The Unity and Diversity of Scripture

One of the glorious characteristics of God is the consistency with which He acts. This is true in relation to the attributes of His person. God is always faithful to His own character; His every action bears the stamp of His righteousness, mercy, and love. But His actions are also marked by what we might call a consistent style. Just as we might admire the characteristic brushstroke of a talented artist or the distinctive sentence structure of our favourite author, so in God’s creative works, we can identify recurring motifs. This should not surprise us. Human creativity is a consequence of our creation in the image of God, and the greater artist is no more likely to work with random inconsistency than the lesser.

One of the motifs of God’s work is His delight in unity through diversity. To most of mankind, this is counter-intuitive; what passes for unity in human things is more commonly uniformity and uniformity cannot encompass diversity. This has become increasingly – and depressingly – clear in recent conversations about diversity. Even as increased emphasis is placed on diversity, the range of acceptable opinions about diversity has become increasingly narrow and demands for uniformity have become ever more strident. God, by contrast, works by better means to higher ends. He is interested not in a monotonous uniformity, but in a vital unity that thrives because – and not in spite – of diversity.

This characteristic is evident in creation. At the macro level, systems of unimaginable complexity, and at a bewildering array of scales, operate together in one harmonious whole, and at the micro level of humanity, male and female provide each other with the perfect and completing complement. We see it in the church. It is not incidental that Paul follows Ephesians chapter 4’s great paean to Christian unity with a description of diversity seen in the distribution, operation, and contribution of gift. And Ephesians’ picture of the church, the body of Christ, is echoed at a local level in 1 Corinthians, most clearly of all in the juxtaposition of chapter 12 verses 27 and 28, ‘Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers’. And it is seen in the canon, in the Bible’s blend of unity and diversity, its almost endless variety and its consistent and coherent testimony.

Both the unity and the diversity of scripture are recognized in the opening verse of Hebrews, ‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets’. ‘Sundry times and divers manners’, more prosaically rendered by modern translations as ‘at many times and in many ways’ captures with great economy the diversity of scripture. ‘Sundry times’ reminds us of the enormous chronological scale of scripture. While the precise dating of the earliest portions of scripture is impossible, even a conservative estimate would involve millennia, rather than centuries. God’s word was written down in the age of the Pharaohs, and the Persians, in the days of judges, kings, and Caesars, during the ministries of prophets, priests, and apostles. Revelation did not arrive in a smooth uniform flow; sometimes it came as a torrent, sometimes as a trickle, and sometimes not at all. At sundry times, God spoke.

He spoke ‘in divers manners’. These different ways likely embrace both method and mode. We grasp only a little of the former – it is difficult for us to understand fully what it meant to be ‘moved by the Holy Ghost’, 2 Pet. 1. 21. We are more readily able to appreciate the latter, for it would be a dull reader of scripture who could fail to appreciate that its sixty-six books encompass an enormous range of genres and styles. Reading scripture exposes us to narrative, poetry, biography, history, and apocalyptic. And each of the categories of genre contains myriad variations between and even within individual books. Think, for example, of the poetry of Job, where each character has his own voice, and where the quality of the poetry varies, from Job’s friends to Job himself, and finally to the sublime strains of divine speech. Or of the book of Psalms, which runs the gamut of human emotion and spiritual experience. Or of the crisp efficiency of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, with their bureaucratic borrowings, the pastoral simplicity of Ruth, the complex characterization of Moses or David or Paul. In divers manners, it all came, inspired by a God who loves variety and is able to address the tastes and temperaments of all sorts of personalities, tempered together so as to address every part of our personality, ministering to our minds, our hearts, and our souls.

‘At sundry times and in divers manners’ God spoke. And He spoke ‘by [through] the prophets’. Somewhere around forty of these ‘holy men of God’, 2 Pet. 1. 21, were used. They were all men, and they were all holy, but beyond those important commonalities, they, too, were marked by enormous diversity. Some were young, some old (and some wrote when they were young and when they were old). Some were well educated, others were not. Some came from elite backgrounds, others had humble origins. Like any group of forty men would be, they were marked by a variety of personality and profession. Their number encompassed shepherds and civil servants, fishermen and kings, priests and doctors. Some are well-known, others unknown. Though mostly Jewish, they were not exclusively so. And they did not all write in the same language.

