The Larger Catechism

Question 3: What is the Word of God?

Answer: The holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, the only rule of faith and obedience.

"to the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word it is because they have no dawn."

Isaiah 8:20

The statement of the second question of the Catechism that God is known to us through his word leads to this question: What is the Word of God? Before coming to deal with the major issues of theology, the being and nature of God, the Catechism is concerned to define what it means by talking of the Word of God.

There is an important principle there which we must carry with us constantly -- it is that God can only be known by revelation. He must make himself known to us if we are to know him. The fact that he does exactly that is a mark of his grace to lost sinners. We must know the source of our knowledge of God if we are to go on to know him. His Word is where we find him, and this third question is concerned with what that Word is.

There are several points made in the Catechism's answer to this fundamentally important question.

1. God is known through writings.

2. These writings are holy

3. These writings cover two Testaments

4. These writings are to be identified as, and with, the Word of God

5. These writings are a rule for us in faith and obedience

6. These writings are the only rule we have for such faith and obedience.

This short statement, therefore, contains major propositions which we shall look at briefly in this study.

God is known through writings

The word "scriptures" just means "things written down", and reminds us that God communicated knowledge of himself to the world by having things written down. The Westminster Confession of Faith expands on this by reminding us that God did not need to give us the Bible in order to save sinners, but that he had his eye on what the Confession marvellously calls "the better preserving and propagating of the truth" as well as "the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church" (Conf. I.1). In other words, by having the revelation committed to writing, God ensured that his truth would be preserved to the end of time, and that his church would be strengthened and comforted.

Back of that commitment are at least two things. First, there is the intelligence of God himself. If God can reveal himself in rational propositions that are not contradictory or meaningless, then that is because of the rationality that God himself possesses. And because we have been made in his image, we can respond to rational truth committed to written form. This, of course, is further explained to us in John 1:1, where Christ is called the "Word". John's purpose is to declare the deity of Christ to us, without a belief in which we cannot be Christians (see John 20:31-2 and 1 John 4:2-3). But John is using words to tell us about the Word! He is communicating the truth about the Truth to us in a rational and meaningful way, because there is nothing irrational about God. We respond to him person to person as he declares himself to us in Christ.

But secondly there is the grace of God here. God was under no obligation to declare to us anything about himself, let alone do so in human language. For him to have done so in the language of angels would have been wonder in itself, but to have employed the language of men is an act of condescension beyond words.

That is to be seen particularly against the background of Genesis 11, where a diversity of languages became a judgement on the sin of a previously monolingual human race. In order to redeem mankind from the sin, God identified himself with both the race and the sin -- he spoke to sinful men in the language of men!

This assertion, however, poses a challenge to the current philosophical ideas of 'postmodernism', which asserts that truth cannot be known objectively, and language is inadequate to convey anything beyond our immediate circumstances. One of the fathers of this view was Jacques Derrida, whose maxim was that "there is nothing outside of the text". Quite apart from the fact that if Derrida is correct, then we have no way of verifying anything - not even Derrida's own statement! - we end up on this view giving up the notion that Bible refers to anything outside of itself.

But the Westminster theology challenges this directly. It asserts that there IS something outside of the text - that when we read the writings of Scripture, there is an extra-textual God to which the writings refer and relate. Language is not meaningless, and truth is verifiable and can be authenticated. Christ's assertion that "I am the Truth" (John 14:6) is one of the most important statements about God in the Bible, and challenges the meaninglessness of postmodern thinking.

Of course, that means that there is a limitation imposed on our knowledge of God. Although there is a revelation of God at every point of creation, his Word is necessary if we are to know him in that saving way that will lead to life and fulfillment. And that knowledge is limited to the reading or the hearing of his word. That raises important questions about how God relates to people who have never heard or seen the Bible; but God will have his own way of dealing with them. The important thing for us to realise is that one of the most effective things we can do by way of witness and evangelism is to make his word accessible and available to people. These scriptures are the very word of life; and if that is the case, then we must ensure that the word of life is published by every means available to us.

These writings are holy

Holiness is supremely a characteristic of God himself (Isaiah 6:3). In its original root form, the word 'holy' describes something that is cut and set apart. Applied to God, it reminds us of God's distinctiveness and his separateness from us. Applied to things in this world, as well as to human beings, the word 'holiness' refers to what has been set apart for God's service and worship.

God's Word shares the same characteristic of holiness that sets God himself apart. It reminds us that God has not only told us about himself in the Bible, but that the Bible is unique -- a book given by God and for the service of God. It breathes the spirit of God on its every page and in its every word, as the next question in the Catechism will remind us.

There is something else too -- the Bible itself tells us that those who wrote these scriptures were holy (2 Peter 1:21): they were men from God, who spoke the things that God intended should be spoken. They were not sinless men -- Peter himself, who wrote these words, denied the Lord! -- but they were holy men, whose great concern was to write about the sinless God who had brought salvation in Christ.

The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture is built in to this idea of holiness. Although the men who wrote the books of the Bible erred in some of the things they did, as well as in some of the other things they wrote, there was no error in the words they used as vehicles of God's self-disclosure, carried and guided as they were by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the best analogy we have of the Bible is the incarnate Christ himself, who was truly God and truly man, but who had no stain and committed no sin. The Bible was written by men who erred, but remains the word of the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2). Thus, although holiness does not necessarily mean sinlessness, nevertheless the faultlessness of the Bible is the logical and natural extension of its holiness.

