My dad did one of these awhile back, and I vowed that one day I would as well. The current extension of my contract at Holyrood forces me to contemplate what my statement of belief is in earnest, as I will be submitting one in an accredidation process to begin shortly.
Today I came across a paragraph in W. Sibley Towner's commentary of Daniel which summarizes very nicely what I think about the article of the Bible as scripture. He got it from the United Presbyterian Confession of 1967.
It reads: "The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times in which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding." Or as Towner puts it, we need to build a "hermeneutic bridge...between ourselves and the biblical writers".
In my own words, I believe that the word of God (which is divine and perfect) has been incarnated by the language of humanity (and therefore subject to errror and the structures necessary for us to comprehend it). Thus, in order to understand it, one must use both mystical/spiritual approaches (prayer, meditation) as well as very academic ones, such as historical and literary criticism.
