After being impressed with some of Michael F. Bird’s articles, and his portion of Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, I decided to pick up this small book. Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible is, essentially, a short version of Bird’s biblical theology. I frequently find myself aligned well with Bird’s well-written views, and this book was no exception. The seven things he discusses are:
- How the Bible was put together
- What “inspiration” means
- How the Bible is true
- Why the Bible needs to be rooted in history
- Why literal interpretation is not always the best interpretation
- How the Bible gives us knowledge, faith, love, and hope
- How Jesus Christ is the center of the Bible
Some chapters were more insightful for me than others. I appreciated Bird’s discussion of divine inspiration and inerrancy, though I didn’t agree with some of his conclusions; his view on divine inspiration was quite vague and unsatisfying (to be fair, I don’t have a “clear” or “satisfying” explanation, either). In a chapter on interpretation, he provides an excellent definition of what a good interpretation is and does:
…a good interpretation is… something that makes sense of an author’s intention in his or her historical context… it is something that explains and accounts for all the assertions and descriptions inside a text; and it is something that is eminently relatable for us readers.
As a scholar, Bird brings a wealth of knowledge about the Bible and its history to the table, and it’s clear that he values this type of knowledge: without it, Bird says, there are just some questions you won’t be able to answer. I appreciated his emphasis on biblical scholarship, because it’s something I think most American Christians lack completely.
Look, if you pick up the Bible and read from Genesis to Revelation, sure, you can get a pretty good grasp of the basic storyline of God… a rudimentary understanding of the Bible can be attained through a close and careful reading of it… Besides, we have the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit… However, if you read the Bible from scratch, and if you are a bit of a novice at reading it, the fact is that you are going to have huge questions that you will not be able to answer.
A mistake I see far too often in biblical literature is theological arrogance— the “holier than thou” attitude towards one’s own Christian beliefs (I recently read a book that falls into exactly that trap). For me, this type of attitude makes or breaks any book on theology. So, to read Michael Bird be fair in his convictions and maintain a humble theology was refreshing.
Overall, I found Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible to be an engaging, filler-free experience, and one I’d encourage any Christian to pick up. It doesn’t break new theological ground or offer any life-changing perspectives on the Bible (at least for me), but it clearly defines and discusses some of the most important biblical issues in a fair and nuanced way.
My full notes below.
Inspiration
I appreciate Bird’s recognition that the Bible is more than simply the “word of God” (though it is). I’ve always found the term “divine inspiration” hard to define, and Bird provides an excellent (yet intentionally vague) definition:
The Bible is the “word of God”… it is also a very human book.
[inspiration is] the explanation of how the Bible can be both from God and from humans.
…Scripture is a product of God’s creative and communicative work in human authors, which is so effective that what they wrote under divine influence is considered to be divinely authored.
Inspiration truly is a hard thing to pin down. We aren’t given much Scripture to help us understand how it works, and this is frustrating for me at times. Bird spends some time explaining some different theories, and in my opinion, many theories are plausible given how little information we have.
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Inspiration as Artistic Ability
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God inspires people in the same sense that a sunrise or a rose inspires a poet. But it is kind of absurd to imagine Moses thinking, “Gosh, I feel angry today. Maybe God is telling us to kill all the Canaanites,” and then writing instructions on the conquest of Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:17)
- For Bird, and for myself, this view isn’t plausible merely because it reduces God’s role in the production of Scripture to effectively zero, which just doesn’t make sense given the obvious presence of God in Scripture. I believe God played a more active role.
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Inspiration as Divine Endorsement
- Essentially, this view says that the authors wrote their own respective works on their own, “and then God simply put his heavenly stamp of approval on what they wrote” (Bird).
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Such a view of inspiration reduces God to the role of a publishing editor, or even worse, a literary critic.
- I would reject this interpretation for the same reason as “Inspiration as Artistic Ability”: it reduces God’s role in the production of Scripture to effectively zero.
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Inspiration as Divine Dictation
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God speaks into the mind of an Obadiah or a Luke, who in turn write word-for-word what they hear.