In short, no matter what way we look at it, scripture is marked by diversity, by a complexity that no book of merely human origin can equal. And it is a book, for though the Bible is made up of sixty-six books, it is not just a set of covers enclosing some sort of jumbled anthology of ancient writings. It is a whole, a coherent and unified book. That unity is organic, not manufactured, for the Bible is united in having one source and in telling one great story.

That the patchwork of revelation has a single source is emphasized by the writer to the Hebrews. It is ‘God’, literally ‘the God’ who has spoken unto the fathers by the prophets. This emphasis continues throughout the Epistle: the human writers of scripture are never identified, and quotations from scripture are attributed to God directly. The writer also emphasizes the fact that scripture tells a single story. He gives us a masterclass in the understanding of Old Testament scripture. Although God has now spoken in Son, and although the old covenant has been replaced with the new, Old Testament revelation remains relevant for believers in this age. After all, as the juxtaposition of Hebrews chapters 11 and 12 makes clear, we are part of the same story as those worthies who lived by faith in previous generations.

Peter agrees. In his second Epistle, he reminds us ‘that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation’, 1. 20. This is a difficult expression to pin down. It does not mean, as some have thought (and taught) that scripture cannot be understood by individuals apart from a ‘magisterium’ of the teaching of a particular church or religion. It could refer to the fact that prophets did not communicate scripture on their own initiative – that is precisely the point that Peter makes in the following verse (‘the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man’). It is difficult, however, to see why Peter would make the same point twice. The third possibility is that Peter is saying that no passage of scripture should be understood in isolation from the rest of scripture. Verse 21 then gives the reason why this is so – scripture must be understood as a whole, because it is a whole. It is not a collection of human utterances, written down on human initiative. Rather, it is ‘the prophetic word made surer’, 1. 19 JND. Prophetic here means ‘oracular’, originating with God, and Peter reiterates the prophetic nature of scripture in verses 20 and 21. Scripture, though written down by ‘holy men of God’, 1. 21, is the product of a singular directing intellect – it comes from God.

Peter’s second Epistle stresses that scripture has a single source. The first chapter of 1 Peter emphasizes that it tells a single story, and that even those who wrote it down only imperfectly understood, ‘Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow’, 1 Pet. 1. 10, 11. The singular story of scripture, with all its different strands and sub-plots, has a singular subject, for it all speaks of Christ. At times it speaks of His sufferings, at others of His glory, but it is all about Him.

An appreciation of the unity and diversity of scripture will inevitably impact our engagement with it. Reading the Bible with a consciousness of its diversity will mean approaching each book of scripture with an alertness to its genre, style, and the context in which it was originally written. This will keep us from approaching each book in the same way, and preserve us from, for example, reading Old Testament narrative in the same way as we read New Testament Epistles, or poetry in the same way as history, argument in the same way as apocalyptic. If we treat scripture as a homogeneous text we risk frustrating the purposes for which God revealed Himself in such variety in the first place.

But we should read scripture too with an eye to its unity. At its most basic, that will mean reading all of it. We all have our favourite parts of scripture, but we impoverish ourselves if we return repeatedly to the same sections and ignore the rest. In reading the whole of scripture, we should keep before us the big picture of the Bible and the unfolding of progressive revelation. Seeing where each book slots into the canon, and grasping the contribution that each makes to the Bible’s overall story will unlock scripture for us. A grasp of the big frameworks of scripture will be a real help here; time spent in understanding the covenants and dispensations of scripture will pay rich dividends in our understanding of the book. As well as these frameworks, we should also endeavour to grasp the big themes of scripture, the arcs that run through the whole canon. God has great programmes in history: of redemption, residence, and rule. These great themes are the girders of the Bible, and we can only really grasp them when we grasp the unity of scripture.

The Bible is a book like no other, for it comes to us from the hand of God and bears the stamp of His divine style. As we read it, let our desire be that so beautifully expressed by George Herbert (original spelling retained):

Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine, And the configurations of their glorie! Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine, But all the constellations of the storie.