17/50: For the Word of God in Scripture...
Amy Grant’s music was the soundtrack of my first 20 years. This song comes from Psalm 119 which speaks about the way the Word is a guiding force in our lives.
“Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it’s not meant to be, isn’t a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It’s actually thinly masked fear of losing control and certainty, a mirror of an inner disquiet, a warning signal that deep down we do not really trust God at all.”
One of the big shifts that I made in seminary was how I thought of the capital W Word of God. I had grown up talking about the Bible as the Word. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with using a capital W as I began to shift from seeing Scripture as an unerring book to a sacred conversation. At the same time, I adopted a tradition that declares after reading Scripture, “The Word of the Lord,” to which all respond, “Thanks be to God.” This seemed irresponsible to me because sometimes a portion of Scripture is read that is pretty horrific. And declaring quickly that the horror is the Word of God is dangerous and misleading for those who need some time to understand how that passage fits into the larger conversation.
While I was in the process of ordination, I was grateful to read an article (since lost) by John Stott, an evangelical statesman, who argued for a lower-case w when we speak about the Bible, and reserving the capital W for Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity. Ironically, this is more biblical. The Gospel of John introduces Jesus as the Word, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1) By conflating the biblical use of the Word of God with the Bible itself, we add extra meaning to the biblical writers. They certainly did not have any notion of the canon of Scripture, formed by church councils hundreds of years after they wrote. When they speak about the Word of God, they are speaking about all the ways God makes Godself known in the world.
This all may seem semantic, but it goes to the heart of a modernist shift in some Christian circles to idolize the book of the Bible, rather than the God to whom it points. The Bible as a word of God reveals to us Jesus as the Word of God. And that Word shows up in all sorts of places as the God-enfleshed Christ-presence.
With all the ways that the Bible and Jesus have been co-opted for bad politics and abusive behavior, we can’t afford to let this one slide. We must be clear about how the Bible has authority, not just make it an unquestioned authority.
I do not know who first adapted the liturgy with this response but it is the most faithful one that I could find that honestly addressed this conundrum. When we read Scripture at my church, we say this:
“For the Word of God in Scripture,
for the Word of God among us,
for the Word of God within us.”
Something swells in me every time we say it because I remember that the Word of God is so much bigger than the words on the page. It is within each of us. It is shared between us. It is alive and moving.
Thanks be to God.