Over the past few years I have been a pastor of two small congregations, I’ve taught classes on the Bible for a community college and I’ve served on a team that interviews pastors for ordination. I have had lots of opportunities to think about and refine my thoughts on several issues relating to the Bible, the church and Christianity. Perhaps the area that I’ve changed the most in is how I articulate the authority of Scripture.

As a pastor and teacher, the most common reason for the authority of Scripture that I hear is one rooted in Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, which states: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” I learned this verse while growing up in the church and for a long time rooted my understanding of scriptural authority in it.

I have come to believe, however, that this is a wholly inadequate foundation for the authority the Bible.

There are two main problems with using the 2 Timothy text as proving the authority of Scripture. The first is that the text is found in Scripture; it is self-referential. Which means that for this text in Timothy to be authoritative it requires a prior commitment to the authority of Scripture. The argument boils down to, the Bible is authoritative because the Bible says that it is authoritative. This is circular reasoning. It may work fine for believers (though it probably shouldn’t), but it is a useless argument for anyone who doesn’t already affirm the authority of Scripture.

The second issue is one of interpretation, or more accurately, hermeneutics. It is common in my church background to seek the biblical author’s original meaning as the baseline for interpretation. “It can’t mean now what it didn’t mean then,” is a statement I’ve heard often. If this is our guide to interpretation, then we have to recognize that when Paul was writing this letter to Timothy, he was not considering it (the letter) to be a part of Scripture. He was just writing a letter to an apprentice. In fact, there is a good case to be made that when Paul referred to Scripture he was talking about strictly the Old Testament. He was a Jewish Pharisee after all. The gospels hadn’t even all been written down yet. Paul was likely familiar with the gospel stories, but these he would have referred to as the good news of Jesus Christ, not as Scripture. If a text cannot mean now what it didn’t mean then, then Paul’s letter to Timothy cannot be used to demonstrate the authority of the Bible as we now have it, which did not reach its official and final form until centuries after Paul died. In fact, following this rule of interpretation we would have to limit the “God-breathed-ness” of the biblical text only to the parts that Paul considered Scripture when he wrote the letter. Again, this would likely only be the Old Testament.

A third issue arises from using the Bible to prove the authority of the Bible. As a circular argument it has no foundation. Thus it must become its own foundation. And it doesn’t take too many cycles of this circle before the Bible itself becomes something of a magical talisman, or a book of spells. Before long the Bible even becomes the center of the Christian faith. It becomes a sacred text that dropped from heaven just as we find it today. We lose sight of the long process of compilation and vetting that went into the formation of the Bible. We lose sight of the fact that we are reading a translation of an ancient language into a modern one. Before long we begin to refer to the Bible with divine and semi-divine attributes: inerrant, infallible, unchanging. We begin to revere and worship the Bible itself. It becomes our god.

There is a better way.

And once again, C.S. Lewis offers us a helpful correction.

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him.

How could we have missed that? It is all over the New Testament. Jesus is the Word of God, not the Bible. Jesus is the risen King, the Ruler of the cosmos, the Alpha and the Omega, the full en-flesh-ment of God on earth. Jesus is the absolute authority. The Bible’s authority is derivative. It is authoritative in the ways that it points us to and reveals Jesus the King. That’s it.

Recognizing this frees us from endless debates about inerrancy or infallibility, because the Bible is not divine. Recognizing this focuses our reading and application of Scripture through its primary subject, Jesus the King. Recognizing this reorients us away from studying a text, and towards developing a relationship, both with Jesus and with the world he came to save.