THE WORD OF GOD?
The Bible after modern scholarship
By Keith Ward. SPCK. 152 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-0-281-06211-9
Debates about the Bible never seem to go away. This short book, written for a popular audience, attacks the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture.
It comes from the pen of the retired Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. He says some useful things — he reminds us, for example, that there is metaphor in the Bible and warns us of the dangers of taking non-literal passages literally. But much of the book is given over to his main thesis, that, in the light of modern scholarship, we cannot trust the accuracy of the Bible narrative and that the Scriptures are not an infallible revelation from God. Instead, they are a collection of important human writings about God and religion, guided, indeed, by the Spirit and, in that sense, divine revelation, but brought to us through the corruptions and shortcomings of their human authors.