- Bird acknowledges that sometimes, God tells someone to write something down (e.g., Jesus tells John to write down specific things in Revelation), but “it does not appear to have been normal” for this explicit type of dictation to occur.
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In 1 Corinthians, Paul genuinely forgot whom he baptized and then backtracked midsentence— hard to imagine God dictating that to him.
- Bird points out that some books are written in terrible grammar (e.g. Revelations).
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Dictation theory removes the human element of Scripture by denying that the personas of the authors shine through the texts.
- I reject this view of inspiration because it’s obvious to me that Scripture contains an essence of humanity; its authors were more than just scribes of God’s speech. Each author’s perspectives and knowledge shines through their words. Some specific portions of text, like Paul’s memory lapse in 1 Corinthians, further cement my opinion.
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Inspiration as Divine Enablement with Words
- Bird equates this with “verbal plenary inspiration”, the prevalent theory. I’ve heard verbal plenary inspiration defined differently, so I’m not sure he’s 100% accurate in his equation.
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…inspiration pertains to God’s work to guide the minds and personalities of human authors so that they would freely choose to write in their own words the intended meaning of what God had revealed to them.
- Bird praises this theory for giving more credit to the humans, but criticizes it for not going far enough in that direction, because this definition of inspiration still calls the exact words and word order to be essentially divinely dictated.
- To be honest, this view seems too nebulous; it doesn’t really describe how inspiration works.
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Inspiration as the Incarnation of Divine Ideas in Human Words
- This view likens Scripture to Jesus: fully God, fully human.
- Bird criticizes this view, but doesn’t offer any strong arguments to make his point. My interpretation of his argument goes something like this: Jesus is simply fully God and fully human; there is no “mixing” or “editing”. The Bible, on the other hand, does contain both a divine and a human essence, but the composition of Scripture included a lot of mixing, editing, translating, lost manuscripts, and just too much complexity to call it “God’s word in human language” (from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics).
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…incarnation is not God’s normal mode of self-communication.
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Inspiration as Conceptual Guidance
- This is Bird’s personal view.
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…God’s guiding and leading human minds at the conceptual level… this is not to say that God simply gives an author the gist of what he wants them to say.
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…inspiration directs thoughts, not the syllables of individual words.
- This view “means God’s word is translatable” (Bird).
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…translations which express the same ideas and convey the same knowledge can be regarded as genuine expressions of God’s word… [this] means that your English Bible is indeed the word of God.
- I have a hard time accepting this view; despite Bird’s defense that “this is not to say that God simply gives an author the gist of what he wants them to say,” his explanation sure seems like it. I get Bird’s point that our translations can be considered the “word of God” if they convey the same “ideas” and “knowledge” as the originals, but isn’t that the whole question— do our modern translations really convey the same ideas and knowledge? It’s a question Bird doesn’t really answer. Many times in translation, meaning is lost (or added!), so I would be more careful to suggest our modern Bibles carry the same significance as the original text. Translation, by definition, is a form of human interpretation.
I think Bird points out an important fact that we like to forget: the creation of the Biblical writings isn’t always cut and dry. In the course of the Bible’s history, specifically the Old Testament, we can say with high confidence that what we are reading is the result of many people writing, editing, or interpreting. Our idea of divine inspiration should not be limited to just the words themselves, but extended to the process by which the Bible was made.
…while inspiration might pertain to the Holy Spirit’s imparting of ideas, the production of a scriptural text often involves a number of human processes that are directed by the Spirit’s guidance. For instance, it is clear that certain books in the Bible were composed and compiled over a period of time, like the Pentateuch…
A high view of Scripture should embrace both the Holy Spirit’s “sanctification of creaturely processes”, includes guidance of the collection, editing, and canonization of ancient texts, which gave us Holy Scripture.
Inerrancy
How, or to what extent, is the Bible “true”? Bird acknowledges that inerrancy debates “can be particularly brutal affairs when played out in conservative Christian contexts.” He gives the example of Michael Licona, an author I quite like, and a well-regarded scholar who published an extensive historical argument for Jesus’s resurrection. In one of his books, he regarded a passage in Matthew as being “special effects”. His de-historistization of this passage sparked a huge controversy that ended in him being “cancelled” in the American evangelical world (think canceled talks, public denunciations, etc.). It’s this kind of behavior, this weaponization of inerrancy, that Bird rightly criticizes.
