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The Bible: Word of God in Human Words

The Greek word synkatabasis refers to God’s “stooping” to meet human beings at their own level, just as a parent gets down on the floor and “lisps” to a child.

By Bernhard W. Anderson

The practice of reading from a lectionary presupposes that God speaks through the Bible to a community of faith. That is why the Bible has special authority for the believing and worshiping community. In our previous discussion,a we found that some locate this authority primarily in a confession of faith (or theological statement) and from this vantage point read selectively from the ancient biblical literature. Others locate authority in experience, for instance in women’s experience, as with modern feminist interpretations, or in the experience of the oppressed poor, as with Latin American liberation theology. These views place authority outside […]

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Footnotes

1.

Here I resume the discussion in my last two columns of BR. See “Reading an Ancient Book in a Modern World,” BR 12:05, and “The Bible Within the Bible,” BR 13:01.

Endnotes

1.

See the essay, written from a Christian standpoint, by Richard B. Hays, “Salvation by trust? Reading the Bible faithfully,” in The Christian Century (January 26, 1997), pp. 218–223.

2.

Quoted by Roland Murphy, The Psalms, Job Proclamation Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), pp. 12–13.

3.

Jon Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), p. 142.

4.

See Ford Lewis Battles, “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,” Interpretation 31 (1977), pp. 19–36.

5.

The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), quoting the encyclical Dei Verbum.