Deane Meatheringham, Second National Evangelical Summit, 20 February 1998, High Street Road Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, Victoria

I Confess

I was brought to know God when I heard the Word of God. The Word itself gave me hearing. I could list various crises and changes which led up to this event, but on refection, I believe that the Word of God was cutting through my self-will and confusion to tell me something which I could not tell myself. My new dawn was hearing an evangelist conclude his message by repeating Ephesians 2:8-9. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast". The preacher had warmly borne witness to Christ and now I knew that what I thought I had to attain, Christ had attained for me. The Word I heard was Jesus Christ and it never occurred to me that I should separate Jesus from God. Through Christ I knew that God loved me unconditionally, that he was for and that Christ had grasped me.
I never thought of separating the Word of God from Christ or from Holy Scripture. Since then I have been forced to wrestle with this issue of how we should regard the primary Biblical witnesses to the Word of God and in what sense their witness is the Word of God. I will try to share some of my convictions and struggles with you in this paper.

I confess the unique authority of Holy Scripture. If it were not for the Bible we would not know that we are justified by God's grace in Jesus Christ. Without the narrative of the Bible and its teaching we would not know who Christ is. So conditioned are we by guilt, pride and worthlessness that not even the Church could have invented a message of the free, unconditional love of God. How would we know that God freely reconciled the derelict world to himself if the Bible did not tell us?

As a Minister of the Word within the UCA I serve the Word of God. For all of my faultiness I set out to hear what God continues to say so that I can do his will and serve my parish and community with the Word of God. This sends me to Holy Scripture. Christ drives me to the Bible. Events around me and within me push me to the Bible to be taught by Christ. In this I need godly teachers and the variety of gifts given to the Church to enable me to interpret the Bible. But it is Christ who enables me to understand the Scriptures. Strictly speaking I don't preach the Bible; I preach Christ. The truth as it is in Jesus I learn from Jesus himself, this is the Jesus authoritatively witnessed to in Holy Scripture. The Word of God which I teach does not originate in my head or emotions. As I bear witness to Jesus God imparts himself savingly to those who hear his Word.

God's Word is the Personal Self-Disclosure of Himself

I mean that God and his Word are one. The Bible begins with: "Then God said, 'let there be light' ". The coming of light is the dynamic action of God himself. The text in Genesis 1:3 does not say "God acted: let there be light." The Word is the personal working of God which does not fail to have effect. (Cf. J. Ellul, "The Humiliation Of The Word" Eerdmans, 1985, pp. 49f.)

Examples of God taking men and women into the mystery of his being through his Word are I Samuel 3:7, "Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him." And I Thessalonians 2:13, ". . .when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God's word, which is also at work in you believers".

Within the communion of the Triune Godhead there is communication. "The three persons of the Holy Trinity live in inseparable, most perfect, and eternally complete communion with one another. It is the life of eternal and perfect knowledge, of a perfect entering into one another's life, of a perfect understanding of each other. In the divine economy there are no secrets. The Father never thinks or wills what the Son and the Holy Spirit do not think or will. It is the life of most perfect love, in which the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity eternally find one another and are eternally united in the most perfect harmony in the bond of perfect union." (H. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, Reformed Free, 1985, pp. 321) Within this perfect friendship there is the Word, which is Spirit and life. The essence of the communication is within the covenant communion of the living God. If this is so in God himself, then it must be applicable to the communication of God with humankind.

We should not succumb to the dualistic heresy which tries to separate God from his Word. For example the comic character and the balloon containing its words.

Divine revelation. . . is the self-disclosure of God Himself. John Baillie

Revelation is the self-bestowal of the living God. . . God in the act of imparting Himself to living souls. P. T. Forsyth


There is an Unbroken Relation Between God's Word and the Humanity of Jesus

In a lecture to pastors, the former Director of Fountain trust and Vice-Principal of St. John's College, the Rev. Tom Smail, commented that liberals and Pentecostals both begin their theology from the same place. Experience! Whereas the Gospel begins with the transcendent God who is not an extension of our dreams, experiences, or faith. I speak of the God who is not in our control, but who makes himself knowable and interprets himself to us as God.

