On using the Bible
We need to understand what the Bible is before we can use it helpfully. In these pages I will be using the New Testament predominantly, so here are some thoughts about it.
It is categorically not a collection of proof-texts which we can turn to in order to answer all the questions about God we might have. In reality it is mostly stories. The first five books are all pure narrative: who did what, who said what. One copy of mine of the whole New Testament has 570 pages, and of these the first 335 are narrative. Then come lots of letters, some quite short, all written for the same reason we ever write letters: because we have something to say but could not get there to say it face to face. These letters contain stuff about purely local situations, together with greetings to people obviously known to the writer but otherwise never mentioned in any surviving literature. Then to round it off we have a series of visions, and even this book has seven letters in it.
Not one of the individual parts of what we now call the New Testament was written with any consciousness that they would be eventually included in an authoritative collection of writings. The age in which they were written was not like ours, with its emphasis on the written, printed word. That age gave far more weight to the spoken word. While there were living witnesses of events, who needed a written account? It was only when these living witnesses were beginning to be fewer and fewer, as age and death overtook them, was there any need for their memories to be preserved on paper. The task of the Christian Church in the second century was to define which of those written accounts and letters had real authority, and this is how the collection of them became what we know today as the New Testament of the Bible.
Two thousand years later we cannot have any better evidence of what Jesus did and said, or of what those immediate followers – to whom he had directly given authority – taught. The key word is authority. This, to me, is what the New Testament has.
Inevitably any references to the human condition in these narratives, letters, and visions is purely incidental. In no way was the writer addressing the question about what it means to be human. He was addressing quite different questions, but using assumptions about being human that allow us to extract some helpful insights into our fundamental question.
Are these extracted insights useful? Are they true? That is the question that you, dear reader will have to consider. But certainly they may be regarded as useful if they are set alongside the assumptions made by modern clinical psychology, with its competing methodologies, its differing diagnostic criteria, and its differing treatment procedures.