The closing sections of the first chapter deal with the use which the church is to make of the Bible, in the reading of it (section 8), the interpretation of it (9) and the application of it (10) in using it to settle issues de­finitively and finally.

The first of these sections dealing with our reading of the sacred Scrip­tures, gathers itself around three main themes.

The first is the theme of INSPIRATION. This has already been alluded to in the second section, which listed the Bible's contents, and stated that all the books were given by inspira­tion of God. But the Confession contains no doctrine of inspiration as such. It is, however, clarified at this point in three main propositions.

The first is that immediate inspiration can be claimed only for the original text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. "Immediate" here means "without means", without any intermediate channel of communication — there is a direct influence on the part of God. This is a useful distinction to maintain. Our Bible is the inspired word of God in a mediate sense — it is available to us only through the work of copyists and translators across the centuries. But the originals, penned by the holy men of God of old, prophets and apostles, were immediately inspired.

Secondly, the languages chosen were significant. Hebrew, says the Confession, "was the native language of the people of God of old". God sovereignly worked through the Jewish nation to build up His church. This language became the medium of His revelation, "and probably no better language could have been selected for the purpose of preparing the way for Christ" (R.B. Girdlestone, Synonyms of the Old Testament, p.6). For Hebrew, as A.B. Davidson taught generations of students, is characterised by — "syntactical simplicity", "methodical al­most to the point of being mechanical" (Intro­duction to Davidson's Hebrew Grammar, p.3). The concentration of thought within the struc­tures of Hebrew lexicography corresponded ad­mirably to the anticipation of Christ within the streams of Hebrew history.

Then, as Rabbi Duncan has it, in the fulness of time, the "concrete matter" afforded by the Hebrew language "puts on the raiment of the Greek form", and "Judea is also the better of going to Greece" (Colloquia Peripatetica, p.20). For, in the Confession's words, Greek was the language 'most generally known to the nations' when the time came for the revelation of God in Christ to be spread and carried to earth's remotest bounds, and the doctrines of grace were given wings with the Greek lan­guage. Nor was the language the highly stylised Classical form, but koine (common) Greek, spe­cialist but not specialised, a common language bringing God's revelation to the common people.

Thirdly, it is to the original that the church is to refer — not to a translation. Any questions arising over meaning, tense or sense are to be addressed by reference to the original, for "nothing should be elicited from the text but what is yielded by the fair and grammatical explanation of the language" (P. Fairbairn, Hermeneutical Manual, p.67.

The second theme of section 8 is that of PRESERVATION. This follows from the fact of inspiration. A supernaturally given Bible becomes a supernaturally preserved Bible. The 'singular care and Providence' of God ensured the preservation of the authentic text of Scripture. This can be seen both by the number of books from antiquity which have not survived the passing of the years, for no singular care and Providence superintended the historical trans­mission of them; and also by the fact that the Scriptures have withstood every effort to attack, modify and undermine them. Following the inscripturation of the revelation, God takes a particular and vested interest in the sending to posterity the text of what He breathed out.

In the Old Testament, it was the priests that were used of God to preserve the Scriptures. The Levites kept the book of the law of God in the side of the Ark of the Covenant, and the king was required to write out a copy of the law "out of that which is before the priests the Levites". So up until the exile, when copies of the Word of God were taken to Babylon, it was the preserve of the priests to guard the revelation of God. Following the exile, the scribes copied out the text, and thus for centuries the Bible was preserved by God's singular care.

It was to priests that God committed the preservation of the New Testament also; not to some particular group but to His kingdom of priests, His Church. We are able to come with confidence to God's Word, miraculously given, miraculously guarded.

The third theme of section 8 is the TRANSLATION of the Scriptures. The point to be noted is that, although written in Hebrew and Greek, the Bible was not given for the sole use of Hebraists and Hellenists, but for the people of God. It was for the good of the Church that the truth was given, and it is for the equipping of the saints that the Bible is supplied to us. That requires, in the absence of a working knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, a place for those who have such a knowledge, and are able to translate the Bible.

