Theology Thursday: What is Scripture? (Essential Series)

As we’re going through the essential series, we’ve tackled fundamental topics such as the Gospel and the Trinity, but now we will answer the question, what is Scripture? To put it plainly, Scripture is the written Word of God and it is the collection of 66 books popularly as the Bible. (Some people use the term 'Bible' different from Scripture, but we’re not gonna be splitting hairs here and I’ll be using the terms interchangeably). When we think of the Bible’s purpose, we probably think of the acronym that many Sunday school teachers love to quote, ‘the Bible is the B.I.B.L.E: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.’ To narrow it down more accurately, the purpose of Scripture is to reveal Christ. Luke 24:27 (ESV) says, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” If you start reading your Bible asking the question, ‘what does this say about me’, then you’re already reading the Bible wrong.
However, I want to expand our perception of Scripture and the only way we can expand our perception of Scripture is if we expand our perception of Christ. Jesus said in Matthew 28:18, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” When we profess that Jesus is Lord, we’re not saying that Jesus is Lord over our salvation, we’re confessing that Jesus is the Lord of our entire lives. There is not an area that He does not have lordship over.
Why does this matter concerning Scripture? Oftentimes when we think of Scripture, we do think of that B.I.B.L.E. acronym, which is very well-meaning, but it is horrendously short sighted. It subconsciously compartmentalizes Christianity, the purpose of Scripture, and the delight from God’s Word. Essentially, it boils everything down in Christianity to this simple statement: ‘what must I do to be saved?’ I’ve heard it time and time again from well-meaning Christians that if a topic or problem arises that doesn’t have to deal with salvation, then it’s not a biblical issue. Is this the all-important question? Yes! Is it the only important question in Scripture? No! Obviously the Bible gives us instruction on theology and holiness such as sin, commandments, obedience, love, hope, peace, sacrifice, godliness, etc. However, the Scriptures also give instruction, guidance, and godly wisdom on everything such as creation, marriage, parenting, business, friendships, relationships, physical warfare, spiritual warfare, politics, suffering, success, and even intimacy!
When we think of Scripture, Christians have to stop compartmentalizing the areas of effects. There is no arena in life in which the Bible does not speak to in some way. Here’s an example from one of my favorite shows of all time… Spongebob Squarepants.

There was this funny episode of Spongebob where he was visiting Sandy’s treedome which is full of air and not water. Not knowing what ‘air’ was as a sea creature, Spongebob didn’t think much of it and made his way into the tree dome. That’s when he realized that the thing he needed most which surrounded him all the time, was no longer present. After surviving only a few minutes without water and trying to convince himself that he doesn’t need water, Spongebob finally breaks and yells out, ‘I NEED IT!’ This is exactly how Christ describes the Christian life. Multiple places in the Gospels, Jesus describes the Scriptures as ‘our daily bread’ or ‘man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ The reason why Scripture is so essential to Christians is because trying to live without the daily bread of the Word of God is like being a fish trying to live on dry land without water in a world that is destined to destroy them: we will eventually fail or get to a point like Spongebob, where we realize how much we desperately need the Scriptures.
My point is that as we’re diving into the Scriptures, I don’t want you to limit its reach. Because Christ is Lord over all things, His Word speaks into all things in our lives. The question is not what the Bible has to say, but are we willing to listen. Now that we know this, we are going to go over 4 things about Scripture: the purpose of Scripture, the writing/collection of Scripture, the inerrancy (some say infallibility) of Scripture, and the meaning of Sola Scriptura. (In my next article, I'll discuss how to interpret Scripture.)

1. The Purpose of Scripture: Christ

I know I already answered this in the beginning of the article but it can never be said enough: the purpose of Scripture is to glorify Christ! Luke 24:27 (ESV) says, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” You might be wondering, ‘Why are we starting here? Wouldn’t it make more sense to start with the reliability or the inerrancy of Scripture?’ Here’s the thing, without Jesus Christ all of Scripture and all of Christianity falls apart! Paul puts it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Without Christ, there is no faith, there is no salvation, and there is no point for even reading the Scriptures. Paul is saying that without Christ, you might as well throw the whole faith away.
   