For many American evangelicals, inerrancy is kind of like your passport and residency visa within the evangelical tribe; without it you can expect to get deported.
Some people preach on the inerrancy of the Scriptures, but what they really mean is the inerrancy of their interpretation of Scripture.
Bird purports that “God’s revelation in Scripture is accommodated to the worldview and expectations of its original audience” in terms of its genres and “standards of truth telling”, but this accommodation “is never a giving in to sheer error.” In other words, it’s complicated!
Bird argues that to present total, literalistic inerrancy vs. apostasy as an either, or is a false dichotomy. I agree.
There are even types of errors that one can accept if you understand divine accommodation to ancient worldviews and how ancient literary genres work… Admitting such a fact in no way undermines the truthfulness and authority of Scripture.
Bird responds to the “death by a thousand qualifications” argument against inerrancy by arguing that “Some ideas in theology and religion are irreducibly complex”, which is fair.
The Old Testament
Bird says that “To get out of obeying the stuff in the Bible that you find repulsive or irrelevant, there are a few options from which you could choose:”
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“Just dump the Old Testament in its entirety”
- But, the apostles and Jesus clearly affirmed the OT.
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Divide OT into civil, ceremonial, and moral components, and consider the civil and ceremonial ones obsolete because of Christ
- Bird says the OT isn’t divisible like that.
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Interpret the weird/disturbing parts allegorically
- Bird calls this a “cheap cop-out that tries to avoid the problem”.
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Give up, and just use the Bible however you want.
Bird argues that, to solve this issue, we should understand that “not everything in the Bible is authoritative for us.”
- Sometimes the Bible is merely describing events, not as ideals to be followed. Other times, the Bible is prescribing a specific behavior we should follow.
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…some parts of the Bible are not normative and were never designed to be repeated.
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- Sometimes the Bible is addressing a specific problem, not offering a generalized prescription.
- E.g., in Acts 15, there are specific instructions for the gentile believers, like abstaining from food sacrificed to idols.
- Sometimes the Bible stories and commandments are not dealing harsh realities, not ideal situations.
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The Bible speaks to a world that is messed up, and God’s decrees for that world do not clean up every mess instantaneously.
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The Old Testament conveys the ruthless realism of God’s people trying to survive in the ancient world… we need to imagine God… taking [Israel], incrementally, toward a better way of being human.
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Bird is a believer in “progressive revelation,” and he makes a compelling case for it.
That does not mean that everything before [Christ] is redundant or relativized, but it does mean that everything must be reviewed through the lens of God’s continuous purpose for his people.
For example, polygamy is seen frequently among Old Testament leaders, including Abraham, Jacob, and Solomon; yet Christ in Matthew 19, and Paul in Ephesians and 1 Timothy, emphasize monogamy. You can’t use the Old Testament to justify polygamy, because there was a newer revelation.
The relevance and usage of the Old Testament in Christian doctrine is a confusing and controversial topic. The New Testament seems to suggest that the Old Testament is indeed still relevant to our lives, but in an unclear way. Bird suggests that the Old Testament was “temporary scaffolding” to prepare Israel for Jesus; it may bear resemblance Jesus’s teachings, but it’s not a law to be followed.
The Law was part of the scaffolding to keep things temporarily in order, upright, and stable, pointing ahead to a future world… The Law remains relevant in many ways, but not as laws to be obeyed… the Law is more of a consultant for ethics than a code of ethics.
Bird’s conclusion on this matter is well-written:
So, when we are faced with a problematic text about anything from polygamy to prohibitions on pork, we have to ask if it has been superseded by something better in God’s progressive revelation of himself. We should recognize that the Mosaic Law is not the primary basis for Christian ethics, even while it remains a form of wisdom for Christian living. Biblical authority must be understood in light of God’s progressive revelation climaxing in Jesus and the teaching of the apostles. It’s called the Old Testament for a reason.
