When
Christians meet with Jews and Muslims and want to emphasise their common
heritage, the expression “Abrahamic faiths” is often used. This is an accurate
description historically, and it also helps us to remember that our differences
of belief are in a sense disagreements within the family.
An
expression that is not so helpful is “people of the book”, the description given
to Jews and Christians in the Qur’an and often used by Muslims today. It is
often hard for us to explain that this does not adequately describe the
relationship of Christians to their Bible. It is not true that “just as” Jews
have the Tanakh, Muslims the Qur’an, Sikhs the Guru Granth and so on, “so”
Christians have the Bible. Christians do not see it in quite this way. Some
sects on the fringe of Christianity, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, base their whole
system of belief on the Bible as God-given data, and there are perhaps some
extreme fundamentalists we can rightly regard as more biblical than Christian.
However, even the most conservative of Christian Bible-believers would say that see the heart
of their faith and experience as a living relationship with Jesus Christ: the Bible is not the ultimate object of their faith, it is the vehicle that conveys Christ to them. The Christian faith is
faith not in a Book but in a Person. Christians do not lose sight
of the New Testament statement (John 1:14) that the Word of God is Jesus.
“People of
the Book” is thus not a good description of Christians. But perhaps “people of
the Word” is nearer the mark. Many people call the Bible “the Word”, but the
two expressions are not the same. A book, however sacred, is an inanimate
object that remains unchanged. It can be interpreted and discussed, but you cannot
ask it what it means and get a direct answer. A word is the utterance of a
living person at a particular moment in time. It speaks to the present
situation.
A word is
not necessarily just a piece of information. It often addresses us at an
emotional level: comforting, cheering, encouraging or challenging, making us
laugh or cry. A word can be an action: sealing an agreement, making a
promise, opening a new relationship or restoring a broken one.
The story of
the Jewish and Christian faiths is one of hearing the word of God. In the
Hebrew Scriptures a prophecy is often introduced by “the word of the LORD came to …”. The
prophets had no canonical Scripture to study and interpret: they believed God had spoken to them directly. Sometimes they contradicted each other: there were “true
prophets” and “false prophets”. The only reliable definition of true prophets
was that their prophecies turned out to be right, but there was no infallible
way of knowing at the time which was
true and which was false. Sometimes the prophets themselves argued with God and
doubted their own call, or the words they felt God wanted them to say. Just as
in human relationships, so in relationship with God, a word cannot convey
absolute certainty: it can only be taken in trust, and in the context of a relationship.
“Word” can sometimes mean promise, as when we
say “I give you my word”. When the preacher in Isaiah 40:8 said, “the grass withers, the flower fades; but
the word of our God will stand for ever”, he was not referring to
Scripture, but to God’s promise to restore Jerusalem. He was quite probably referring
specifically to the prophecies of the original Isaiah.
In the New
Testament, when we read (Acts 6:7) that “the
word of God continued to spread” it doesn’t mean that the apostles went
around distributing Bibles! The “word of God” was the message about Jesus. The
expression is sometimes still used today, as when a preacher is introduced with
words like “so-and-so will now bring us the word”.
No,
Christians are not “people of the book”. We are something much more dynamic, more immediate and more challenging: we are “people of the word”.