Section 8 of the first chap­ter of the Confession, deals with the topic of the read­ing of the Scriptures. Given, as has already been empha­sised, by the immediate power and inspiration of God in the original lan­guages, the authentic text of Scripture is written in languages that many believ­ers do not know and cannot read. If they are to make use of the Bible for their own personal growth and development, the Bi­ble must be given to them in a language that they can understand. The Confessional position is that "because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God, who have right unto and interest in the Scriptures ... they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come..." One of the proof texts given for this position is 1 Corinthi­ans 14:9 — "except you utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?"

The Confession qualifies the work of Bible translation with the word 'vulgar', which means 'common'. The Roman Catholic Church had applied the same word to its own translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. This version of the Bible was completed in 405, and proclaimed by the Council of Trent in 1546 to be the official Bible of the R. C. Church. Yet the irony is that the 'Common' Bible was anything but common; the old Latin served to keep the Word of God from the people.

It is arguable that the Reformation was precipitated by the translation of the Scriptures into a language which could be read and under­stood by the people. As E. J. Young put it, "In the Providence of God the Reformation gave to the world an open Bible" (Thy Word is Truth, p.16). John Wycliffe was rightly called the 'Morning Star of the Reformation'; he and men like him insisted that no class or group of people, however sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority, had the right to demand acceptance of their particular interpretation of the Scriptures as final. This belonged to the common people of God, who required to have the Bible in a com­mon language.  "You that read the Bible daily," wrote Bishop Ryle, "and 'delight in the law of the Lord', never forget you owe that Bible to the Reformation".

What are the principles of biblical Bible translation?

It must be faithful to the words of Scrip­ture. The words and not merely the sense have been inspired by God. A distinction is made here between dynamic equivalence and lexical equiva­lence, the former meaning that a translation has to convey the sense of the passage. the latter meaning that the translation has to adhere strictly to the meaning of the individual words. The latter is a biblical method of Bible translation. Our business is with words and any translation which concerns itself only with conveying the general sense and tenor of a passage runs the risk of dulling the edge of truth.

In other words Biblical vocabulary is specialist vocabulary, and a working knowledge of it is necessary to appreciate the truth of what the Bible teaches. Paraphrasing, to give the emotional feel of passages and sentences, is not the same as translating.

Neither must translation be interpreta­tive. It is the task of preaching to interpret the meaning of biblical words and phrases, not the task of translation. Translation preserves the meaning of the text by conveying it into another language; exegesis uncovers the meaning of the text by probing into the meaning of the words and their place in the text; exposition applies the meaning of the text by bringing the words across the cultural and historical divide which sepa­rates the world of the writer from that of the reader, and all three converge in preaching.

Translation also requires that the lan­guage must be fitting, reverent and appropriate. The things of God are to be given to the common people, but that does not make them common things. They remain holy, not vulgar, things. The work of Bible translation is not the work of devaluating the text by employing inappropriate or irreverent language. It is not appropriate, for example, to employ the language of the tabloids; the words of Scripture are holy things, and must be treated as such.

Edward Hills, in The King James Version Defended, makes this important point when he portrays Christians as saying "We want a Bible that talks to us in the same way in which we talk to our friends over the telephone. We want an informal God, no better educated than ourselves, with a limited vocabulary and a taste for modern slang" (p.242). And while we rejoice that the Word of God, even in the poorest of translations, remains the Word of God, we must always resist the spirit that downgrades the Bible by insisting on carnalising its vocabulary.

These principles of Bible translation are nobly summarised in the following statement regarding the way in which the New King James Version was published: "we believe that a basi­cally literal translation, assisted by the findings of modern linguistics, will yield the optimum version" (The New King James Version in the Great Tradition, p.127). We must be slow to rubbish any translation and version; but we must also be bold to advertise the best. And the best we still believe to be found in the Masoretic text, the Textus Receptus, the Authorised Version and the New King James Version of the Bible.