THE BIBLE, THE WORLD, AND THE TRINITY

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THE Bible is our ultimate source of information about how both synagogue and church began, but it is also constantly used as an ultimate theological authority. The traditional argument of both Jews and Christians for ascribing this authority to it is that it is the Word of God. If not actually dictated by God, it is so completely inspired by him that it is without error in matters of faith and morals. That is one view, and it is astonishing how it still persists in liturgical and ecclesiastical usages. But there is another attitude: that the Bible describes the activity of God, as interpreted by men who with their whole heart believed in him. But the men who wrote it were men of widely different understanding, and of widely different time and environment. The literature they composed covers more than a thousand years of history. If Christians adopt the first, the traditional, view, then they have to face a certain number of very difficult facts. They have to justify it in the face of the fact that these seven words The Bible is the Word of have been responsible for more evil and cruelty than any other seven words in the history of the Christian church. In the whole battle for humanizing the law which raged over Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, the churches, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, all opposed reform again and again on these same grounds the Bible is the Word of God, and you cannot tamper with it. This was the authority for burning witches, for maintaining slavery, for enforcing capital punishment for innumerable offences. In the argument today over apartheid the same words are heard. The Bible ordains that the sons of Ham shall be kept in subjection, and the Bible is the Word of God. But it is not only the Old Testament which is involved. We have to keep a belief in hell, because the parables of the Gospels constantly terminate with a division of men into sheep and goats. We have to defend, as Christians, a demonstrably false picture of Judaism in its Pharisaic form, because of the words which are ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. We have to accept that Jesus behaves in a way which, to contemporary moral standards, not merely denies that he is incarnate but makes him a figure unworthy of our admiration. Without regard to any distinction between the innocent and the guilty, he damns whole classes such as the Pharisees or the rich; he damns whole cities. Because Woe unto thee Chorazin, woe unto thee Bethsaida (Matt. 11:21) was the Word of doubly so, because it is both a word of Jesus and in the Bible whole cities were destroyed in the crusade against the Albigenses in the south of France in the thirteenth century. Every man, woman, and child was killed on the orders of the churchmen who led the crusade. Kill all, they cried. God will know his own.