Bible a Witness to God

I don’t believe in the Bible; I do believe in the God the Bible testifies to. The Bible is a witness, and a witness is never to be identified with that to which it testifies. The Bible is not to be worshiped. I witnessed the early morning flames that engulfed and carried skyward all of the Old Main building, except the stones themselves, at Howard Payne University in 1984. I was there. I saw it. I had taught classes in this sandstone structure that had been built in 1890. I was a witness, obviously was not the building, but I am an authority on the event. Matthew and John were witnesses of key events in the life of Jesus. There were there, saw, heard, touched, and traveled with Jesus. They wrote their testimony. They were authorities on Jesus. They were not the ones to be followed. That one, they gave witness to. So it is that Bible is not to be worshiped; it is not God. It is an authoritative witness, but it has no inherent power of its own. If we are the judge or jury in a courtroom, we are to listen carefully to all the witnesses and then are required to arrive at a judgment of what we believe to be the truth. But we find that even witnesses who have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth do not always give coherent testimony. Even as the attorneys attempt to clarify and untangle the vague language of stories and ambiguous wording that come out before the court, eye-witnesses often contradict each other or even other parts of their own testimony. The judge and/or the jury are called on to sort out all the testimony and arrive at what, in their judgment, is the truth. The Bible–the Christian Holy Scriptures–is, in my judgment, the best, in fact the authoritative, testimony to what God is about in this world, and to what the character of God seems to be. It is not, however, a consistent witness. Much of it is unclear. Much of it is contrary to other parts of the entire witness. Each one who reads it must sort, interpret, and arrive at their own judgment of its validity, value, truth, and meaning. And how do we do this? We do it by following our habitual ways of thinking, evaluating, judging, and deciding. Others do it by following their own, differing, patterns of decision-making. We do this, ordinarily, in accord with the consensus of those whose word and character we trust. Habit and consensus rule our understanding of, and thus, our relationship with God. It always is possible that we have developed bad habits, and are in consensus with the wrong crowd. We may have lived in a small and restricted life-world. Gretel Ehrlich, in her book, The Solace of Open Spaces, tells of a Wyoming rancher’s wife who did not get off her large and self-sufficient ranch for eleven years. Ehrlich writes that, after her husband died, she bought a car and began traveling this large country of ours to see what she had been missing. This anecdote is all that is told of the story, but we may be assured that after traveling beyond the wild emptiness of Wyoming, this ranch wife had acquired a much larger frame of reference and thus the likelihood of a different personal perspective on life. None of us should make dogmatic judgments about the biblical testimony until we have been exposed to a world at least a little larger than our own home pasture.