PastorPete: I was trying to find that other thread you referred to (in Re: the gospel of Thomas and the Canon - The Canon of the Bible). Only to add that Jesus and ‘word of God’ cannot be identified with each other; in the OT ‘the word’ is the spoken word by which the world was created, the torah, or the prophetic word of the prophets; in the NT it is the proclaimed ‘word of faith’ or the ‘word of Christ’ - Romans 10:8, 10:17; it is also ‘the word of their testimony’ by which the saints overcame the accuser - Revelation 12:11.

Barth’s argument that there is a distinction between the written and the revealed word of God always seemed to me to raise a question about the bible’s authority, and to open up a gap between the bible as authoritative in itself, and authoritative when illuminated by the Spirit. (What about 2 Timothy 3:16 - "all scripture is God-breathed/inspired by God" - and therefore, presumably, in some sense ‘revelation’, and also authoritative!).

Maybe it becomes something of a semantical argument when pursued at this level. But the ‘telescope’ idea of scripture seemed, for this reason, to contain some flaws for me.

I like the way in which Tom Wright reframed the whole ‘authority’ argument around a narrative understanding of the bible. Instead of the tension between the bible’s ‘literal’ (word by word) authority or its ‘inspired’ (revelatory) authority, he proposes a narrative authority. He offers a model of the bible as being like a five act play - Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Church. The final act (like Acts) is incomplete, although we know something about the conclusion of the play, and a great deal about where it was tending, in view of the previous four acts, and the parts of act five available to us. The bible’s ‘authority’ over us is therefore to do with us writing our own role into the missing material in the light of all the material available elsewhere, in order to propel the drama to its prescribed conclusion.

This approach to the bible (from The New Testament and the People of God - pp140-143) avoids the ‘bibliolatrous’, and very static tendencies which you rightly criticise, but it does uphold the bible’s authority, and more importantly leads to an active response (perhaps unlike the telescope metaphor).