In response to David Philips' essay, "The nature of the Bible," which defends the Bible as the Word of God, we have seen thus far that the Bible is not the Word of God, big "W" but, as the Confession of 1967 says, it is "the word of God written," small "w". Christ is the Word of God, and the Bible is a witness to Christ. It is subordinate to him. In addition, the biblical understanding of inspiration as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with the idea of perfection. It means, rather, that God is creatively at work giving new or renewed life. The Bible is inspired because it gives witness to the life-giving, creative work of God.
Phillips links the authority of the Bible to its perfection. He writes, "Because the Bible is God's Word and is without error it is the supreme authority for the Church." He notes that there are many, whom he labels heretics, who do not believe that the Bible is uniformly perfect in all of its parts. He is particularly perplexed by so-called "open evangelicals" who "are not prepared to accept the Bible is true in all its detail." From his perspective, Phillips can only conclude that if the Bible is not entirely true "in all its details" then either it is not entirely the Word of God or God has authored an unreliable scripture and is also unreliable. These conclusions are unacceptable to him, obviously. The issue for him, then, is: "Is the Bible the Word of God in its entirety or is it not?" His answer is, "Yes, it is."
By this way of thinking, either the Bible is perfectly true throughout or it is not. If it is perfectly true then it is reliable and authoritative. If not, then none of it is reliable—all or nothing. Phillips' arguments sound logical and persuasive—so long as we accept the platonic philosophical view of reality that subsumes them. According to Platonism, the real world is the unseen world of perfect universal forms not our world of imperfect copies of the universal. In the Christian version of Platonism, the Bible is lifted up to the level of a perfect universal form, and as such it must be entirely and completely perfect. Platonism does not allow for a mixing of imperfect earthly forms and universal perfect forms. The Bible, hence, must be one or the other. Western Christianity has long been dominated by this platonic, dualistic form of thinking about the Bible in particular and Christian faith generally.
Platonic dualism and its concept of perfect universal forms is a Western philosophy that doesn't arise from the Bible itself. If we keep our eyes open for it, not even the God of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is perfect in this platonic sense. In Genesis 3:8, for example, God walked in the Garden of Eden in the evening looking for Adam and Eve. God did not know where they were. Later in Genesis, God saw how evil the human race had become, "And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart." (Genesis 6:6) There are quite a number of Old Testament passages that say that God changed God's mind or regretted an action. For the ancient Hebrews, the thought that God took a physical form, didn't know some things, and could have a change of heart were not problems. God was still the Lord, Creator of the Universe, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—their God. The children of platonic Christianity, however, can't accept the whole premise and so must rationalize away this non-platonic, admittedly ancient understanding of God.
In sum, Phillip's argument that the Bible must be perfect in order to be authoritative is based on a particular Western philosophical tradition. If we accept the tradition, we accept the premise. However, if we approach scripture from another perspective, the premise no longer holds. And, just so we are clear at this point, Phillips draws his philosophical assumptions not from the biblical traditions of the Hebrews or the first generation of Christians but from Greek philosophy.