The holy writings through which God reveals himself are to be identified with the Old and the New Testaments

The Bible as we have it is divided into two parts, one predating, the other postdating the coming of the Lord Jesus into the world. The Old Testament was traditionally divided into three sections: the law, the prophets and the 'writings' (see Luke 24:44). The New Testament contains four Gospels, or accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus, and a bulk of letters written either to specific congregations and churches or for general circulation. These sixty-six books, however, make up one Bible, or two 'Testaments'.

The word 'testament' is a reminder to us of the covenantal unity of the Word of God. Although we have two testaments, containing several types or genres of writing, and encompassing sixty-six individual books, we have only one Bible. That unity is important, and is actually stressed in the answer to this question of the Catechism: "the holy scriptures" (plural) "are the word of God" (singular). There is only one word of God. God's revelation is woven into the history and expressed in the poetry of an ancient civilisation. It is given to us in the story of Christ's life, death and resurrection, and explained to us in the doctrines and teachings of the New Testament.

Together, these ancient books reveal one story: a story of covenant salvation, in which God intervenes for the deliverance and liberation of a fallen race. As he does so, he reveals himself as the saving God still. That is the glory of the Bible -- that its message is so simple, yet completely life-transforming.

Yet because the Word of God is to be identified with the Old Testament (written in Hebrew and Aramaic) and the New (written in Greek), there is a need for careful study of these writings, their backgrounds, their purpose and their style. We need students who will devote themselves to careful study of the languages, with their grammar and syntax, their careful structure and patterns. We need men and women to research the biblical writings so that we will have a clear grasp of what the Word of God actually says.

Thus the Bible, so simple as to nurture a childlike faith in us, is so complex that it will tax the studying abilities of the deepest minds. And because that is the case, we have a mandate for rigorous theological training, so that those who proclaim that word to others will do so with power and with authority.

The Word of God is to be identified with the whole contents of the Old and New Testaments

It has become fashionable in modern biblical scholarship to speak of the Bible as containing the Word of God, rather than of its being the Word of God. Although this is a modern viewpoint, it is unfortunate that the Shorter Catechism employed similar terminology when it spoke of the "Word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments". A careful reading of the Catechism, as well as the wider Westminsterian context, will quickly show, however, that the Shorter Catechism did not intend to convey the idea that the Bible was only the Word of God in certain places.

The distinction may appear small, but has large consequences. The Bible may or may not become the Word of God to us at different moments. If that is the case, then the authority is removed from the Bible and its teaching. That is a very fashionable position to hold in our postmodern world, where the meaning intended by the author (from which the word 'authority' comes) is not necessarily final -- what matters is the meaning received and perceived by the reader. If that is the case with Scripture, however, then we cannot speak of the Bible as authoritative.

The position, however, that the Scriptures are one and the same as the Word of God raises a host of questions relating to how the Bible is to be translated and interpreted, as well as which manuscripts of the Bible represent the original text. It raises questions such as whether, or how many, of the Old Testament laws are still binding in the New Testament age. It raises questions over the legitimacy of translating pronouns like "he" as "he" or "he or she" or "they"! These are scholarly questions which are constantly being debated. One thing is certain: for those who agree with the theology of the Larger Catechism, the Bible is final simply because all it contains is the Word of God. No part of the Bible is ever not the Word of God; and no part of the Bible is ever in process of becoming the Word of God. A particular verse or passage may be of deep significance to me at any given moment, but every "jot and tittle" as Christ puts it in Matthew 5:18, is the final Word of Almighty God.

The Word of God is a rule for us in faith and obedience

Following from the fact that the Scriptures are the Word of God is the fact that in our faith and in our obedience, we have a standard and a rule here. The whole of our lives is summarised in the phrase "faith and obedience", because these refer to what we believe and what we do -- with our beliefs about God and our response to him.

God has not left us to work out a faith system for ourselves. Nor does he leave to ourselves to live as we please. He has given us a rule for what to believe and how to live. There is therefore both an intellectual and a practical aspect to the Bible. With our hearts we believe all that it says, and in our lives we show loving obedience to the God whose word it is.

The Word of God is the only rule for our faith and obedience

But the Catechism goes further. The Bible is not only a rule; it is the only rule that we have. It is at that point that individuals and churches are apt to err. We can make tradition our rule, or the views of others our rule; we can shape our beliefs and our practices by the insights of councils and of great men. But the Catechism teaches that there is only one set of writings in the whole of the world where the whole counsel of God is declared to us, and where God sets before us the final standards of our behaviour.

Of course, in a world like ours, in a world of opinions and traditions and viewpoints, churches will have their own standards and their own views. But the clear message from the Reformation is that there is only one place of final arbitration in our behaviour and in our beliefs: and that is the voice of God speaking to us in the Scriptures. The acid test is not what the preacher says, or what the church says, or what the church ancients said, or what evangelical leaders say. The final test is "What does the Scripture say?" (Romans 4:3).