Testing Scripture, by John Polkinghorne

Chapter Two

1. “How can we square this picture of a vengeful God with the one given us by Jesus, who tells us to love our enemies? The simple answer is that we cannot. I believe that response to this dilemma demands the recognition that the record of revelation contained in Scripture is one of a developing understanding of the divine will and nature, continuously growing over time but never complete, and quite primitive in its earliest stages. Only slowly and falteringly could progress be made in Israel towards gaining a fuller comprehension of the reality of God.”

- How does Polkinghorne’s explanation provide a sensible description of scripture’s eventual development?

2. “Clearly very great development had taken place in between Joshua and Second Isaiah, and who can doubt that it had resulted from a deeper and truer understanding of God and God’s ways? Accepting this enables us to acknowledge the crudities and atrocities present in early Scripture without being driven to discard belief in the spiritual value of the Bible. We can recognize within it an unfolding process of insight and understanding as God’s nature was progressively revealed.”

- How does this development mirror our personal growth in faith?

3. “This developmental perspective on Scripture also helps to explain many of the apparent contradictions present in its pages. Often passages in the canonical text, presented as if they were a unity, have in fact been formed by intermingling material drawn from a variety of sources, composed at different times and, therefore, reflecting different stages of development. In Israel there was a continual reworking of key narratives, a task which extended over centuries. The process of identifying and dating the sources involved is a matter of scholarly activity and debate.

- How does this apply to the creation accounts in Genesis 1 & 2?

4. “The Old Testament contains material spanning perhaps a thousand years, but the New Testament is much more temporally compact. I believe that all, or almost all, of its books were written before the end of the first century. Probably the earliest Christian writing available to us is Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, composed about the year 50. (The crucifixion was in either 30 or 33.) There would have been a preceding period of oral transmission in a culture where this skill was commonly and carefully exercised, and possibly there were some early written sources now lost to us.”

- How are the Old and New Testaments similar and dissimilar?

5. “It is significant that the Church preserved the multiple perspectives offered by the four Gospels, rather than attempting a conflated harmonization. It was soon recognized that the Gospel of John had a different character from the other three.”

- How do you understand the arrangement of the synoptic gospels (first three gospels) compared to John’s gospel?

6. “Perhaps the strangest book of the New Testament is the Revelation of John. In fact, because of this it had some difficulty in gaining a place in the canon. Revelation illustrates the mixed character of Scripture as hope and horror mingle in its pages. There are deeply moving pictures of the worship of heaven (ch. 4 etc.). There is a profoundly hopeful conclusion (21.1–22.7). But there are also terrifyingly brutal descriptions of divinely inflicted punishment (the sequences of seals, trumpets and plagues in chapters 6–10 and 16), presented as manifestations of the wrath of God. The failure of subsequent generations to recognize that these apocalyptic images of divine vengeance arose in the particular context of a time of intense persecution, and that they should be evaluated as human responses to that situation rather than as unalterable expressions of the timeless divine will, has had a baleful influence on much subsequent Christian thinking. No book of the New Testament has been more unfortunate in its interpretation and influence than Revelation.”

- Describe your experience with reading Revelation. 

7. “The unfolding process of developing theological understanding that we find in the Bible has continued beyond the confines of Scripture itself. The fundamental experiences and insights of the New Testament period led eventually to the Christological and Trinitarian conclusions of the Church Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. The Fathers had sought to draw the boundaries within which they believed orthodox Christian thinking needed to be contained if it were to be a true witness, but there has remained a need for further exploration and reflection. Those who believe in the continuing work of the Holy Spirit (John 16.13) will not find this surprising. The role of development, within Scripture and after it, depends upon the fact that revelational disclosure is primarily personal rather than propositional, living and not petrified.”

- How is the Holy Spirit continuing this “revelational disclosure” through the Church today? 

- How do you understand your role?