The word of God or the word of man:
Many people have some sort of opinion of the Bible, good of bad. It is often described as "The Word of God", but there are two ways to look at the Bible. "It is the word of God, given by God", of "It is the word about God, written by believers". Many people, including a lot of theologians, believe the latter. Both ideas, and the conclusions about them, are set out below. The Christadelphians believe the views set out in the left column.
| The Bible is the Word of God | The Bible is the word about God |
|---|---|
| The Bible is God's revelation to mankind. | The Bible is the result of mankind's search for God. |
| God inspired people to write, that is to say, they wrote what God put in their minds; not as robots, but as men inspired. | People wrote on the basis of their own culture, so that although they often had a very strong faith, they were still a product of their own era. |
| Although the Bible was written by many different people, God himself is the actual author, and it is one story. | Bible texts are often the product of various stories being put together to form a whole. |
| The Bible is reliable, though we should keep questioning and studying it. | Parts of the Bible were written much later than the writers would have us believe. |
| Apparent contradictions (excluding translation and copying mistakes) are often a consequence of our not having a complete knowledge of the background, or because we just don't read it properly. | Apparent contradictions arise from the fact that there are various writers, or from the fact that the story had various sources. |
| The Bible is a unity; the message is the same at the beginning as at the end. | The Bible shows a development in thoughts and ideas about God. |
| God has revealed to us only that which is necessary for our salvation. | There are many mysteries which we will never understand. And a lot is missing that we have to think up for ourselves. |
| Everything we need to know is in the Bible. | There are also useful things to be found outside the Bible. |
| The Bible is complete. | There are also non-Bible traditions which we should not ignore. |
| Each part of the Bible is of value, although some parts are definitely more difficult than others. Only the whole Bible gives us God's complete revelation. | The Bible is a coincidental collection of writings, from which you take that which you find useful. A study of the whole book is not necessary. |
| Foretelling future occurrences in the minutest detail is no problem for God. Such passages of Scripture give us a guarantee that they really are a message from God himself. | Foretelling the future is simply not possible for human beings. Of course, people can have general expectations for the future. So-called "predictions" can only have been added later under the name of the original writer. |
| God also foretold our times and therefore we must not scrap bits of the Bible as we see fit. | We live in completely different times now. Large parts of the Bible no longer apply to us. |
| The principles in the Bible apply to all eras. We must try to understand the book as it is written. | The book is a culture-bound reflection of its own time. We first have to "translate it to our times". |