What Is Scripture?

This is the first in a series of blogs I would like to offer on the question, "What is Scripture?" In each blog, I plan to summarize and briefly comment on how this question is answered by one of a number different authors from various traditions. The blog is inspired by students in my current graduate course on the same topic. Hopefully they will also enrich the blog with their comments.

The name of this series is taken from the title of a wonderful book by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), What Is Scripture? Smith was one of the great scholars of the new academic field of Religious Studies -- gentle in judgment and voice, eager to learn about all the world's religious traditions, and not afraid to learn from his own Protestant Christianity as well. In this 1993 book Smith asked a broad audience of readers what we mean when we use the English word "scripture." If one of us is, say, a Buddhist, another a Baptist, and another an atheist, what are we referring to when we apply the general word "scripture" to refer to very different books held dear or not so dear by very different people? Smith observes that most of us, in fact, do not know what we mean, and those of us who think we know tend to disagree sharply with each other's definitions. As I hear it, here is his remedy:

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