Mark Harris

The Word of Ward: Keith Ward, The Word of God? The Bible after modern scholarship, (London: SPCK, 2010. £9.99. pp. 160. ISBN: 978-0-281-06211-9)

This book is closely related to Keith Ward’s 2004 book, What the Bible Really Teaches: A challenge for fundamentalists. There, Ward took on the conservative evangelical approach to the Bible and disputed its interpretation of key passages and Christian doctrines. In the present volume, Ward presents a wider perspective. While the conservative approach is still in his sights, his aim is to put forward the findings of modern biblical scholarship and then to reconstruct his own views of some of the main Christian doctrines. Along the way, Ward discusses issues such as biblical inspiration, the historicity of biblical miracles, and how Christians should approach the Old Testament and its moral guidance. A large part of the book is devoted to the role of metaphor in the Bible, and how that might affect our understanding of the classic themes of creation, incarnation, atonement and salvation. Finally, Ward finishes with an extensive discussion of the theme of development in the Bible, especially development in ideas of God’s being, of divine justice and of the afterlife. This reinforces his key point, that the Bible is not so much a single, unified document but a diverse anthology which witnesses to evolving revelations of God, and which culminates in the story of Jesus. Jesus therefore becomes the definitive divine revelation, the yardstick against which all other ethical and doctrinal claims of the Bible can be tested, and even rejected if necessary (p. 59). Despite his title, Ward’s actual engagement with modern biblical scholarship is rather minimal. True, he has taken to heart the insistence of modern scholarship that the Bible is a diverse and evolving text, and that a great deal of it is metaphorical in nature, but he gives little sense of the subtleties and debates standing behind these points alone. And neither does he present the methodologies, aims and objectives of biblical scholarship, nor its attendant difficulties. Furthermore, Ward makes no mention of the big areas of debate in recent decades, some of which impact directly the issues discussed in this book. Perhaps the most significant of these (in light of Ward’s Christological epistemology) is the highlycontroverted nature of the life and teachings of the historical Jesus. But, apart from a brief reference to Albert Schweitzer’s and von Harnack’s approaches to the kingdom sayings (p. 105), Ward reveals little awareness of this. One gets the impression that, despite Ward’s insistence that the opinions of biblical scholars ‘must be taken seriously’ (p. 3), they are not so very important in the scheme of things. Despite my misgivings about Ward’s presentation of biblical scholarship, the overall view of the Bible which he develops is helpful, especially with regards to some of its more ‘difficult’ texts of violence and judgement. I also found his philosophical approach, when applied to the nature of God and the afterlife, to be refreshing, going beyond most conventional biblical scholarship on these themes. This book would be particularly useful in reflection or discussion groups, and many of the chapters are the ideal length to form the material for sessions on key topics.