Interlude: The Incarnation, the Bible, and the Qur'an

I wanted to just write a brief blog in response to a comment my father-in-law, Pastor Mark Green, wrote to the previous blog entry about the history of the Bible. He was saying that a couple of his churchmen have raised objection to what authority Scripture can really hold since it was, in fact, "written by men."

In response to this, first I would say what I have already alluded to in my previous blog concerning the authority of Scripture: I believe that the authority of Scripture is derived primarily from its use in the church, making the issue of "who wrote it?" kind of secondary. To paraphrase one of the great theologians of our time, Stanley Hauerwas, "the meaning of the Scriptures cannot be separated from the task of discipleship."

I have come to appreciate the fact that the Christian Scriptures were written by humans much more since my semester abroad in Egypt, where we studied the Qur'an and Muslim theology to some extent--from Muslim professors nonetheless. In Islam you have a Holy Book that comes straight out of the mouth of God--dictated by the archangel, Gabriel, to the Prophet in his isolation. The final compilation of the Qur'an is said to have take place before the end of the Prophet's life. Not only is the text held to be linguistically and structurally flawless, it must also be read in its original 6th c. Arabic in order to be truly Scripture. (Look at any English Qur'an at Barnes & Noble or elsewhere and you'll see that it's called an "interpretation" not a "translation" of the Qur'an.)

On the other hand, the Christian Scriptures were, as has been observed, "written by men" (though, of course, we would also profess, by faith, that they were inspired by God, though not in the same way that Muslims claim the Qur'an was). Over literally 1,000+ years, scores of individual authors (and probably later editors, compilers, redactors, religious scribal schools, and even later, churches) brought together all the books of the Bible. Since the time when the canonization of the Bible was finished (which is where we ended our last discussion), the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words of the Christian Holy Book have been translated into hundreds of other languages and dialects, with the express belief that they are not significantly tainted by this translation process.

Well...I could go on, but I told you I'd keep this brief, and I want to get back to the train of thought I began with the last blog. But let me say this one last thing....

Have you ever considered the fact that Jesus never wrote a single thing, at least not anything that has appeared in Scripture (and certainly anything he wrote would have been)? The God of Islam saw how Jews and Christians had gradually corrupted the texts he had given them, and thus eliminated all human error from the equation with the Qur'an by dictating its Arabic syllables verbatim to the Prophet. The Christian God--become Man, in Christ--doesn't even bother writing a single thing while on earth, as far as we can tell. Just consider it!

I think the Miracle of the Incarnation Itself gives us a clue as to why God chose frail, faulty, unpolished human beings to compose His Scriptures. In the Incarnation, we see the perfect melding together of the human and the divine; everything that the Temple in Jerusalem was supposed to be--a midpoint between heaven and earth--Jesus fulfills and surpasses a hundred times over. And it's through this melding of human and divine that God brings freedom and salvation to all mankind.

And Scripture is this melding of the words of God and men, which bring the message of the good news of freedom and salvation in Christ to all mankind. God doesn't seem to mind that our biblical writers did not know about our modern science, or the evolutionary theory, or even (some of them) about the Trinity before writing. He doesn't seem to mind either that we've translated these ancient Greek and Hebrew words into weird, modern European languages like American English. He doesn't seem to mind even if nerds like me critically study the texts of the Bible.

If we use the Incarnation as a sort of lens, we see that the Bible is totally God uniting humanity with himself--just as Jesus was God and humanity united perfectly into one person--for the purpose of bringing good news to all people. The beauty of the fact that "men wrote the Scriptures" is that...well...God saw fit to invite men to write the Scriptures! How awesome is that privilege!