What is Sacred Text?

Most religions recognize some document(s) or symbols as sacred or holy:  the TaNaKh for the Jews (or what we Christians know as the Hebrew Bible); the Koran for the Muslims; the Buddhist Tripitaka and Sutras; the Tibetan Book of the Dead; the Hindu Veda; and, of course, the Christian Bible are a few examples.  I will focus this blog on the Christian Cannon but I believe the discussion is applicable to any sacred text.

The question comes to me every now and then as to the nature of the scriptures: are they inspired? Infallible? Inerrant? These questions tend to be somewhat vague in that the questioner really doesn’t have a good handle on what they’re asking.  More often than not they’ve been challenged by someone and they’re trying to figure out how to deal with it.  Now a days the Muslim must deal with questions about the command to kill infidels and martyrdom for 72 virgins.  So clearly Christendom is not alone in its struggle to deal with its own texts.

To understand this battle regarding the nature of scripture it’s necessary to understand that this is a relatively new issue.  Up until the mid to late 1700’s the questions of infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible would not even have been understood.  In order to understand how this came to be an issue it’s necessary to delve into a little history.  In the 1500’s & 1600’s an event occurred known as the Reformation.  Martin Luther and others broke from the Roman Catholic Church because in their opinion Christendom was failing to live up to Biblical principles.  They saw the core issue being caused by focus on the authority of the church rather than the authority of the Bible.  The Protestant movement established a principle known as “Sola Scriptorium” (Scripture Only).  They believed that if the church/state was governed by scripture alone in matters of faith that soon all of Christendom would be living good Christian lives.

Unfortunately what actually occurred was decades of wars in which each confession attempted to enforce their interpretation of the scriptures on each other that continued until over a million people had died and the resources of Western Europe were exhausted.  We now enter the 1700’s, the age of science, enlightenment and reason.  Theologians completely disenchanted with solo scriptoria jump on the “reason” band wagon.  Scientific enquiry and reason is the way to God!  This forces the conservatives among the Protestants to develop a defense of Sola Scriptoria and so first was the loud proclamation of the infallibility of scripture and then later, as they become more extreme in their defense, the doctrine of inerrancy (1881) was born.

Now none of this is to indicate that sacred texts are not divinely revealed, infallible and/or inerrant.  We haven’t gotten to that point in the discussion yet.  And, the gentlemen responsible for the doctrine of inerrancy, Drs. Warfield and Hodge were extremely distinguished Theologians.  And, those who defend the doctrine would argue that it didn’t exist before because it wasn’t needed before.   But an important part of the answer is the genesis of the questions.   In my next Blog I will explore how the writers of the text, their early readers and those who canonized the text thought about them.  How did they become sacred?

“The Church is like a public swimming pool, all the noise is at the shallow end”