Geoff Thompson is Co-ordinator of Studies in Systematic Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, the University of Divinity. He is the author of Disturbing Much, Disturbing Many: Theology Provoked by the Basis of Union.

A briefly famous exchange on Q&A in 2013 between Kevin Rudd and a self-described "pastor of a local church" captured the banality of the contemporary public use and understanding of the Bible.

And yes, even then, the issue at hand was same-sex marriage.

The pastor insisted that he "just believed in what the Bible says" and, therefore, was opposed to same-sex marriage. The then newly-returned Prime Minister, defended, as a Christian, his support for same-sex marriage with the claim that "the fundamental principle of the New Testament is one of universal love, loving your fellow man."

The pastor's hermeneutical innocence was matched only by Rudd's theological naivety.

From its earliest days, Christians were aware of the difficulties and challenges involved in interpreting the Bible. The assumption that we can "just believe" what it says is a distinctly modern - and seriously flawed - assumption.

Equally, while Christians have frequently and properly sought to develop adequate summary statements of the Bible's content, they have been careful to avoid reducing it to a "fundamental principle," let alone one quite as bland as "universal love." That's as unhelpful, uninformative and misleading as claiming that "saying G'day is the 'fundamental principle' of the Australian way of life."

Four years later the same problems are on display in the current, and now more pressing, debate about the same issue. Christian contributions to the current debate about same-sex marriage continue to be impoverished by heavy-handed and unsophisticated uses of the Bible.

Fortunately, biblical scholars - including my own colleagues, Sean Winter and Robin Whittaker - are drawing our attention to the different ways particular biblical passages are read in relation to the question of homosexuality and marriage. This in itself has been an important contribution to establishing the fact that it is simply incorrect, if not disingenuous, to speak of the Christian view on this contentious matter.

Welcome though the recognition of hermeneutical diversity is, it is not, however, the issue at stake in this article. Behind conflicting or diverse interpretations of particular biblical passages is a deeper issue: What is the Bible in the first place, and what can we reasonably expect to do with it?

At first glance, this might seem an in-house Christian concern. And, primarily it is. Yet, the emergence of the Bible in contemporary public debates means that a wider audience has some stake in the answers to these questions. Of course, few in the wider public would accept that the Bible has any place as a warrant for policy making. But if Christians are going to use it in that forum, then the public is entitled to scrutinise how we are using it. And that scrutiny might be better informed if there is some public discussion about the in-house debates.

It is not just that are different ways of interpreting particular texts, it is that there are different ways of understanding what the Bible is and why Christians use it. In other words, behind the "how to read it" question are two prior questions: What is the Bible? and Why should anyone read it?

It would be fair to say that that the "how" question has been so dominant in even the in-house discussions that the "what" and "why" questions have been passed over or, dealt with so minimally, that the answers to them are as bland as the exchange between Rudd and his pastor-interlocutor was. What I will argue here is that the "what" and "why" questions warrant much closer attention than they usually receive, and that the answer to them will actually have a bearing on the answer to the "how" question.

What is the Bible?

The Bible itself does not inform its readers of an answer to this question. Unlike the Qur'an, which is much clearer about its status and purpose (see Sura 2:2), Christian convictions about the Bible are necessarily statements of faith formed outside the text in response to particular and historically-located debates about the Bible. Yes, the New Testament contains some definitions of the Hebrew Scriptures which, of course, functioned as the early Christians' "Bible" (see, for instance, 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21). None of the New Testament authors themselves ever suggested that their writings had the same status as the Hebrew Scriptures. (Although one of those writings does actually refer to the writings of Paul as "scripture": 2 Peter 3:16.)

That a selection of early Christian writings was later added to those of the Old Testament to constitute the Christian Scriptures was the work of later Christians. This work - which was more or less settled by the end of the second century - was embedded in complex, subtle, polemical and extended discussions about the nature of Christianity, its relationship to Jewish faith, and the authorship and content of those early writings.

One of the important elements of this early work is that the fundamentals of Christian faith were already in place in creeds, liturgies and summary statements of faith before the extent of the Christian Scriptures was settled. It was not the Bible which produced Christian belief. Rather, the Bible emerged in the process of clarifying the details of Christian faith. In other words, it was because you believed certain things about Jesus and God that led you to believe certain things about the Bible.

It would be unsurprising if this seems counter-intuitive to twenty first century readers. A quite different view of the matter has taken hold both among Protestant churches as well as in popular conceptions of what Christians believe.

