What's a Lutheran? (4) The Bible as Authoritative Source and Norm
Lutherans confess the Bible – the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments – as “the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith, and life.” Primarily this means that Lutherans do not recognize any other source or norm as standing above or apart from the Scriptures – not the teachings of Martin Luther or any other church leader, past or present.
God continues to speak to us through the Word which, as explained in the last installment, as Law and Gospel. God does not speak through the Word in other modes, such as science or history, and so we readily accept that the Bible is not the final word on those types of questions. What the Scriptures reliably do is to give us Christ – to communicate God’s self to us, as revealed in Jesus.
Where a literal reading of the Bible appears to contradict science, history, or the Gospel itself, this is a sign that we need to struggle to read the text differently, in the light of Christ and the gospel, until we can hear what God is trying to say to us. It was Luther’s experience that if we pay close attention to what the text of Scripture actually says, and not simply assume it says what we have always been told that it says, that we consistently discover it is a much better and more grace-filled Word than we expected. And this is our experience as well.
Given that Martin Luther’s often intemperate and unfairly harsh remarks on Judaism were used to justify the horrors of the Nazi holocaust, contemporary Lutherans are particularly quick to insist that the Hebrew Scriptures are not Law which is inferior to the Gospel of the New Testament, but that the Old and New Testaments both contain gospel as well as law. We reject any suggestion that God’s revelation to the Jewish people has been superseded by Christ; rather, Christ fulfills what the Hebrew Scriptures have always been about.
We also recognize that the Bible was written in a very different time and culture than our own and that careful discernment is needed to apply it to our contemporary world. We have come to understand that texts which seem to endorse slavery or genocide, or seem to condemn LGBTQ people, should be interpreted in ways that reflect the gospel of God’s love and welcome for all people without exception.