“Others look to religion to provide a clear and all-encompassing explanation of world events, and an easily understood method for dividing out the good guys and the bad. This approach also falls short. As a Christian, admittedly a rather imperfect one, I believe that we all benefit from God’s providence and live under his judgment, and that when properly seen and understood the tangled threads of human history will ultimately reveal the work of a divine hand. But my faith also teaches me that, as C.S. Lewis put it in the Narnia books, Aslan is not a tame lion. Faith in God can help you find the inner strength to face the storms of history with courage and resolve, but the Christian revelation is intended to lead people toward a deeper engagement with the mystery and the wonder of the universe. Those who look for point-by-point guides to a coming apocalypse in the Christian scriptures, or those who think that a simplistic reading of the ethical teachings of Christ eliminates the need for hard political thinking are missing the point. Christianity—and in this it resembles all the great religious traditions—exists to enrich and to complicate rather than to simplify our understanding of the contemporary world.”
The Bible’s story may indeed be considered a metanarrative subsuming all other narratives, or a truth that relativizes all other forms of knowledge. But as metanarrative and final truth, the Bible does not speak directly about everything per se. It rather speaks of everything indirectly, because it speaks of the origin, redemption, and final purpose of all things. Believing what the Bible says about the Bible, in other words, makes it possible to affirm both that the Bible provides a comprehensively true perspective on all things and that the Bible does not explain everything in the world directly. With the Scriptures’ own statements about themselves in view, attitudes toward studying the world – eagerness to exploit secondary ways of knowing – should be opened up rather than shut down. This openness to experiencing the world, in turn, is exactly what a biblical vision of divine creation, with Christ as the active agent, encourages. […]
In [J. I.] Packer’s phrase, “sola scriptura was never meant to imply that what is not mentioned in the Bible is not real, or is unimportant and not worth our attention, or that the history of biblical exegesis and exposition, and of theological construction and confession, over two millennia, need not concern us today, or that we should restrict our interest in God’s world and in the arts, sciences, products, and dreams of our fellow-human beings.” Rather, “The Bible has been given us, not to define for us the realities of the created order, nor to restrain our interests in them, but to enable us to diagnose, understand, appreciate, and handle them as we meet them, so that we may use and enjoy them to the Creator’s praise.”
For a truly biblical view of the Bible, it is important not to treat the Bible as a storehouse of information sufficient in itself for all things but to embrace, rather, the Bible’s own perspective that leads its readers to a God-ordained openness to all things.