DO WE DO WHAT WE DO BECAUSE
THE BIBLE SAYS DO IT?

Leroy Garrett

It is an interesting question in that it implies still other questions, such as What is the purpose of Scripture? and What kind of a book is the Bible? Since many of our problems relate to the way we treat the Bible, we should not avoid facing up to such questions.

The question I am asking reminds me of a conversation between a student and me in one of my Ethics classes some years back. I asked the class to name something they believed to be wrong. This student, a bright young lady, replied that she believed stealing to be wrong. “Why is stealing wrong?,” I then asked. She responded with “Because the Bible says Thou shalt not steal. “ When I asked her if the Bible was the basis of her conviction about stealing, she insisted that it was. But when I asked “If the Bible said nothing about stealing would you feel free to steal?,” she hesitated but finally admitted that stealing would still be wrong.

The class at last decided that stealing is not wrong because the Bible condemns it but the Bible condemns it because it is wrong. Stealing was wrong before there was a Bible. God wrote into the Ten Commandments legislation against stealing, not to make it a sin, but because it was a sin. Cain killed his brother Abel long before another commandment read Thou shalt do no murder, but he was guilty of breaking what might be called “the law of moral reason.” No one has to hear the Ten Commandments to know that stealing and murder are wrong. Those commandments rather convict him of what he already knows, and thus condemn him as a sinner. Paul was speaking of still another commandment, Thou shalt not covet, when he wrote: “when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died” (Ro. 7:9). The written code reminded him of what was already written in his conscience, but more pointedly and clearly, and thus revived his sense of sin. Law has this function.

I doubt if the apostle would say that he therefore sought to live above covetousness because of what the Bible said to him, but that the Bible (or the commandment) identified him as a sinner because he coveted. Paul would seek not to covet, not so much because of the commandment, but because covetousness is wrong.

Like most of you there are a number of things I do as if they were second nature to me.

I love my wife and family.

I obey the law. I pay my debts.

I go to church. I pray. I do a few good deeds.

I give part of my income to the poor.

The Bible tells me to do everyone of these things. We could all find proof texts. But do I do them because the Bible tells me to — or is there not a better reason? Is there not something wrong when one is motivated by nothing higher than some written code, however esteemed that code may be? Do you want your daughter to marry a man who will love her only because the Bible tells him to?

I love Ouida for many reasons or no reason (love defies reason!) and I can’t see that such an injunction as “Husbands, love your wives,” which is in the Bible, has much to do with it. I do not love her because the Bible tells me to. I love her because she is Ouida, and the Bible tells me to love her, not to make it right but because it is already right.

The Bible has a way of taking what is right and framing it with Christian urgency, such as “Love your wives, even as Christ loved the church.” I respond with, “Yes, of course, I love Ouida even as Christ loved the church,” though I might never have put it that way except for the Bible. The Scriptures identify this basic moral principle in Eph. 6:1: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Because it is right! There may be many reasons why something is right: the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, the sanctity of human personality, the inner sense of duty, moral reason, the authenticity of selfhood, the totality of human experience (in that we learn what is good and evil through trial and error).

For years the state of Alabama had a “reasonable” speed law, and drivers were arrested for exceeding that limitation even though no exact speed limit was posted. We all know that “60” would be reasonable on most highways while “90” would be unreasonable on any highway. And we know that “60” would be unreasonable on a residential street. We know such things just as we know when a child is being abused or a women is being maltreated. It is common moral sense, which God has given all of us. And this is behind much of what the Bible says in reference to the way we are to behave. We are told to do them because it is right to do them —common moral sense.

But there are those things that are uniquely Christian or at least spiritual that may not be mandated by moral reason, such as prayer, study, the corporate assembly, visiting the sick, acts of mercy. Do we do such things because the New Testament requires them or does the New Testament require them because that is the way Christians behave? The difference may be important. The early Christians did these things long before there was a New Testament to tell them to do them. Such behavior grew out of their religious life as Jews, elevated by the example and teaching of Jesus and his disciples. Their experience itself is what eventually became our New Testament.

