Skip to main content

The Divine and the Human in the Text and in the Word

In the course of reviewing the book The Social Life of Scriptures, edited by James S. Bielo, Mark Noll says,

Christian believers of every sort have almost always spoken of the Bible as divine revelation in human form. The best classical teaching on Scripture has insisted that the divinity, the humanity, and the inseparable intertwining of divinity and humanity are crucial for understanding and appropriating Scripture [Books & Culture (September/October 2010), p. 12].

When we are dealing with Scripture, we are dealing with “the inseparable intertwining of divinity and humanity.” Is there a difference, though, in the “inseparable intertwining of divinity and humanity” that is present in the Bible and that which is present in Jesus Christ?

Unless we preachers keep our constant attention on the twin facts that the Bible is divinely inspired and humanly produced, we will lose the appropriate sense of its power and its pertinence. The Bible is both a divine Word and a human word, which makes it more real than any other written word.

Jesus, though, is the Word made flesh. Jesus is the ultimate merging of the human and the divine. It strikes me as idolatrous to raise the Bible to that same level in our thinking. After all, Scripture points to Jesus and Jesus completes Scripture.

I sometimes ponder the implication of the fact that God inspired (literally, “breathed”) the Scriptures; it sounds much like God breathing into the first man, which gave him life, but which did not make him God.

In Jesus, on the other hand, “the Word was God.”

God was in Christ; God breathed the Scriptures.

The difference seems to me important. After all, is not our preaching of the written word only effective if and as it points to and is enlivened by the living Word?

Comments

  1. The difference seems important to me as well. Just so long as we remember that you would not be able to say, "Jesus, though, is the Word made flesh. Jesus is the ultimate merging of the human and the divine" without Scripture. Pitting the two against one another, which you certainly aren't doing, is usually not a helpful exercise. Thanks for this and for the Mark Noll quote; he is one of my favorite authors.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Was a Refugee

(A sermon based on Matthew 2:13-23 for the First Sunday after Christmas) I have never been a refugee and you probably haven’t either. There have been times for many of us when we “had” to leave home but we did so because we chose to get an education or to take a job or because our parents told us it was time. Oh, there is a sense in which many of us feel a restlessness and rootlessness and feel like we are on a constant quest for home. But the facts remain that we have never been driven from our home or from our hometown or from our homeland because of warfare or famine. We have never been driven away because of our ethnicity or our politics or our religion; we have never been forced out or forced underground because we are a threat to those in power. Millions of people are refugees, though. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were at the end of 2012 15.4 million refugees—people who have fled their country for another because of war or persecution—in the world....

When You Pass Through the Waters

(A sermon based on Isaiah 43:1-7 & Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 for the Baptism of the Lord) The images are ones we still use. “I feel like I’m going under.” “I really got burned.” Water and fire have long been images of trial, testing, and suffering. We experience events and situations that either are life-threatening, such as a serious illness or accident, or feel like they are life-threatening, like a divorce or job loss or serious problems with a family member. We feel like we’re going under. We feel like we’re getting burned. Sometimes, we don’t just find ourselves in such a situation; we rather put ourselves there. So the prophet speaking in Isaiah 43 spoke his words to guilty people, to people who had sinned and who either knew they had sinned or needed to admit their sins. Their nation had been devastated by the Babylonians and they had been transported into exile hundreds of miles away and it was all because, the true prophets had told them, they had sinned against ...

An Experiment in Preaching

A friend who in his late fifties took a new pastorate said that he had written the last sermon he ever intended to write, meaning that he planned to use the vast collection of sermons that he had built up over his career and produce nothing new. I have in my paper and electronic files every sermon I have ever written; I even have the outlines, some of which were lifted straight out of the back of my trusty Thompson Chain Reference Bible, from my first halting efforts, which were quite different than my later halting efforts. I have at times “re-preached” some of my “greatest hits”; in so doing I heeded the wise words of my wise father who once told me, “If it was worth preaching once it’s worth preaching twice.” And if it’s worth preaching twice maybe it’s worth preaching thrice or more! Over the last twenty-five years I have written full manuscripts for 99% of the sermons that I’ve preached and 90% of the time I’ve taken that manuscript into the pulpit with me. Last Sunday I began an...