When discussing religion with people of different beliefs, miscommunication and even misunderstanding can occur, particularly when a single term is used with different meanings. For example, to a Muslim, “monotheism” means that God is absolutely unique, with no partners, while, to mainstream Christians, the Trinity is monotheistic.
A fundamental idea for many religions is the authenticity and authority of scripture. But what is scripture? And more importantly, why is it scripture? For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the standard definition is found in Doctrine and Covenants 68:4: “And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.” In other words, scripture is defined by its source — the will, mind and word of God. Ancient Hebrews would have agreed, usually preceding prophetic pronouncements with the phrase “the word of the Lord” (debar YHWH).
Somewhat paradoxically, scripture often began as spoken words, not written texts. Confucius’ “Analects,” the Quran, the Hindu “Rig Veda,” Homer’s “Iliad” and Zarathustra’s “Gathas” were all transmitted as oral scripture for centuries. Only when revelations were written down and collected did they become scripture in the literal sense. By New Testament times, Jews had developed an authoritative collection of sacred books they called the “writings” (“graphe” in Greek, “scriptura” in Latin), a term found throughout the New Testament and generally translated as “scripture.”
Religions and denominations are often defined in part by what books they accept as scripture. Christians, for example, are distinguished from Jews by their acceptance of the New Testament. Muslims can be defined essentially as those who accept the Quran as God’s word. And problems focused on scripture can also occur within a religious faith. Many Protestants, for instance, define themselves in part by accepting “sola scriptura” — only scripture — as authoritative.
Liberals and conservatives within a denomination often split over their understanding of scripture. For conservatives, “scripture” refers to revelations that are authoritative because they were revealed from God. Some liberals, on the other hand, use the term “scripture” to refer to books that a religious community accepts as canonical; for them, scripture is what’s written and accepted as authoritative by humans.
The perspective proposed by such liberals — and the one that, for obvious reasons, is commonly adopted in academic studies of religion — is that scriptures are texts that individuals or communities have decided to regard as scriptural. Scripture derives its importance from the status believers bestow upon it. The Bhagavad-Gita is genuine scripture in this sense because Hindus believe it to be scripture, and the Quran is scripture because Muslims regard it as such. So, too, with the Dao De Ching and, for that matter, the Bible.
The more humanly pressing question, however, is whether that’s “all” scripture, or any particular scripture, is. Believing the Quran to be a collection of Muhammad’s musings is very different from believing it to be God’s eternal word. And this question is independent of anybody’s belief about it.
In conversation, a liberal friend once defined a “prophet” as “someone who stands in a certain relationship to his community.” But, for orthodox believers, a prophet stands in a particular relationship to God, whether or not any community follows him.
Conservatives agree that scripture is written and selected by humans, but, beyond this, they insist that a text is scripture because it’s divinely revealed. For conservatives, scripture would remain scripture even if nobody regarded it as such because scripture is defined by God, not by individuals or communities.
Unfortunately, the liberal perspective tends to sideline the view that scripture is scripture because of something inherent in its nature and essence, not because of our individual or communal response to it. Scripture, to those who believe in it, is a manifestation of God to humans that humans can either accept or reject. But human rejection of scripture doesn’t change its scriptural nature. That comes from God.
Scripture is scripture whether we believe it or not. This thus creates a potential misunderstanding: a religious liberal can affirm “belief” in scripture, but that may sometimes signify only recognition of the human status of certain texts — and perhaps even the canonical texts of the community to which that person nominally belongs. It may or may not imply that such scripture is divinely authoritative, authentic or historical.
Daniel Peterson founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.