The Importance of History and Biblical Academics
Bird emphasizes that while the Bible can and should be applied to our modern day circumstances, it was nonetheless written for an ancient audience, and should be treated as such.
The problem is that things we take for granted, think of as self-evident, or plainly assume, were often quite different to ancient peoples… word, concepts, and symbols had different meanings in the ancient world than in our modern world.
For example, Bird discusses the concept of humans being created “in the image of God” in Genesis. Modern readers typically interpret this to mean something like “rationality” or “intelligence”, but Bird quickly points out this dehumanizes the mentally disabled or injured. Instead, using history and archaeology, we can see that in the ancient Near East, monarchs are typically given the title “image of ____ (insert local god name here)”. This helps us understand that “image of God” was probably meant to confer a sense of royalty onto humans; we rule and steward the Earth.
Another example is Jesus’s “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s” passage. Bird points out that most sermons on this passage teach that Christians should pay taxes, but remember their ultimate allegiance to God. But studying the historical context tells a completely different story: the coin Jesus asked to see very likely had Tiberius’s face on it, with an inscription that called him “Son of the Divine Augustus”. While the questioners were attempting to trap Jesus into either disrespecting Rome or worshiping it, Jesus’s words in this passage are his attempt to flip the questioners’ trap back on them, by pointing out that their money sinfully contained an image of a God other than Yahweh.
If an accurate understanding of the Bible requires an extensive understanding of history and ancient societies (among other things) then what chance do laypeople have? Bird’s answer is that while uneducated readers can grasp a basic understanding of God, Jesus, and the storyline of the Bible, an academic background is necessary to answer the harder questions of Scripture.
Look, if you pick up the Bible and read from Genesis to Revelation, sure, you can get a pretty good grasp of the basic storyline of God… a rudimentary understanding of the Bible can be attained through a close and careful reading of it… Besides, we have the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit… However, if you read the Bible from scratch, and if you are a bit of a novice at reading it, the fact is that you are going to have huge questions that you will not be able to answer.
Bird suggests that we should all seek to increase our understanding of the ancient world the Bible was written in, by absorbing various academic materials— they’re highly available in any format you want.
Importantly, Bird later points out that academics and scholarly understanding of the Bible are not the ultimate goal of reading the Bible.
I think it is important to stress that knowledge about God is not enough; it is knowledge of God in tandem with faith in God that matters. Going back to the Gospel of John, we need to take seriously Jesus’s rebuke to the Jerusalem priests: “You study the Scripture diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40).
How To Interpret the Bible
For Bird, the “meaning” of a text is a fusion of 3 things: the author, the text, and the reader. He criticizes any approach that solely uses one component to obtain a text’s “meaning”. The three approaches are explained below:
- Author: the “meaning” of a text is equivalent to the author’s meaning; the task of reading is to decipher what the author is trying to say.
- Bird criticizes this approach, explaining that the author’s meaning is not always clear, or even feasibly attainable.
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…what does Paul mean when he says “For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off” … I have a few ideas, but I do not have certainty, and I don’t thin anyone can be certain of Paul’s intention here.
- Bird also points out that sometimes, the author doesn’t understand the meaning of their own text. E.g., did Isaiah think his “suffering servant” was himself, or Jesus, or someone else? A surface reading suggests it alludes to Israel as a whole, but nowadays it has a new interpretation, clearly pointing to Jesus.
- Text: “meaning is entirely independent of the author’s intention”
- Reader: “authors are inaccessible; texts have no predetermined meaning, so meaning is created by the act of reading”
- Believers of this theory would say that there is no single “right” interpretation.
- Bird criticizes this theory for using literature as an echo chamber: “all you see or hear in a text is what you and your community bring with you.”
Bird provides an excellent definition of what a “good interpretation” is and does:
…a good interpretation is… something that makes sense of an author’s intention in his or her historical context… it is something that explains and accounts for all the assertions and descriptions inside a text; and it is something that is eminently relatable for us readers.