Great Quotes: Wright on the Bible
I’m currently reading N.T. Wright’s book Scripture and the Authority of God. Its a great book about what it means to say that the Bible is authoritative – which Wright views (correctly, in my opinion) as a shorthand way of talking about the authority of God exercised through the Bible.
As I read over lunch today, I came across this fabulous observation:
“There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is “true” after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture actually teaches and emphasizes. Which is the bottom line: “proving the Bible to be true” (often with the effect of saying, “So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought”), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear?”
Of course, the two positions are not mutually exclusive. But Wright correctly points out that allowing ourselves to be changed as we read the Bible (and thus encounter the living God behind the Bible) is much more important than arguments about the historicity of this or that event or passage.* Christians have too often been guilty of focusing on historical issues, while not allowing ourselves to be challenged by what we find in the Bible. In doing so, we miss the forest for the trees.
* For the record, Wright is someone who would affirm the historicity of the vast majority of the biblical text. He simply argues that it is a secondary concern.
