“Spirit-moved men wrote God-breathed words that are divinely authoritative for Christian faith and practice.”
My interactions with the Bible mostly occur “after” the subjects of this book. I’m less concerned with proving it should be used for Christian doctrine and more concerned with actually using it to sharpen my own understanding. But the proving is important work, of course, and it’s crucial that Christian scholars are doing that, even if it’s a backburner subject for most Christians. That being said, we all have our moments of doubt, and I came to have misgivings about the doctrine of sola scriptura. From God to Us was recommended as a potential resource to answer some of my questions. The book doesn’t fully address many of my concerns but provides an important function nonetheless.
Norman Geisler was an extremely prolific writer, making scholarly contributions to the fields of apologetics, systematic theology, ethics, history of philosophy—the list goes on. In the 1960s he wrote A General Introduction to the Bible, a whopper of a book that dwarves it’s offshoot, From God to Us. The latter, which is the subject of this review, is a streamlined version of the older book, and the only thing I’ve ever read from Geisler. It is presented as a sort of abridged version of A General Introduction, and functions as a casual introduction to the subject. It doesn’t read like either a textbook or one of those “history for the masses” type of books, but a sort of casual middle ground. Its table of contents suggests that Geisler, along with co-author William Nix, cast a very wide net, but the volume is slim and moves between its subfields very quickly. The book touches a range of topics, from origin to transmission to compilation to translation to canonization to manuscript discovery to critical analysis to translation.
The lack of depth is not a problem if you want to use it as a reference book—if you agree with everything in these pages, you probably don’t actually think about its contents all that much (e.g. the vast majority of American Christians probably don’t care in which caves which manuscripts were found or what material they were written on); so having it as a go-to for when those questions come up is helpful. But it doesn’t build an impenetrable defense, in my estimation, nor does it seem like that was the intention. It functions well if you’re approaching it from a Protestant Evangelical perspective and just want to fill in the gaps of understanding concerning your own denomination’s beliefs, but someone who is coming to it looking to make a case against the veracity of the Bible will find some holes to exploit (that’s not to say those holes can’t be plugged or haven’t been by other works; it’s just that the authors don’t seem to be overly concerned with doing that here).
The book is divided into four sections, concerning inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation. Each of these terms is first defined clearly, and then it is explained exactly how modern scholars understand these as they relate to the Bible. The first two sections carry the most weight, for me, because they are important for how I function as a Christian. There were a few things in particular that the book was helpful in clarifying. One was the very concept of “inspiration.” Nailing down the definition proves difficult because in our modern language we say that things like love songs or paintings are inspired. But it’s not as if these men were “inspired” by God to write what they did; that’s the wrong way to look at it. But they also didn’t function as automatons who couldn’t control their own bodies as they wrote the books of the Bible. The authors also compare the idea of “inspiration” against those of “revelation” and “illumination,” which biblical scholars consider to be wholly different things. I found this discussion to be beneficial to my understanding.
I also found it helpful when the authors pointed out a thing I knew already, which is that the Bible was written over thousands of years by dozens of different people. This is common knowledge, but the spin that added another layer to my understanding is that many of the authors wrote without knowing that their writings would be compiled with the work of others in the future. That these texts can all be brought into theological and doctrinal alignment is something that is easy to take for granted when talking about The Bible; but considering that single authors struggle to keep story details straight across a string of several books written within years of each other, the amount of internal consistency on display in the Bible is actually quite remarkable. And then to consider that we’re not just talking about a story, but the shaping of a consistent worldview and mode of living, and that it was written across such a span of time within various cultures—kind of a mind-blowing realization. (I’m not sure how much Geisler and Nix really press this—I think some of that may have come from my notes when pondering what I read.)
The latter two sections deal with the transmission—what materials were used, etc.—and translation. I found these to be of limited use. Other than to tuck in the back of my mind the fact that this work is being done, I probably won’t think about it too often.
Like I said, though, the book is not very long, and so there are some clear areas where the defense is not necessarily weak, but just not fleshed out enough. I’ll rattle off a few things that need further study on my part because they are not adequately covered in From God to Us. The authors posit that the New Testament canon was locked down by only considering texts written by the Apostles, which is used to suggest that the Apostolic succession claimed by traditional churches is not valid. I don’t think this argument is strong. (It also doesn’t aid in validating any other claims in the book, so it seems needlessly polemical). I also didn’t find their explanations on the in-out decisions on the Apocrypha to be convincing. At some points they use the fact that a NT book was circulated to be read in churches as a reason to consider it canonical, but simply state and then ignore that several Apocryphal books were used in this way (The Shepherd of Hermas, The Didache). They do the same thing with early church fathers citing books as inspired—some of them considered Apocryphal books to be inspired, but then we are told they incorrectly considered them to be inspired. But wait, you just said that early church fathers citing books as inspired was a criteria for putting them in the canon? But I suppose that none of this is seriously impactful for me—it’s not like I’m not allowed to read the Apocrypha, and the authors do allow that these were considered useful but not authoritative once the canon was officially set. Catholics use some of them for doctrine, but that’s a discussion for another time.
By and large though, From God to Us covers the basics. It provides a lot of evidence and information that point to the Bible as we have it being the complete Word of God as utilized by the earliest Christians. The quibbles about the Apocrypha and the presuppositions of the authors do not diminish what they present. It is a very useful little reference book to have handy. Much of its contents should not be the subject of serious hang-ups for Christians or those considering Christianity, but it helps to know the Bible isn’t just some ancient text that was dug up from a cave after being forgotten for a thousand years or dropped out of the sky into Martin Luther’s lap, but instead has a very well-documented history.