It doesn't take long to find examples of this different view once you start scanning the websites of Australian churches. Check out the "what we believe statements" of many churches and you will find that they have turned this order on its head: you can only believe in Jesus because you first must believe certain things about the Bible. It might seem more intuitive, but it is theologically flawed, and seriously so. Consider the following three examples:

"We believe that the Bible is God's Word. It is accurate, authoritative and applicable to our everyday lives."

"God has chosen to reveal Himself to us by His word. The Bible is God's final, infallible revelation of Himself, our world and our place in it. We therefore seek to read, learn, teach and submit to the Scriptures. The Bible is not a truth amongst other truths, but the perfect truth of God."

"We believe that the Bible is God's unique revelation and that every word was supernaturally inspired by the Holy Spirit as it was being written down by various human authors. The Bible is our final authority for all matters of belief and behaviour."

The first is simply trivial and theologically vacuous. It reduces the Bible to little more than a manual or encyclopaedia. The second is more robust. Nevertheless, it is staggering to see just how easily it attributes to the Bible the uniqueness, authority and perfection which orthodox Christian faith has classically ascribed only to Jesus Christ. The third, with its appeal to a crude "every-word-inspired" logic, reduces the Bible to the product of a divine dictation exercise divorced from the rich tapestry of divine/human encounters to which it bears witness.

True, these are summary statements, but it is precisely as summary statements that they are so problematic. Summarise the Bible in these ways and you will almost certainly misread and misuse it.

The problem with these summaries is not that they attribute authority to the Bible or that they link it to revelation. That's standard theological fare. It is that they do so without reference to Christ. And therein lies the departure from classical understandings of the Bible.

Strikingly, the early Christians did not develop independent or creedal statements about the Bible. Their understanding of what it was and how it was to be used was worked out in ad hoc ways and in relationship to the primacy of Jesus both as the Word of God and as the unifying content of the newly-emerging Scriptures. This can be seen, to varying degrees, in some of the seminal texts of the period - including Origen's On First Principles (see Book IV.1), Athanasius's On the Incarnation (especially pars. 46-56) and Augustine's On Christian Doctrine (especially Book I).

That the church much later began developing discrete headline-style statements about the Bible did not occur out of the blue or without reason. The sixteenth-century European Reformers were compelled to defend the authority they gave to the Bible against Catholicism's claims for the authority of the Pope. It was their polemical statements which sowed the seeds of what is observed in the three contemporary examples cited above.

But there is no excuse and no theological justification for continuing the polemics of the sixteenth century in this way when the consequence of doing so is to define the Bible in the theologically impoverished way they do. Indeed, my hunch is that such statements function as importantly as sub-cultural shibboleths as they do as theological claims.

Diversity and Conflict in the Bible

The alternative understanding of the Bible which follows below has been shaped by my own Church's statement on what the Bible is and why we use it. This statement is the fifth paragraph of the Basis of Union , the theological foundation on which the Uniting Church in Australia was formed in 1977. It's a statement which reflects the more classical theological understanding of the Bible as primarily determined by its relationship to Jesus Christ. It also affirms the Bible's normative role but without the polemics of the sixteenth-century. Just as the ancient church did, it places the reading of Scripture in the context of a wider network of Christian doctrines and practices. It is worth quoting in full:

"The Uniting Church acknowledges that the Church has received the books of the Old and New Testaments as unique prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which it hears the Word of God and by which its faith and obedience are nourished and regulated. When the Church preaches Jesus Christ, its message is controlled by the Biblical witnesses. The Word of God on whom salvation depends is to be heard and known from Scripture appropriated in the worshipping and witnessing life of the Church. The Uniting Church lays upon its members the serious duty of reading the Scriptures, commits its ministers to preach from these and to administer the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper as effective signs of the Gospel set forth in the Scriptures."

There is so much here that invites reflection. Most conspicuous is the way Jesus Christ and, the Gospel about him, are presented as the unifying content of the Bible. The use of such terms as "testimony" and "witness" allow the proper ordering of the biblical texts to the Word of God which is not a body of information, but Jesus Christ himself.

Also significant is the recognition that the Bible is itself an internally differentiated text. This is reflected in two ways: first, in the reference to the Bible being constituted by the Old and New Testaments; secondly, in the reference to the plural "witnesses." The latter is a deliberate recognition of the diversity of theologies in the Bible. Both these moves provide critical leverage against the tendency to treat the Bible as some sort of "flat text" (as implied by the "every-word-inspired" logic noted above).

