The power of Scripture VI

Second, the power of Scripture is legitimate because of the freedom that its readers are given to accept or reject it. It isn’t an incantation, as wizard-words are; or some kind of hallucinogenic rhetoric that robs its readers of their capacity to respond as persons. The freedom of readers is always to close the book – to remain deaf to the voice of God. Resistance, as Foucault observed, is always possible, to the point of self-destruction. God’s authority is, we may say, exercised gently, or even graciously. As Richard Bauckham puts it:

This is how the Bible transcends the contemporary dilemma of a total incompatibility between freedom and authority, conceived as total autonomy versus oppressive authoritarianism. The authority that inheres in the biblical story is the authority of grace. In other words, the biblical metanarrative is a story not of the assertion of autonomy in domination, but of grace and free response. In this story all is given by God, including freedom.[1]

The covenant-making God calls his people to respond to his redeeming of them with their continued trust and obedience. The book of Deuteronomy may serve as an example. Yhwh founds his command to his people on his mighty and gracious liberation of them from Egypt. Memory of the gracious acts of Yhwh is the sine qua non of Israel’s life and the ground of her obedience to him. While refusal of the command of Yhwh is condemned, it still remains for them a possible choice (see Dt 30-1). Although the word of God - the commands, stipulations, decrees and ordinances – is a word of authority among the people, it is up to them to enact that word.[2] It is they who are to ‘fear the Lord you God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God’ (Dt 10:12-13). The will of Yhwh is to be carried out by the co-joining of his will to the wills of the people. They are to submit, but it is from freedom that they submit, else it is not true obedience.

It is at this stage that I would like to note the place that Scriptures themselves give to the voice of protest against the absence of God. The gentleness of the voice of God in Scripture is such that he even allows the articulation of a dissent against him. The complaint of the Psalmist at the delay of Yhwh’s justice is one of the remarkable features of this word that God can call his own word. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ pleads the Psalmist. That the God-forsaken man utters the same words on the cross reveals how well this complaint has been heard by the one to whom it was made: so well heard indeed that he enters into the very condition that led to that complaint.

Third, the final power to which Scripture gives witness remains to be seen. That is, the Scriptures declare and describe the coming judgement of God according to the righteousness of his character. The day is coming when the Lord will powerfully fulfill all the words of Scripture and show them decisively to have been true words.

According to its human nature, Scripture is revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and in contention. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.

However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.

Furthermore, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ ‘according to the Scriptures’ are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final Yes of God, which is yet to come.

Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. As we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, neither shirking the discomfort of disagreement nor avoiding the painful truth in them. Reading with what we might call an ‘eschatological’ sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.

[1] Richard Bauckham, "Authority and Scripture," in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 67-8
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer similarly speaks about the practice of the Word of God. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)