"I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask insistently and with some humility for us to receive the answer from it." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from a letter to Rudiger Schleicher.
During the Reformation and through subsequent centuries, the church was divided about the nature of the sacraments--transubstantiation, consubstantiation, real presence, memorial, and how many sacraments are sacraments. These debates over questions of "what is it?" tore the churches apart. Of course, the debates weren't just about the sacraments, but also about power and who yielded sacramental power. One of the things I love best about my Wesleyan theological heritage is that it shifted the conversation about sacraments from "What is it?" to "What is it doing?" Wesleyanism tends to leave the nature of sacrament to mystery ("musterion") and emphasize that the Trinitarian God is present and working in and through the sacrament. This emphasis is empowering, humbling, and uniting.
The divisive conversation about "What it is" has shifted since the Enlightenment to the question of the nature of Scripture. The fight over the nature of the Bible is even more entrenched because it has even more to do with power. As the authority of the institutional church declined and as human beings increasingly looked to science and observation as a tool to know what we know, scripture was given a new role as a sort of legal authority on the nature of all things. It began to be read as a tool to say "See, the way I think things should be is the way they are because God said so because look here he said exactly what I say in his book and so you have to just swallow it or be against God." And so, now we have debates about the authority of the Bible, inerrancy, infallibility, etc.
What is the Bible for? What does it do? Why did God give it to us? How does it function in our living? Those are better questions. They are uniting questions. They are questions that lead us to listen to God through scripture humbly, to be taught rather than to look for tools to impose our views and ways upon others.
In my experience, I have encountered people with extremely varied views on the nature of the scriptures who humbly yield to the voice of God through it and find a meeting place for a living relationship with God when they read it with open heart. I have also encountered people with all kinds of views of the Bible who use it as a tool to impose their ways and ideas upon others and who never seem to humbly yield before God and seek answers for which they honestly don't know the answers as they listen to God through the Bible.