Dr. Frank Turek says this multiple times in his public debates and teachings at universities around the globe, and though at first it sounds incredibly controversial, read his statement closely. “Christianity is not true because a series of documents we put under one binding we call the Bible says it’s true. In fact, Christianity would be true if the Bible never existed. You say, ‘How can that be?’ Because Christianity did not originate with a book. Christianity originated with an event: the resurrection. The New Testament writers did not create the resurrection. The resurrection created the New Testament writers. There would be no New Testament documents written by Jews in the first century, if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead!”
Now what I hate is that Catholics will take Dr. Turek’s statement to say, ‘See! He just disproved Sola Scriptura (Scripture-alone) and proved the need for the Church and ‘apostolic succession’, because Christianity would be true without the Bible!’ We’ll go into this deeper later, but when they say that and if you conclude that, you’re missing the entire argument. Turek is explaining what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15:17, if Jesus never raised from the dead the entire faith is false including the Church. Christianity isn’t true because the Bible says it’s true nor is it true because the ‘church’ says it’s true. It’s true because Jesus is the real God-Man who came down to earth, lived the perfect life free of sin, died on the cross for our sins, and then defeated sin and death by rising from the dead on the third day. THAT is why Christianity is true because Jesus is real, Jesus is alive, and Jesus was actually raised from the dead! Amen!
My point is that we shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. The written Word of Scripture is made to proclaim the Incarnate Word of God. I’ve seen and known of people who knew the Scriptures inside and out, memorized the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and yet they deny Christ and are either in Hell or on their way. Dr. Bart Ehrman is an excellent example of this. He is a New Testament textual scholar meaning that, educationally, he is able to provide an accurate translation of the Bible and yet he is an atheist and denies Christ. I just want to be as clear as possible. You can read your written Word, hear the proclaimed Word at church for years, but if you do not believe in the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, to save you for your sins, you are not saved and you have missed the entire purpose of Scripture which is to point us to Christ.

2. The Writing of Scripture

For the sake of time and simplicity, I'll avoid going into deep analysis and details on the writings and the collecting of Scripture. This is not designed to be an in-depth scholarly article, but a quick resource for the average Christian to use. Nevertheless, it's important to know how the Scriptures were written. Altogether, the Bible is a collection of 66 books, written by over 40 authors, over the span of 1400 years. First, how were they written? 2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." Here we see how Scriptures were written: they were written by God. However, it's not that simple either. We see from both the Old and New Testament that there were co-authors such as the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Moses (Genesis-Deuteronomy) and in the New Testament such as the 4 Gospels, Paul, and Peter. Furthermore, we also see how these co-authors had their own personalities in their works. Just a quick look at the Gospels and you can see that there are unique style differences in each, even though they are all telling the truth.
Now you might think of this as semantics or splitting hairs, but there is actually divine truth behind this fact of co-authorship. Part of the mystery of Christianity is that God is the One who ultimately does all of the work... and yet, we are mystically involved. For example, who delivered Israel from the Egyptians? Obviously, we would say God did. However, who subconsciously comes to mind when we think of the human vessel that God used to bring about that deliverance? Moses. Or consider your walk with Christ. Does the Spirit cause us to live holy and do good works? Yes, Ezekiel 36:27 is evidence of that. However, does He do it in such a way that robs us of our free will? No and we see that from 1 Corinthians 10:13. My point is that when we look at who wrote the Scriptures, yes it is ultimately the literal written Word of God, however, we must acknowledge that it was co-authored by faithful Christians and exactly how that works, similarly to our walk with Christ, remains a mystery only known within the hidden counsels of God.
Now, we can be confident that these authors, namely those in the New Testament since those are the most hotly debated, are actually reliable eye-witnesses of Jesus Christ and His resurrection. This also plays a key factor in understanding how they were collected. Every epistle written in the New Testament is written either by an Apostle such as Matthew, John, Paul, or Peter, or by a close associate to the Apostles such as Mark and Luke. The most debated New Testament letter in which the authorship is questioned is only the book of Hebrews and, yet, no one debates if it's actual Scripture because it is. The point is that we can trust that the writers of both the Old and New Testament were real Christians who had experienced the events first hand, had first hand records (such as in 1 and 2 Chronicles), or were close to the eyewitnesses such as John Mark.

