The Power of the Bible

Yesterday Professor Steve Moyse gave some reflections at IME 4-7 on the power of the Bible to change and move us. Moyse is a New Testament scholar, head of theology at the University of Chichester and is involved in homegroups at church and does some lay preaching etc.

(1) He spoke of his conversion while at University through the Christian Union getting him to agree to reading Luke’s gospel. He found it spoke to him with convincing power, he met the risen Jesus and became a disciple.

(2) Then Moyse went to a Bible study on Genesis 22 and thought it was appalling that Abraham should contemplate killing his son and think that it might be the will of God. (Moyse didn’t mention Heb 11, by the way, which confirms what the Genesis text hints at that Abraham reasoned that God can raise the dead). Moyse seems subsequently to have become a liberal since he thinks Mark contradicts John and so on.

Now, we deny what (2) is meant to imply, of course. But Moyse seemed to want to ask how we account for the transforming power of the Bible if we do not hold to a fundamentalist doctrine of Scripture (though a version of (a) below could be seen as fundamentalist).

He had 4 options:

(a) There is something intrinsic about the Bible that makes it powerful.

(b) God chooses to use the Bible in this way.

(c) Literature (not just the Bible) can speak with power and transform.

(d) The transforming power of the Bible is an illusion. The power comes from us not it.

We deny (d) though we accept that who I am and my context shapes my reading of Scripture. My spiritual state also affects what I hear.

(a), (b) and (c) are perfectly compatible with one another.

Books communicate and mediate personal relationship (c), though the Bible is as special case since its author is living and active in its reception. The Holy Spirit speaks the words of the Bible to us today (Heb 3 & 4). The Bible is intrinsically special (a) since God wrote these words, but they are also ordinary human words with real human authors. God chooses (b) to continue to use the words he caused to be written. God’s choice is appropriate not arbitrary. A version of (b) could be a mindless hyper-charismatic magical or superstitious use of the Bible as directly addressed to me divorced from its original intended meaning.

Questions about authorial intent and meaning become easier (and more complex) when we remember a speech act view of language (we do things as people addressing people with words, not just stating propositions, but bringing relationships into being and altering them) and consider God as the ultimate author of Scripture. We need not think that Isaiah understood everything that his book properly means to us.

There is some mileage in the kind of distinction that Moyse mentioned between (original intended) meaning and (later or fuller) significance. In a way, all exegesis and systematic theology is application.

Moyse has a new book out, by the way, Evoking Scripture: Seeing the Old Testament in the New (2008), which is basically a series of case studies on NT use of OT followed by some literary and theological reflections.