The Human Words of God

Even though the evangelical tradition I was raised in taught me that real humans wrote the Bible, I was not prepared to critically study Scripture at a small state liberal arts school in New York during the mid-aughts. I knew the Bible didn’t drop from heaven, but learning the long, multi-layered history of how Scripture came to be (the process known as canonization) caught me off guard. More challenging, some of the things in the Bible that I had been taught were factual, or “literal” history, were often a lot more complex than I originally thought.

That raised a poignant question for me. I had encountered God in the Bible many times: in devotions, small group studies, and hearing the preached Word. Experience led me to believe this book is God’s Word to us. But now I was confronting the Bible’s humanity in new ways. How could Scripture be both these things—divine and human—at the same time?

That is one of the central questions animating this year’s Theology Lab series at Highrock Covenant Church on how we read and interpret Scripture. In a series of online conversations, distinguished biblical scholars and church leaders are helping us discover anew how we might encounter the living God within the beautiful complexity of the Bible.

Karen Keen, author of The Word of a Humble God: The Origins, Inspiration, and Interpretation of Scripture, helped kick us off. In her work, Keen offers a proposal for understanding God’s character and how that inspires us as Bible readers.

What do we learn, she asks, from the fact that in the creation story God orders the world in collaboration with creatures like us (Genesis 2)? What do we discover from a God who can be found washing the feet of others? The answer, says Keen, is an illuminating notion of divine humility.

Part of the novelty of Keen’s work lies in how she applies this notion of humility to the formation of Scripture itself. The process of how the Bible came together over centuries included human authors, editors, and communal participation. Yet, far from being an arbitrary process, it lines up well with how we might expect the kind of God who creates in collaboration with us and washes our feet to work. God enters our world, empowering the creaturely process by which the Bible comes to be. The humble God of the Bible, notes Keen, “uses power to serve and lift up.”

The notion of God’s humility has implications for us as readers of Scripture as well. As we engage the Bible, individually and collectively, the humility of God reminds us that we can bring all of ourselves to the text—our cultures and heritages, our sorrows and joys, our dreams of what could be. The humility of God teaches us not only that God cares about these things, but that God is ready and able to receive them from us.

Next, we were joined by Tim Mackie, co-founder of the BibleProject. We talked to Tim about a paradigm that can assist us in reading Scripture. The first “pillar” of this paradigm, as they describe it, takes up the question I introduced above: How is the Bible both divine and human literature? Tim approaches this question by reflecting on the typical way God is shown to act throughout Scripture.

Like Keen, Mackie highlights that the only time God acts apart from any creaturely medium in the Bible is in the creation account of Genesis 1. The Bible is deeply concerned with “the mystery of God’s activity in the world,” Mackie says, but we can easily lose sight of the underlying way God works in our midst. God covenants with people, becomes incarnate as a human in Jesus, and sends the Holy Spirit upon women and men to proclaim the gospel. The Bible, notes Mackie, shows that “God acts in the world through humans acting in the world.”

Likewise with our readings of Scripture. The activity of God, interwoven through our lives, helps us see how the Bible as human literature exists in harmony with Scripture as God’s Word to us. The human dimension of the Bible, which is all of it, is God’s way of speaking to us through people like us, in their living witness to the good news of God’s salvation.

This can be disorienting. How do we discern God’s voice among human voices? How do we know we are following the words of God and not simply our own? These are important questions that highlight our deep need to be, as Covenanters have long affirmed, readers of Scripture in community. We read Scripture together, making it an integral part of our worship and common life.

Intriguingly, coming together around Scripture is not just a good practice for Bible reading. If God works the way Mackie describes, then our gatherings together around the Word become an essential place where we may look for God to enter into our midst and speak to us. 

Of course, none of these proposals fully explains how God speaks to us through people like us. Mystery remains. Still, these ideas can help expand our imaginations and point us to both key practices and surprising places where God is to be found in our lives.

In April we’ll be joined by Dennis Edwards, dean of North Park Theological Seminary, to discuss his new book, Humility Illuminated: The Biblical Path Back to Christian Character. I anticipate that this conversation will help bring together the various threads of this conversation. Given what we’re learning about the Bible and experiencing God through the humble offerings of our lives, what makes more sense than pursuing Christlike formation through a biblically shaped vision of humility?

Together, we’re learning to read Scripture in order to hear, encounter, and be transformed by the living God.