3. The Inerrancy/Infallibility and Sufficiency of Scripture
I won’t spend too much time here because, again, my goal is not to give you a history lesson on textual criticism, historical analysis or the scholarly sources. If that were the case, it would take a whole course to go through it all. However, I want you to know what it means when Christians say that the Bible is the perfect Word of God that is inerrant and/or infallible. Inerrant means that the Scriptures are without error and infallible means that the Word is incapable of making mistakes or being wrong. To put it another way, the Scriptures will never fail. This means that we can trust the reliability of the Bible and that it will not lead us astray in telling us something wrong or deceptive about God.
This is important when we start to read Scripture because when we find something uncomfortable, or something that we don’t particularly agree with, the problem is never the Scriptures, but it is us in our sin. This is why when you see LGBTQ people try to affirm their sin in Christianity, the first thing they attack is the validity of Scripture. They either say that the translations were incorrect from the original languages or that the meaning of certain words were incorrect, because they don’t want to believe that they are wrong but that the Bible is incorrect. However, the Bible is the infallible, inerrant, and perfect Word of God, because it is God-breathed. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” The perfect Word of God is sufficient to make every Christian complete and equipped for every good work. This is why we believe that the Scriptures are inerrant, infallible, and sufficient for the Christian life.

4. Meaning of Sola Scriptura: Highest authority NOT only authority.
This is somewhat of a side note but it’s important nonetheless. When Protestant Christians say that we believe in Sola Scriptura, which means Scripture-alone, we are saying that we believe that Scripture has the highest authority but not the only authority in determining a Christian's life. By highest authority, this means that, because it is infallible, it is the standard of how we know God (theology/orthodoxy) and how we live for God as Christians (orthopraxy). This means that if anyone, even Christian, says something that is contradictory to the Bible, we always refer to the Bible as being right above what a human being says. This safeguards Christians from heresy. If a Christian says that same-sex marriage is right and not a sin, we can look at the Bible and say, ‘No! God’s Word said that it was a sin and detestable before Him.’ His Word is the higher authority above human conclusions.
 Oftentimes opposers to Sola Scriptura, namely Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, strawman the meaning of Sola Scriptura to be defined that Scripture is the only authority and that we disregard church history. Furthermore, they say that because we believe in Sola Scriptura, it has caused all of the divisions and schisms and it has created thousands of denominations around the globe. There are multiple problems with this, though I won’t go into the full debate (there are plenty of debates out there), I will point out some of the problems that arise from Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians specifically with the concern of denominations.

