Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 05:4 (Fall 1996)
Article: Rightly Applying the Word of Truth: The Bible and the Moral Life
Author: John Bolt

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RAR 5:4 (Fall 1996) p. 53

Rightly Applying the Word of Truth: The Bible and the Moral Life

John Bolt

The evangelical marketplace makes available to religious consumers bumper stickers and T-shirts that boldly proclaim the pious slogan, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” With slight modification that could also serve as a motto for an evangelical understanding of the relation between Holy Scripture and the moral life: “God commands it, I must do it, and that settles it.” The life of Christian discipleship is thus seen as a matter of obedience to revealed divine law. In the words of Carl F. H. Henry, “God has been pleased to reveal His will ... and has done so in express commands, given to chosen men through the medium of human language, and available to us as the Word of God in written form.” Stated in other words: “What God has revealed in the inspired Scriptures defines the content of His will.”1

In recent years a body of literature has arisen, also among evangelicals, that is highly resistant to thinking of the Bible in any sense as law or as a “rule-book.” Allen Verhey’s perspective on New Testament ethics is characteristic of this viewpoint. “The New Testament,” he contends, “does not come to us as a timeless moral code dropped from heaven; to treat it and to inquire of it as though it were would be inappropriate.”2 At the same time Verhey does not find neo-orthodoxy’s solution, in which “the task of a theological ethic ... is not to systematize and republish the content of Scripture, but to facilitate a new revelation, a new encounter, a concrete command of God in that moment,” adequate either. His suggestion is to construe “God’s relationship to Scripture and to the Christian community through Scripture ... as that of sanctifier.”

In and through these writings God continues to call and empower people to live with integrity and truthfulness in a

RAR 5:4 (Fall 1996) p. 54

different time and place, facing concrete questions. He continues to be sanctifier in His relationship to the church through these human words. What one understands when one understands the New Testament, then, is not a systematic set of doctrines or rules or a systematically indeterminate “word of God,” but the “power of God to renew life, to transform identities, to create for Himself a people and a world for His own possessing and for their flourishing.”3

According to Verhey, use of Scripture in moral argument is authorized when and only when such use “is coherent with the message that God has already ma...

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