As Anglicans, we believe we have three ways of learning about God: scripture, tradition and experience. We believe that it is false to give any one of these three priority: if the three do not coincide and give the same picture, there is something wrong.
The first Christians experienced God at work among them directly, through contact with Jesus, or by seeing and coming to know the signs of his healing power. Later generations shared their experience through personal contact, as part of the life of the church family. In time, accounts of Jesus' life and work came to be written down, sometimes to explain (Lk.1:4), sometimes to convince (Jn.20:31). And letters from early Church leaders came to be gathered into what we now know as the New Testament, which took its final form by the end of the fourth century.
It is good to remember that each book in our Bible was written or gathered together with a specific purpose in mind. Paul's letters were written in response to very specific situations in particular congregations. Paul's response to a problem in first-century Corinth might or might not fit our needs in twentieth-century Berne.
It is also good to remember that Christians over the centuries have recognized in the New Testament a window through which with the help of the Holy Spirit we can meet God - through which God can reveal himself to us.
There is a danger in talking of the Holy Spirit of imagining that God himself wrote the Bible. In fact, it was written by sinners like ourselves, trying to describe things they had experienced that were beyond themselves. So we should remember that it is not an infallible source of reference on every topic under the sun. Some things are just plain wrong: grains of wheat do not die when sown (Jn. 12.24). Isaiah did not write "I am sending my messenger ahead of you" (Mk 1.2) (it was Malachi). There was never a king Belshazzar, nor any Darius the Mede (Dan.5.30-31).
Some things are inconsistent, such as the names of the twelve disciples (take your pick from James, John, Peter, Andrew, Thomas, Philip, Judas Iscariot (everyone), Bartholomew, Matthew, James ben Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot (Matthew, Mark and Luke), Thaddaeus (Matthew and Mark), Judas son of James (Luke and John) and Nathaniel (John)). Even, indeed, whether Jesus was crucified on the day of the Passover (John) or the following day (the other gospels). The flood we all know lasted forty days (Gen.7.17) is also recorded as lasting 150 days (Gen. 7.24).
The Bible writers and their audience would not have worried about this. Their aim was to show how God was at work in history, and how God was at work in Christ. They were not concerned with the details in the way present-day newspaper reporting is concerned with details. Their concern is not with the individuals, with Zacchaeus or Mary Magdalene or Nicodemus, but with what God was doing. The important news was what Jesus asked the disciples to report to John the Baptist: "The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. (Mt 11.5) The mechanics of what happened are secondary - the news itself is what is important.
One advantage of admitting this is that we are not tempted to explain things away in natural terms. The writer who described the children of Israel's passage through the Red Sea means it to be seen as a miracle worked by God - explanations involving strong winds and seasonal changes miss the point. If the evangelists say that at the crucifixion there was darkness from the sixth hour to the ninth (Mk 15.33), it is useless to try and explain it by an eclipse (quite apart from the fact that Passover is at the full moon, when eclipses are impossible, and that eclipses do not last three hours!). God was at work in a special way.
To look at the Bible for this angle does not change its essential truth. God does indeed speak to us through it, if we will only take time to listen, and to get below the surface. We can read it extensively, a chapter or two at a time, or intensively, studying the many facets a few verses may present. We can read it methodically, setting aside a regular time to do so, or simply when we feel a special need to be with God. The Bible is a precious treasure house of news about God, and we should read it with love and wonder.
HD