The experience of the early church was centered in Jesus Christ. While they drew upon their background as Jews (and in some instances as Greeks), the focal point of all that they did was Jesus. Itinerant teachers passed along the growing body of teaching that he left with his chosen envoys, the apostles, and soon documents began to circulate, the letters of Paul being among the first. While such documents served to confirm their faith and deepen their knowledge and to some degree modify their behavior, the “authority” (we can doubt if they thought in such terms) was the mind of Jesus Christ.

Are the Scriptures therefore our “authority” for the things we do? Yes and no. Yes insofar as the Scriptures grew out of the life of the early church and are the testimony of Jesus’ own apostles or those close to them. But the Scriptures are not the ultimate authority in that they must always be brought to the judgment bar of our own conscience and our own faith in Christ. Jesus is our authority, and so the Scriptures are authoritative insofar as they point to him.

So I would say that ideally we do what we do, not primarily because of the Bible, but because of our faith in Christ. We do what Christians are supposed to do, what Christians have been doing all along through the centuries. If I know my heart, I would die for Christ as a martyr, not because of anything I might quote from Scripture, but because I am committed to Jesus as Lord. The Scriptures of course are an important part of my faith, but it is Jesus who is the object of my faith. The Scriptures strengthen my faith, but so does the life of the church in history, such as the exemplary life of myold Sunday School teacher, the martyrdom of Polycarp, and the stand taken by Luther.

But the Bible is something more than the witness of the church in history in that it is “God-breathed” or inspired, 2 Tim. 3:16, a reference to the Old Testament in particular, and this is what makes all the Bible “the holy Scriptures,” which is what Jesus and his apostles called the Bible and what we should call it. The Bible never calls itself “the Word of God,” for Jesus is the Word of God and the Word of God is revealed and reflected in the Scriptures, but is not to be identified with the Scriptures. We all of course can and do refer to the Scriptures as the Word of God in that God speaks to us through them, but we are to know that the Word of God existed in eternity long before the Scriptures and it will continue into eternity, long after the Scriptures cease to be.

The role of Scripture is clearer to us when we see them as more descriptive than prescriptive. In the New Testament, for instance, we have a description of what the early Christians did. The message is not that we are to do precisely as they did (prescriptive), but we are to do for our time what they did for theirs (descriptive). If the order of worsillp, polity, methods and missions are all spelled out in detail (prescriptive), then the church in every age should be a determined uniformity, and no excuse for diversity. But even with the New Testament churches there was diversity in all these areas (descriptive).

The communism (is that the word?) of the Jerusalem church (Acts 5) is an example of what I mean. If it is prescriptive, then every church in every age should do as they did. But if it is descriptive, it serves as an example of how they cared for each other, and so we should find ways, as circumstances demand, to show like care but not necessarily in the same way.

Perhaps the holy Scriptures in some instances may be thought of as prescriptive, such as its mandate for loyalty to the risen Christ, or we can say they certainly issue commands, such as to be baptized, but I do not see the Bible as ever prescriptive in the sense of a “prescription” that one takes to a drugstore. Nor does the Bible take on the likeness of a “Constitution” (as if with articles and sections?) or as a fixed “Pattern,” ideas that are often imposed upon it. The Bible is simply not that kind of book.

I see the holy Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, as largely experiential, reflective of the life and faith of the early church and somehow inspired by the Holy Spirit. It tells us both the good and bad about the earliest churches, not one of which is the ideal for us today. But out of their triumphs and defeats, their rights and wrongs, and apostolic efforts to apply mid-course corrections, we have norms and principles for the ongoing Church of Christ upon earth. Moreover the documents the earliest believers passed on to us show us what it meant to them for Christ to be with them and in them “even unto the end of the age.”

We do what we do because we too are Christians and Jesus is with us as he was with them. It is faith in a living Christ that motivates us. We are the ongoing church, believing and doing as the church always has. The Scriptures undergird, strengthen, and deepen that faith. Since the faith could conceivably have been perpetuated by oral tradition through the centuries as it was in the first, it could be argued that while the New Testament is crucial to our faith it is not absolutely necessary.

It is enough to say with the apostle Paul that the Scriptures are profitable, and he tells how: “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).