Scripture

A primer on sacred text

Introduction

The first essay in this series on fundamental Christian belief can be found here where we deal with four large movements in theology: the Trinity, creation, salvation, and the Eschaton.

Now, we move on to our Scriptures…

Fundamental to the Church’s life is our sacred texts, even if we are deeply divided over the nature and role of these books. Words like “inerrancy,” “infallibility,” or “inspiration” immediately summon apologists and evangelicals to arms, making sure we get right the fact that Scripture is a particular thing. Whatever ideas we hold in this regard are crucial to our authority in teaching and structures of control. If someone denies what we tend to believe about the Bible, then further reflection and conversation usually ends. In modern Pentecostalism, everything starts and (mostly) stops here. As far as we are concerned, any person who would reject what we have named as our central tenets of biblicism could not possibly come to correct conclusions about other weightier theological matters.

I. Authority

Where we to generate a simple sketch of our sources of authority – at least our professed ones, even if the practical reality is something else – we would claim to give preeminence to the Spirit (which of course preexisted the Bible), then to the Scriptures, then the Church. We like to think that we are “Spirit-led” in everything at all times, that our readings of Scripture are as straightforward and sound, and that we have honored the Church’s teaching and tradition across time.

Yet, I think the reality is something else altogether.

Everyone agrees that the Spirit – whose work is to form Christ in us, to be sure – should be given preeminence. Afterward, our structural authority is not so simple. Before there was Scripture, at least our New Testament texts, there was the Church, and the Church was held together by her story, bath, and meal – a statement you will hear me repeat over and over again. “To break bread and drink wine together is the central Christian action,” not the reading of a shared book [1].