COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation!
We had been attending Trinity Church for close to two years. Nourished by the Bible teaching we received every week in church as well as in the Bible study classes we attended, I was astonished to find Scripture opening like a treasure chest before my eyes. The more I delved, the more consistent I found it. I began to realize that God Himself was the central value of the universe, not me and my happiness.
I believed I had jettisoned my indoctrination that Ellen White had been inspired exactly as the Bible writers had been. I saw that the Bible proved itself consistent, and I knew I couldn’t say the same for Ellen White. Even though I found the Bible to be increasingly trustworthy, however, I kept bumping into confusing presuppositions.
One evening I was talking to Dale Ratzlaff on the telephone. Someone had posed a question to me that stumped me, and I asked Dale for his understanding.
“We criticize Ellen White for quoting Bible texts out-of-context to prove her points,” I repeated to Dale,“yet we accept the New Testament writers quoting Old Testament verses, claiming they were fulfilled by events in Jesus’ life and in the fledgling church. Those Old Testament texts seem taken out-of-context, and no Jew would have seen their fulfillment the way the New Testament explains them. How is our criticism of Ellen White different from other people’s criticisms of the gospel writers?”
“God inspired the New Testament writers to show how the Old Testament texts were fulfilled.”
Dale’s answer was concise and unequivocal:“God inspired the New Testament writers to show how the Old Testament texts were fulfilled.”
I accepted his answer. Gradually I realized that although I had memorized 2 Timothy 3:16 as a child—“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”(NIV), I had never believed that text to be proof of the Bible’s reliability. I reasoned that one couldn’t prove a book’s claims by its own words; such “blind” acceptance of its own claims as fact would be “unscientific”, circular, and gullible.
I’ve come to understand that I was taught, subtly but powerfully, that human reason had to have the “last word” on whether or not the Bible was truly God’s Word to mankind. While Adventists considered it to be “infallible”, that idea merely meant it wouldn’t misrepresent the essentials of salvation. We were free to question the exact words and concepts the Bible used. We believed God inspired prophets with ideas, but He allowed them to interpret those ideas and to use their own words to explain whatever it was they had understood. Hence, inconsistencies and culturally biased notions had crept into the Bible as a result of God “honor- ing” the prophets’ freedom to interpret His impressions to them. We, in our time, were free to re-interpret those Biblical principles to fit our culture.
This approach to Biblical exegesis was identical to the way Adventists interpreted Ellen White.
Learning to trust that our sovereign God had inspired not just the prophet’s thoughts but had overseen the words of Scripture has made the Bible more rich and internally consistent than I had ever imagined it to be.
During her class in Bible Study at the Former Adventist Weekend in February, Elizabeth Inrig explained the Bible’s inspiration this way: just as Jesus is a hypostatic union of Divine and human, so the Bible is a union of the Divine and the human. Exactly how it “works” is a mystery, but it cannot be dissected.
The Word in flesh demonstrated His own dependence upon God’s eternal Word when he confronted Satan:“It is written:‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’ ” (Matthew 4:4 quoting Deuteronomy 8:3).
Correct understanding of the Bible’s authority is crucial for our understanding of reality. In the Word of God we find the truth about Jesus, and in Him we find the source of life itself. †
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