The purpose of this article is to try to get you to think. I want you to
think about what you may take for granted - or what you may assume about
God's revelation. Do you have a confident definition (for example) of the
word inspiration? Is the collection of the documents we call the
cannon of scripture a resolved question? What does cannon mean? Does
it mean The Scripture? Are you sure? Is there any point to reexamining
our definitions? I present the quote below not as a recommended doctrine
but as an idea that will hopefully get you to examine your assumptions.
Inner-community strife is never benign. The weak, both individually and in groups, inevitably are hurt, and as the contending sides harden in their respective positions, the essential elements of the dialectic of faith polarize; the visionary1 elements (which focus on a transcendent order calling under divine judgment all existing mundane structures) part company from the pragmatic elements (which concentrate on the embodiment of the divine in human institutions). The Old Testament is not immune to such strife. Indeed, in all periods of the religion of Israel tensions are visible between men with differing notions of what it meant to be God's people, although, at times of crisis like the sixth and second centuries, those tensions are exacerbated to the point of breaking the community into hostile factions. For the modern individual or group which confesses that the Old Testament records the self-disclosure of divine will within Israel's history as a nation, either such inner-community strife and polarization must be ignored, or God's self-disclosure must be discerned precisely within the field of tension between the vision of the transcendent divine order and the Israelite's sense of solidarity with his community's institutions and practices. While the latter alternative arises many questions which must be addressed anew by thoughtful persons of faith (e.g., the meaning of canon, the sense in which a unity of scripture can be ascertained), it does resonate with certain aspects of the modern religious person's experience: God is the unconditioned and is beyond facile comprehension by the human mind; the religious life therefore involves struggle, and can even be characterized as a dialectic2 of faith.It somehow seems dangerous to reexamine our assumptions. It feels like doubt. It feels ungrounded. Even then, we need to be able to stand on something solid. I believe you can realign your approach to scripture without shaking your faith in God. On the other hand, if you have been a Christian for years and years and your faith has been grounded in assumptions about the cannon and inspiration then such realignment can be very uncomfortable indeed. It is frightening. It feels like having built a house and finding out there was a flaw in the foundation; so the whole thing falls down and needs to be rebuilt on the correct foundation. I think having one's thoughts thus provoked is spiritually healthy. It has a way of getting a person to realize what is really important. I do not believe your faith will be crushed; but there will be that sensation of taking a lot of steps back - maybe even starting over from scratch. Here is a statement I invite you to consider: Our faith is to stand on Jesus, God's Son - not on the cannon (which contains God's self-revelation) and not on our assumptions on the nature of inspiration.
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