This internal diversity is critical for developing further insights into what the Bible is and why we use it. It is important to recognise, first of all, given the contemporary dominance of hermeneutics in academic theology, that the diversity is part of what the Bible, as a particular collection of literature, is. It is not a diversity evident only after the application of different hermeneutical theories. Understandings of what the Bible is and why we use it cannot (and must not) ignore this.

Two contemporary theologians who have shed light on the nature of this internal diversity are Walter Brueggemann and Rowan Williams. Brueggemann argues that the diversity of the Old Testament reflects an ongoing history of various schools of Jewish theology, and the communities attached to them, interacting with each other though "witness, dispute and advocacy." While these terms warrant closer attention than can be given here, they point to an understanding of the differentiated unity of the Old Testament being the result of a process of "profound conflict and disputation through which Israel arrives at its truth-claims."

In other words, precisely as a body of literature, the Old Testament preserves tensions and conflicts in the midst of agreements. The most common example of this would be the tension between those voices of the Old Testament which link blessing with obedient piety (such as Deuteronomy) and those which invoke lived experience to protest against such claims (like Job and Ecclesiastes). The tension between them cannot be resolved. Both are accepted as authoritative reference points for understanding the ways of Israel's God.

A similar point is made by Rowan Williams with reference to the entire Christian Bible. Williams portrays the Bible as a tension-filled history where different theologies are in conversation with each other, correcting each other and calling each other to account. "The movement of our canonical texts," he writes, "is frequently a quite explicit response to or rebuttal of some other position within the same canonical framework; the world it opens to us is one of uneasy relationships and discontinuities."

Rejecting a certain kind of postmodern hermeneutics, Williams also maintains that the canon itself represents a history of thinking and theological discernment. He notes the different theologies at work in the "historical" narratives of the Old Testament and the diversity of the Gospels. This leads him to suggest that "the biblical text ... displays an inner literary history (narrative texts reworking other narrative texts, from Chronicles and Kings to Matthew and Mark)." The conflict of interpretation of the Bible reflects the theological conflicts already present within the Bible. But, for Williams, the framework of this history of conflict is quite clear:

"the existence of conflict and even conscientious division may not be a sign of polarisation but a necessary part of that movement of the story of God's people and their language towards the one focus of Christ crucified and risen that is the movement of Scripture."

The language might be dense, and behind it lies a fair dose of literary theory and theological claim, but the point is the same as that which I've been arguing: Jesus Christ is the unifying theme of Scripture; the proclamation about him as the crucified and risen Messiah is the fact without which there would not be the Bible that we have. To grow in knowledge of him and obedience to him is the purpose of reading it.

This is not an original idea. It is ancient. It echoes Augustine's well-known hermeneutics of charity from On Christian Doctrine:

"So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scripture or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them."

But it also echoes the similar but stronger (and less well-known statement) of the First Helvetic Confession of 1536. Even in the midst of sixteenth-century polemics, its Swiss authors did not lose sight of what the Bible is and what reading it should lead its readers to do:

"The entire Biblical Scripture is solely concerned that man understand that God is kind and gracious to him and that He has publicly exhibited and demonstrated this His kindness to the whole human race through Christ his Son. However, it comes to us and is received by faith alone, and is manifested and demonstrated by love for our neighbour."

How Should the Bible be Used?

What does all this mean for our contemporary debates? It certainly will not resolve the debates among Christians about same-sex marriage. Nor will it resolve the inevitable and necessary exegetical debates about particular passages. If anything, it actually complicates such debates because it points to the fact there are also decisions to be made and debates to be had about which theologies within the Bible are, in the light of Christ, to be privileged over others.

Earlier I said the "what" and "why" questions about the Bible take logical precedence over the "how to read question." But there is a second "how" question which also ought to be conditioned by the answers given here to the "what" and "why" questions: How should the Bible be used?

If we are to learn from the Helvetic Confession, our answer might be that it needs to be used with the same kindness that characterises God's attitude to the human race. Kindness can be easily sentimentalised. But against the background of this argument, it seems reasonable to suggest that when the Bible is not being used with God's own kindness, then those using it have probably not understood what it is or why it should be used at all.

Geoff Thompson is Co-ordinator of Studies in Systematic Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, the University of Divinity. He has recently published Disturbing Much, Disturbing Many: Theology Provoked by the Basis of Union.