The Legitimate Power of Scripture, in promise

The Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature, as diverse critics have noted. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).

The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too.

With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.

We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, “God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us” as a nurse does with a baby:

Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.[1]

The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.[2]

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975) I.XIII.1. Where Calvin’s analogy is problematic is that it could suggest that in revelation God comes to us as other than what he is.
[2] The Occamist distinction between potentia absoluta dei and potentia ordinata dei is suggestive here as well. God’s omnipotence and his absolute freedom are conditioned by his self-limitation, in the making of promises and even in the choice to use human texts in which to reveal himself.