So three things to say about the Bible:
- The Bible is divine
- The Bible is human
- The Bible saves
First, the Bible is divine.
What we think about the Bible and what we think about God go hand in hand.
So writes Kevin Vanhoozer:
I submit that the best way to view God and Scripture together is to acknowledge God as a communicative agent and Scripture as his communicative action. The virtue of this construal, as far as first theology is concerned, lies in its implicit thesis that one can neither discuss God apart from Scripture nor do justice to Scripture in abstraction from its relation to God. For if the Bible is a species of divine communicative action, it follows that in using Scripture we are not dealing merely with information about God; we are rather engaging with God himself–with God in communicative action. The notion of divine communicative action form an indissoluble bond between God and Scripture.
They are almost simultaneous doctrines and the reason why is because of who God is, that in his essence he is a communicative agent. God is a God who speaks, who communicates himself. Before anything else existed, there was conversation. Within the intra-Triniarian majesty of the Father and the Son by the Spirit, God has shone forth who he is. The whole idea of communication, of speech, of any media, finds its source in God. And especially, of course, the Bible. The Bible comes from God. We would not have it if God weren’t who he is.
The Trinitarian wonder of communication
In fact, as Frame mentions, there is a deep-seated Trinitarian perspective on revelation. Any time communication happens there is a speaker, a thing spoken, and one who hears. And in the Godhead, from Scripture we see that the Father speaks, the Son is the word, the one spoken, and the Spirit is the ears and eyes, the one who comes and enables the hearing and seeing.
Second, the Bible is human.
The communication of God to his creatures has been put into words. Human words from a human language on human pages with a human binding. And you can read it. You read it. With your human eyes.
Third, the Bible saves
Now, does it really? Yes and no. Jesus is the one who saves. He’s the only mediator between God and man, he is the one and only Savior, the only name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). And, you see, this book is all about him. This book, the whole thing, testifies of him.
Jesus is both the revelatory and redemptive word of God…
Jesus makes God known and he saves, and if you will see his word, you’ll see him in this book.
So bring this down to the personal, to the relevant. Think for a moment of that actual point when you read the Bible. What is happening in that moment?
An Episode in salvation history
Now let’s bring it together.
John Webster writes:
. . . the Christian interpreter is ‘reconciled to God, drawn into the fellowship of the saints and illumined by the Holy Spirit’. . . . the Christian interpreter is one who has been extracted from the darkness of sin by the judgement and mercy of God, and set in the sphere of the church, the chosen race, the royal priesthood, the holy nation which is what it is by virtue of the divine call out of darkness into light.
Christian interpretation of Holy Scripture is determined by this setting; the ‘hermeneutical situation’ (that is, the constitutive elements of the business of scriptural interpretation, God, text and readers, and the field of their interactions) is not an instance of something more basic but an episode in the history of salvation. At every point it is defined by the fact that it involves this God (the one who is light and who in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is luminously present), this text (Holy Scripture as the assistant to that presence), and therefore this reader (the faithful hearer of this God in and through this text).
(“Biblical Theology and the Clarity of Scripture,” 378, italics and paragraphing mine)
Before dawn, over midmorning coffee, or at the dinner table with family—whenever you read the Bible, something miraculous is happening.
The presence of desire to hear God’s word and think his thoughts testifies to the blood-bought grace by which he called you out of darkness. The mental energy and hungry soul that you bring to an open Bible is not separated from God’s saving activity. In fact, the act of your reading is part of that saving activity as God continues his perfecting work (Philippians 1:6).
And it is not merely a piece of God’s action in your personal life. It is another scene in God’s whole redemptive and revelatory activity towards mankind. Your simple reading the Bible—your interpreting—is a step forward both in the degree of your transformation and in God’s manifold wisdom being made known to the world.
The Father speaks. His Son is the Word. And his Spirit comes and makes you hear.
Reading to Walk 