Denominational Issue
The irony of denominations is that both Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians claim to be the One True Catholic(universal) Church and that the other churches are damned. Now I’ve seen recently that they’ve lighten up on this issue, but historically, this is what they’ve believed about each other, so the fact that they claim Sola Scriptura causes divisions, schisms, and denominations when both of them have experienced this with each other, is nothing short of irony. Nevertheless, the claim from Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians is that 'because of Sola Scriptura, it has caused many divisions within the churches and has created thousands of denominations around the globe. Sola Scriptura is flawed because it causes schisms in the church since you give everyone the ability to interpret the Bible on their own.'
On the surface, this seems like a valid criticism but in reality, they use this as a front with the presupposition or presumption that neither the Catholic Church nor the Orthodox Church has had divisions or schism over theological issues and interpretations. Again, literally the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church caused the greatest schism of all due to a difference in theological belief and they blame each other for it. As a “divided church”, it’s hypocritical to say that Sola Scriptura is the thing that’s causing division. Furthermore, the ‘thousands of denominations’ is a skewed number because most of the thousands of denominations are being influenced by location, minute differences, and false religions. This claim has been well debunked by countless of scholars and a deeper look into the 'thousands of denominations' prove that this is an overly inflated number.
For example, historically speaking, the Episcopelean Church is simply the American offshoot of the Anglican Church of England. Since the location was halfway across the globe, they became ‘two different denominations’. In fact, if you look at the so-called thousands of denominations in Protestantism, all of them fall under only a handful of denominations such as Baptist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc. but they are in different locations. Another example of this is the Methodist Church which typically has its own ‘denomination’ in each major country or cities in foreign countries. This causes the numbers to flux to the thousands.
Secondly, there are ‘denominations’ listed based upon incredibly minute differences. For instance, there is technically a difference between a Southern Baptist Church, a Reformed Baptist Church, and a Calvinist Baptist Church. However, these are all still Baptist Churches and the only difference is incredibly small theological beliefs that wouldn’t be considered a new denomination in any way. Another example is the minute difference of worship also known as liturgy. The main difference between a traditional Pentecostal Church and an Assemblies of God Pentecostal church is the ‘holiness standard’ of clothing. Meaning that a traditional Pentecostal normally has women wearing long skirts and sleeves and men wearing suits and ties, whereas at an Assemblies of God, people might wear jeans and t-shirts. This small difference sparks another ‘denomination’ even though they are both under Pentecostal, which is the exact same thing that happens in the Roman Catholic Church in terms of attire.
Lastly, these numbers often include false religions. Obviously, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormonism, or even ‘Christian denominations’ that deny the fundamentals of the faith, should not be included. In terms of ‘Christian denominations’, I’m mainly talking about Universalists who utterly deny Hell and believe that everyone is going to heaven regardless of belief in Christ or not. Or other denominations that blatantly deny fundamental beliefs of the Gospel such as the United Methodist Church should not be included in truly Christian denominations because you cannot be a Christian Church if you do not preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, it’s incredibly important to know that there is grace yes even in the Bible, for different interpretations. In fact, we even see the Bible writers using the same verse and interpreting it different ways and it’s still considered God-inspired! For instance, Jeremiah 31:15, in its context, was interpreted to talk about how God will turn the mourning of the people into joy and gladness. However, in the New Testament, Matthew 2:17-18 quotes it as a fulfillment to Christ when Herod killed children to get to Jesus. The same verse, two different and both correct uses and interpretation. Is there a wrong way to interpret Scripture? Absolutely! No interpretation of a verse should be contradictory to the rest of Scripture, but to say that there is only one authoritative way to interpret the Scripture means that when the New Testament writers interpret the same Scriptures differently, that they are potentially wrong with their interpretations, especially noting not all of the writers were ‘Apostles’ such as Luke and Mark.  
Essentially, Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians are trying to ask the question: ‘who has the authority to interpret the Scriptures? It’s because of Sola Scriptura that everyone was able to interpret Scripture and it created thousands of different church splits.’ Their point is that they believe that the Church with the papacy should be the one to have authoritative say on how to interpret Scripture. However, there are major problems with that. For one, the irony is that all Protestant denominations agree that Roman Catholicism practices are wrong and pagan. We’ve all reached the same conclusion that we should not venerate (a fancy way of saying worship but not really ‘worship’ as not to break the first and second commandments) saints or be praying to Mary. We also reached the same conclusion that rejects the Pope who sits at the ‘seat of Peter’, can speak authoritatively over the Church, and, by the way, acts as the Visible Head of the Church whereas Jesus acts as the Invisible Head of the Church. Logic tells you that the pope is essentially supposed to act as Jesus. Furthermore, all Protestants reject that Mary was sinless like Jesus and that she was ‘bodily assumed’ (again, another term to not say ‘ascended’ like Jesus) into heaven and did not experience death, and that Mary is regularly stressed to be our model of the Christian faith, and not JESUS who literally told us to follow Him.
It’s fascinating how Christians who read simply read the Scriptures come to the same exact conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church is wrong whereas, in order to read the Scriptures in Catholicism, you have to go through the pope, magisterium, and church tradition before you can ‘understand the Scriptures.’ Also, the reason why Sola Scriptura is so important is because, once again, it’s the way that God designed it. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” Paul isn’t talking to just the pastor of Colossians, he’s talking to the ENTIRE CHURCH! He’s saying that every Christian should let the Word of Christ dwell richly in them, not let the tradition and magisterium of Christ dwell richly within us. Every Christian should be teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, that every Christian should be singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in our hearts. We can only do this with Scripture, not with anything else!
Therefore, my prayer is that you would embrace the Scriptures as your daily bread that the Holy Spirit uses to guide you on your Christian journey. It is truly a delight to your life and when we actually read the Scriptures regularly and apply them to our lives, watch how God will deeply sanctify us by His truth, for His Word is truth!

I pray that this was beneficial for you!