The Word of God, whom we know as the Son of God, the second person of the Triune communion, has revealed himself in the flesh of his incarnate Son.

This is the One called Jesus, Immanuel, God with us. The Lord God Himself has come to be one with us by taking our human nature upon himself. Dualism separates the flesh of Jesus from the divine Son and also will divide the Jesus who lived in our human history from the Spirit of Christ who speaks in our age. This makes a phantom Christ. To deal with this Greek dualism the theologians of Nicea spoke of Christ as of one and the same being with God the Father. The word they used was homoousios "of the same substance". When Jesus is detached from his oneness with God, what we call Jesus is no more than an empty symbol into which we can project our own sexuality, ideology and religion. It will make history and interpretation fall asunder and the theology which comes from it ignores the wisdom of Kant’s dictum that all concepts without percepts are empty and all percepts without concepts are blind.

In the incarnate Son, God has communicated himself to us by savingly giving himself to us and for us. Since Jesus is the Word of God, when we hear Jesus speaking in the Gospel we hear the Word of God which is of the same substance as God. What I wish to emphasise is that there is no ambiguity, or uncertainty about the fact that God has bound himself to our humanity.

Knowing this deeply affects how we read the Holy Scriptures because in our union with Jesus Christ we are bound to the divine, human Word. In the Bible the divine Word and the human word are only united through participation in, and dependence on Christ. What this means is that when we read the Scriptures God speaks to us directly and personally.

Holy Scripture must not be separated from God's Saving Activity in Christ

We can only understand the message of the Bible through our being in Jesus Christ. God’s self-impartation of himself is not the giving of mere information about himself but through the reconciliation of the world through Christ we are saved into a knowledge of God.

I wish to connect the saving action of God in Christ with the humanity of the Bible. God has spoken through human prophets and apostles, and above all in his incarnate Son. In the humanity of Jesus we hear the divine Word. The human word and the divine Word belong together and cannot be separated. Tom Torrance puts it like this:

John 5:30-47 illustrates what happens when people separate the Holy Scriptures from Christ. Jesus says that although people read the Bible and had a "high view" of Scripture they had not heard God's voice and God's Word was not abiding in them. The Scriptures, Jesus says, bear witness to him. But if we try to get these Scriptures into a reductionist set of propositions outside of a living relationship with Christ then we will have a transmogrification of the Scriptures. We will now control the Bible. We will be in danger of reducing the Word of God to its written form. Should we do this then we may be in danger of giving the Bible a hypostasis of its own ending up with a quadrinity rather than the triune God. Jesus told the leaders of his day that they erred because they neither knew the Scriptures or the power of God.

The Bible has a Unique Authority

The Bible is the only fixed witness that we have to the unique, once for all acts of God in Christ.

It was God's own Word spoken to Moses and the prophets within the history of Israel which they brought into the hearing of their people. It was God's own word that these witnesses of the Old Testament were able to echo. The apostles of Christ were contemporary witnesses of all that they saw and heard Christ do. These witnesses stand in a unique place making us dependant upon them for our testimony. Whether it is the prophets or the apostles, their witness came through the witness of God himself given in the Holy Spirit. II Peter 1:21 captures the wide picture of the biblical testimony when he writes: "Men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." What did they speak? The Word of God.

A key to further understanding the relationship between testimony and the Word of God is Revelation 19:10. "For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit (or essence) of prophecy." From the beginning of time Jesus has been the subject and the burden of prophecy. All true prophecy comes by the Spirit. It bears testimony to Jesus. But it is Jesus who testifies in the testimony of his servants to him. Thus in the Acts we see the apostolic witness given in the power of the Spirit is the Word of God. In Acts the Word of God grows and multiplies as more and more people apart from the apostles are empowered by the Spirit. Yet in the N.T. the testimony given is tested by the apostolic authority.

