It is not a good sign if they can present or hear the Roman Catholic doctrine without a certain homesickness for its unheard-of soberness and certainty.”
-Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 204.
“The authority of Holy Scripture cannot be the foundation of faith in Christ; rather must the latter be presupposed before a peculiar authority can be granted to Holy Scripture.”
—Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), §128.
At the centre of the Bible is the gospel. Our entire doctrine of Scripture should be determined by this evangelical centre.
This has been my argument over the past couple of weeks. And several readers have raised questions about this distinction between the Bible and the gospel. How can we distinguish between the Bible and the gospel, when the gospel itself is found solely in the Bible? What are the criteria for identifying any “core” or “centre” of Scripture?
Simply put, my answer is that Scripture itself demands that we identify its own evangelical core, its own central message. The gospel is not a preconceived theological category which we then bring to Scripture, but it is rather something which we encounter in Scripture itself, and which demands to be taken seriously as the centre of the whole biblical witness.
In other words, our identification of the gospel as the core of Scripture is nothing more than an attempt to follow the ancient hermeneutical rule: Scripture interprets itself (Scriptura sui interpres). And this means that we should aim to use the word “gospel” as it is used in the New Testament itself—not as a narrow theological slogan but as a fundamentally open concept which remains always related to the decisive saving act of Israel’s God in the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Hans Küng offers a useful discussion of the centrality of the gospel in his important book The Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1967), pp. 40-41. He notes that “[i]t is certainly possible to look impartially for a ‘centre’ in Scripture, by working exegetically from the New Testament texts rather than dogmatically from established preconceptions.” After all, what was form criticism except a massive (one-sided, but still largely successful) endeavour to identify the Bible’s central “gospel” using critical tools?
But what is this gospel? Küng continues: “On the one hand the word ‘gospel’ is not restricted to a particular doctrine..., but is fundamentally open; on the other hand, the word ‘gospel’ in the New Testament is indissolubly linked to the saving event in Jesus Christ.” Thus we can identify the gospel through critical and exegetical research, but this identification will always remain provisional. Precisely because the gospel is the centre of the Bible itself and not some external theological preconception, any identification of the gospel will always remain open to revision in light of further research into the biblical texts.
Küng is also right to point out that the word “gospel” refers not just to one part of the Bible in isolation from other parts, but to the biblical witness as a whole. And it is precisely the evangelical centre of Scripture which allows us to take seriously the witness of Scripture as a unified whole. Without this evangelical centre, we would undermine the unity of Scripture either by selecting certain portions of Scripture in isolation from others (as in Marcionism), or by reducing all Scripture to a single “harmonised” level (as in fundamentalism).
An exegetical and critical identification of the Bible’s evangelical centre, and a sharp theological concentration on this centre, allow us to avoid both the Scylla of Marcionism and the Charybdis of fundmantalism, and to view the whole Bible—with all its inner tensions and divergencies—as the gospel of God.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine
—John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), 1.17-23.
In recent posts I have suggested that the “inspiration” of Scripture should be understood not as a static property of the biblical text, but as an event that takes place in and through the text. I described this event as an act in which God speaks or “breathes out” the gospel. This means that the Bible is unique because of what happens through it, because of something God does when the Bible’s message is communicated.
To describe this event quite simply: the Bible is the Word of God because God himself speaks through it, because through it God “breathes” the gospel. As Karl Barth put it, the Bible is God’s Word because it becomes his Word again and again.
The essential point in all this is that the Word of God is an event that happens. It is not a fixed text, not an object that we could master and possess. The Word of God is God himself speaking and acting; the Word of God is God himself encountering us here and now with a word of salvation. Because this Word happens through the Bible, because God himself elects to speak through this particular text, it is true to say that “the Bible is the Word of God.”
Several readers have thus raised an important question: what is the difference between the Bible and other forms of gospel-speaking? If the Bible is the Word of God “instrumentally” rather than “formally,” how can we claim for this particular text a normative status above all other Christian texts (e.g. sermons, theological treatises, or blogs)?
The answer, I think, is that the Bible has a normative status precisely because of God’s election. God has chosen the biblical writers and the biblical texts to be the primary witnesses to the history of his saving act. God has chosen to speak his own Word through the word of these witnesses. God has chosen to assume these witnesses, to take their human words up into his own saving history. God has chosen that these witnesses should be the rule and guide (κανων) for all subsequent speech about himself, so that these witnesses will in turn bring forth new witness, new speech, in each successive historical moment.
Through the Bible—and through the Bible alone—we learn what it means to speak the gospel. And in so far as, guided by the Bible, we do speak the gospel, the Word of God also takes place through our speaking. This is not a different or lesser Word from the Word that takes place in Scripture. It is the very same Word of God which takes place both in Scripture and in our own gospel-speaking. But it takes place in our contemporary speaking only to the extent that this speaking remains guided by the primary witnesses of the biblical canon.
“Because God demands nothing from the people of God without already taking responsibility for it, God issues his command in order to draw people into God’s promise of faithfulness.”
—Gerhard Sauter, Gateways to Dogmatics: Reasoning Theologically for the Life of the Church
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