What do we believe about the Bible? (What’s the big picture?)

What are the beliefs held by Campus Crusade about the Bible?

First, let’s define what I mean by “the Bible”.

Let’s look at what Campus Crusade for Christ’s statement of faith says on the issue:

The sole basis of our beliefs is the Bible, God’s infallible written Word, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe that it was uniquely, verbally and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit and that it was written without error (inerrant) in the original manuscripts. It is the supreme and final authority in all matters on which it speaks.

Cru believes, along with the Protestant branch of the Christian faith, that the Bible consists of 66 books consisting of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible (commonly known as the Old Testament) and the 27 books of the New Testament. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons include several books that we, in accordance with the Jewish belief and tradition, would not. These books (Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Odes, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach & Baruch) are regarded by many as being profitable to read but are not considered “Scripture” in that they are not believed to have any authority on belief or doctrine. These rejections are most often based on ancient Jewish rejections of them as authoritative.

How much do we trust it?

There’s an ongoing debate within the Church about how far we take the words of the Bible to be true. This is where the words infallible, fully inspired, and inerrant come into play as well as the entire last sentence of the quote from the Statement. We will get into this more in a later post, but here’s the quick run-through.

What does the Bible seem to say about itself?

Psalm 12:6 The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

Proverbs 30:5 Every word of God proves true; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him.

One of the books that we read a lot when going through our training (initial and ongoing) with Campus Crusade is Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, a 57-chapter 1291-page tome that covers a huge swath of Christian theology at an admirable depth. In one of the seven chapters on the Bible he defines what we mean by “inerrant”:

The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.

Grudem elaborates that the doctrine of infallibility allows for and assumes the following:

1. The Bible uses everyday language and ordinary speech.
   For example, when it talks about the sun “rising” it is speaking in the normal (non-scientific) sense. When it says that Jesus fed 4,000 there may have been 3,956 or 4,103 people, we recognize this to be the case just like when we talk about the 4,000-person snowball fight in Dupont during “snowmageddon”.
2. The Bible uses loose or free quotations as was acceptable in its contemporary literary tradition.
   The definition of “quotation” as word-by-word is a fairly modern and thoroughly Western phenomenon. Ancient Greek and Hebrew had no quotation marks and like many places in the world even today quotes of what someone said need only to accurately convey the content of their remarks. “He said he’ll be home shortly” is consistent with a the subject saying, “I’ll leave for dinner in two minutes.”
3. The Bible uses irregular and uncommon grammar in certain instances.
   The use of plural verbs for singular actors, alternate spellings, feminine adjectives for masculine objects are not unusual in the Bible (especially Revelation). It should not surprise us that these passages could still be truthful, just as someone who speaks with a “backwoods” dialect could still be the most trustworthy person in the world.

“Verbally and fully inspired…”

This simply means that we believe that the whole of the Bible was authored by God, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through human agents who imparted some piece of their own written inflection and perspective without tainting the accounts by error or sin.

Resources

At the end of each post I will attempt to add a list of resources to read or check out if you want to understand more about what I’ve said.

• Campus Crusade’s Statement of Faith
• Systematic Theology
  • Amazon
  • Half.com
  • Wesley Seminary Library
  • Library of Congress
• John Piper (“Ask Pastor John” Podcast) – Is the Bible Without Error?
  • Other “Ask Pastor John” episodes about the Bible
• Wikipedia Articles
  • The Biblical Canon
  • Books of the Bible
    • Tobit
    • Judith
    • Esdras
    • 1, 2, 3, 4 Maccabees
    • Odes
    • Baruch
  • Biblical Inspiration
  • Systematic Theologies

Tagged as: bible, canon, inerrancy, infallibility, inspiration, statement of faith, theology