The Biblical witnesses are all human. The Word of God comes in human form. The amazing thing about the incarnation is that we have to do with this man who is God with us. The heresy of docetism always wants to disregard or to minimise the humanity of Christ. Docetism also wishes to undervalue the humanity of the Biblical writers. Yet we do not possess the Word of God other than in its humanness. In Scripture the human does not become divine. But in this very much human word we hear the Word of God. When we hear the Word of God from the Biblical witness we hear it with all the ambiguities, limitations, poverty and riches known in human expression. But by the grace of God it points beyond itself, to what it is not in itself. "Christ became human flesh, a servant without form or comeliness, the most despised among men. . . and so also the Word, the revelation of God entered creation, in the life and history of men and people in every form of dream and vision, of research and meditation, even as far as the humanly weak and ignoble; the Word became Scripture and as Scripture subjected itself to the fate of all writing." (Bavinck quoted in G C Berkouwer, Holy Scripture, Eerdmans, 1975, pp. 199)

The wonder of it all is that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ speaks his Word to us through human beings. "The connection between God's speaking and the human word is very close and real. One can describe this relationship without exaggeration as identity". (Berkouwer, ibid, pp.145) The character of Scripture is that the human writings are God-breathed (II Tim. 3:16) The Scriptures are the living oracles of God. (Acts 7:38)

"Primary in the concept of canon is the positive thing, the imperative, the inescapable impression that in these writings we have to do with the command to speak about God". (K Barth, The Gottingen Dogmatics, Vol I, Eerdmans 1991, pp. 54) Barth asks the question why Luther and Calvin went to the canon of Scripture to find their marching orders? "In the first instance we can find no other reason than this: Because he (Calvin) heard Moses, Jeremiah, and Paul speak about God, because he heard there the trumpet that summoned him to battle. In something of the same way 1400 years earlier, in the historically obscure early period when the old book was not yet old, the oral and written witness of the same prophets and apostles affected the people of the second generation and brought about the rise of the early church, that is, the rise of Christianity." (ibid pp 55)

Preaching the Word of God

I can't begin to develop this point even though it may be of the most importance. In order to preach, the Word of God must have come to us in the knowledge that our lives are wrapped up in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We must know ourselves to have been crucified once and for all with him in the final judgment of his cross. It must be the reigning, present Lord Jesus who catches us up to be bold in our witness to him. And each preacher must have known his or her own personal Pentecost.

A Declaration

With Christians of past times we declare the impregnable foundation of the Uniting Church in Australia is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is revealed in Holy Scripture.

We reaffirm the paragraph in the Basis of Union concerning Scripture "as the unique prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which she hears the Word of God and by which her faith is nourished and regulated. When the Church preaches Jesus Christ, the message is controlled by the Biblical witnesses".

We declare that the prophets and apostles, whose witness is inscripturated, proclaimed the Word of God.

We assert that any Gospel which is detached and isolated from Jesus Christ as given in the canon of Scripture is not the Word of God, and is another Gospel.

We confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of Scripture and is the canon within Scripture itself. Therefore an autonomous canon of interpretation brought upon the Bible from outside, whether it be scientism, behaviourism, or ideology, will contradict and invalidate the Gospel of Christ. If these things obtain the church will cease to be the church. There is no way to Jesus Christ around the apostles.

"We repudiate the false teaching that the Church can turn over the form of her message and ordinances to some dominant ideological and political convictions". (The Barmen Declaration)

"We pledge ourselves to the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments as the pure and clear fountain of Israel, which is the only true norm according to which all teachers and teachings are to be judged and evaluated. . . The Word of God is and should remain the sole rule and norm of all doctrine, and no human being's writings dare be put on a par with it, but everything must be subject to it." (Formula of Concord)