The Bible is quite often referred to by Christians (more usually of the fundamentalist/conservative variety, in my experience) as ‘Th word of God’. The person of Jesus Christ is described in the Bible as ‘The Word’ or ‘The Living Word’.
On a different message board, I came across an individual who says that because of this, Jesus and the Bible are essentially the same thing.
My absurdity meter went right off the scale, but it occurred to me that the distinction is a little unclear - I had always thought of it as:
—Jesus as ‘the Word Of God’ = the last word on God’s character, the embodiment of everything that God could possibly express.
—The Bible as ‘the word of God’ = God’s verbal message to mankind (or part thereof).
Questions:
How prevalent is the view that the Bible=The Word Of God=Jesus?
I can’t think of anywhere that the Bible refers to itself as ‘the word of God’ - where does it say this and if it doesn’t, when did people start describing it as such?
The passage that I have most heard used to link God and the words of the Bible is in 2 Timothy Ch3:
This also gets used to justify the “infalliblity” of Scripture - if the words are “God-breathed” then they cannot be inaccurate in any way, because that would be to imply that God was not perfect.
The biblical usage seems to refer to a much more dynamic thing than a bunch of actual words - saying things like “the word of God came to …” - a sort of divine (prophetic) revalation if you like, although Jesus seems to use the phrase to refer to the Hebrew scriptures in Matthew 15…
In any event, I find that the attitude you’ve witnessed Mangetout is the attitude of the YEC. I’ve run across this mentality on several boards…and I think I know the board you refer to.
I think the reason behind it is to bolster their YEC viewpoint. If you don’t agree with Genesis then you aren’t a Christian. IMO it’s a way to attack those of us who believe in theistic evolution.
You’re right Meatros (and I think you witnessed the actual exchange I speak of) - in this case, it was a means of insisting on a boolean all-or-nothing truth-or-lies status for the Bible.
Logically extending the argument, if Jesus is the Bible and Jesus is God (as well as the Word of God), then the Bible is God… hmmm.
I ran into this very situation in another group. Orthodox Christians can get nervous over calling Scripture “The Word of God”, since we often refer to Christ as “The Word of God”. Thus, to call Scripture this can sound like somebody is calling it God. But if Scripture is God, then does that mean that God can be burnt?
Even if one tries the hair-splitting of calling Christ the “Word Incarnate” and Scripture the “Written Word”, that still verges upon claiming that Scripture is God. I prefer “words from God”, myself.
In my experience it’s not that widespread – except for the more extremely fundamentalist groups, and even then the usual tendency is to say you cannot possibly believe in Jesus w/o absolute biblical literalism.
BTW, for reference purposes, the prime source for Christ being the Word Incarnate – the Logos – is the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…”
As a bit of a curiosity, in the best known Spanish version of the Bible (contemporaneous with the KJV), “word” was translated poetically into the Latin cognate “verbo”, good enough then, but these days it reads as “the Verb became flesh and dwelt among us”. So we get to have a literal action-oriented Savior, which is cool.