Evangelical biblicism is not an especially evangelical way to read the Bible. In practice, biblicism demeans scripture. On the surface, biblicism appears to champion a “high view” of the Bible, but its actual practices betray a rather low view of the Bible. Evangelicals who are truly evangelical can and ought to do better.
Most readers of this book know that the word “evangelical” originally comes from the Greek word euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον), which is formed by the union of the linguistic parts eu- “good” and angelion “message.” To be evangelical, then, means having one’s life centered on the terrifically good message that God is reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:17–19). That is indeed amazingly good news. But really and truly hearing, grasping, and making sense of that fantastic news for our lives is altogether different than, for example, simply following a life handbook of divine oracles or looking up information in a holy user’s manual to help fix a problem. Go find any one of the user’s manuals or handbooks in your garage or closet and think for a moment about whether even a divinely inspired manual for living life would really amount to gospel-like great news. It wouldn’t.
A truly evangelical reading of scripture confronts us with a particular story and message that, if taken seriously, blow the doors off every assumption, outlook, and experience that we have ever had apart from Jesus Christ. The evangelical message of scripture shakes loose from us every misguided and idolatrous preconception about everything, literally everything, that we thought we knew, and then begins to rebuild us in light of the singularly radical fact of who God really is and therefore who we really are in relation to God and what he has done for us. The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the most important thing we will ever need to hear and know, and it has the power to reframe and transform everything else.
Neither the Christian gospel itself nor the scriptures that announce the gospel to us are collections of biblical advice or “perspectives on” every ancillary “how-to” topic with which we might want help in our lives—including dressing well, running our finances, and raising our children. If we ever get to the point where the gospel has seriously formed our lives, we may then have some good gospel-informed ideas concerning how to think about money and parenting. But real evangelicals will always think about such issues, indeed all issues, through the single lens of the gospel of Christ—which means indirectly, not directly through some biblicist procedure of parsing allegedly “relevant” biblical propositions.
We are fortunate if scripture’s good news, as disturbing as it is, reworks even part of our lives—and even more so if the gospel really gets a grip on us. Unfortunately, we tend to domesticate the amazing message with which scripture challenges us, and we work hard to protect ourselves from the good news doing its life-altering work on us. Indeed, I suspect that all too often evangelical biblicism in particular—under the well-meaning guise of defending a “high view” of scripture—does just that. Biblicism too often traps, domesticates, and controls the life-quaking kerygma (proclamation) of the gospel in order to provide the Bible reader with the security, certainty, and protection that humans naturally want.
The irony, if and when this happens, is tragic. Evangelicals—a people whose core identity is supposedly centered in God’s earth-shaking good news to a literally lost world—turn the inspired and truthful witness to that good news into merely a holy handbook to help people live more manageable lives. The Bible—however highly it is lauded in theory—easily becomes in biblicism a tool in human hands used to facilitate the kind of secure, stable, and therapeutically satisfying lives we wish to live.
Sometimes, at the popular level, this looks like “helpful hints from scripture” that people use to manage their daily emotions and relationships. At more academic and official church levels, it might consist of establishing and defending watertight theological systems that provide all the answers (for those who believe them) and thus produce cognitive and emotional security in a very insecure world. As a result, in these ways, “the defense of Scripture can become more important than Scripture itself.”[165] Either way, these approaches use scripture to achieve the biblicist’s human-centered purposes rather than allowing the Holy Spirit to speak through scripture the God-to-people message that, even as it saves and comforts, also disrupts, challenges, and changes anyone who takes it seriously.
The primary purpose of the present book is to point out what appears to be a serious problem with biblicism, not to elaborate complete solutions to that problem. However, so as not to leave the misimpression that I am a hermeneutical nihilist or radical postmodern relativist, I hope to suggest that this critique can actually go somewhere constructive, and I will offer some viable alternatives to biblicism that I think retain some of the best of that for which biblicism stands. Biblicists may not like these alternatives or be willing to choose them, but they are worth consideration. If biblicists reject these possibilities, the burden is on them either to show how biblicism is actually possible (despite pervasive interpretive pluralism and its other problems), or to advance a better alternative.
If my larger critique above is even modestly sound, then what is needed to improve on biblicism is some kind of a stronger hermeneutical guide that can govern the proper interpretation of the multivocal, polysemous, multivalent texts of scripture toward the shared reading of a more coherent, authoritative biblical message. Such a stronger hermeneutical guide would also, of course, have to be consistent with, if not directly derived from, Christian scripture and tradition.
This chapter offers some ideas to readers who acknowledge biblicism’s fatal problems as described in this book and who want to find an alternative approach to scripture that still remains essentially faithful to the sensibilities of the evangelical tradition. Readers who are not persuaded that pervasive interpretive pluralism and other problems make biblicism impossible will find much of what follows to be lamentably misguided. I can do no more to help or answer them. Readers who are persuaded about biblicism’s impossibility yet who do not believe its problems can be surmounted within an evangelical framework may find this chapter interesting but inadequate. But readers who are persuaded of biblicism’s impossibility and who wish to re-address scripture in a way that may in fact be more truly evangelical should read on.
I do not believe that American evangelical biblicists are currently in a particularly good position to simply identify and adopt some comprehensive and complete set of principles that will set their approach to scripture aright. Better—given the power of the biblicist heritage and the risk of adopting flawed alternatives—to take the time and care needed to rethink these issues well. A lot of historical water has gone under the bridge, shaping established habits and tendencies of evangelical thought and practice, and this necessitates careful reconsideration. Certain other related contemporary disagreements—between evangelical conservatives, postconservatives, emergents, postmoderns, and other types of evangelicals—create challenges that also affect our discussion here. Biblicism, I have said, is impossible. But there are other approaches—including outright liberalism—that I think are even worse.
American evangelicals in this discussion need to resist their natural historical tendencies toward entrepreneurial, activist, pragmatic, immediate problem solving and instead spend the time needed to think matters through carefully, creatively, and in interaction with the larger, longer Christian tradition. Furthermore, success in this matter would seem to require an open, civil, collective discussion leading to something more like an eventual near-consensus, rather than some convicted party launching off into a high-visibility program or movement that leaves most of the others behind. The last thing American evangelicalism needs is more autonomously impulsive reformist action and more organizational and identity fragmentation. In any case, the kingdom of God is not going to shift into neutral until American evangelicals get their approach to the Bible straight. So evangelicals might as well take their time to engage the matter openly, carefully, honestly, civilly, and thoroughly. Better to have been patient and actually gotten somewhere good twenty years from now than to jump to immediate problem solving and end up getting nowhere.
The thinking for the kind of constructive process I offer in the following pages contributes only one set of limited, partial, and fallible ideas. I want to underscore the word “toward” in the part title for this section of the book. The purpose of what follows is not to resolve all of the problems. It is rather to point to what I think are some promising ways forward, beyond biblicism. My hope is that thoughtful evangelicals would be ready, willing, and able to consider them, and possibly embrace them, and then contribute to a larger critical and constructive discussion.
The ideas in the following pages do not offer a fixed package of solutions to the problems raised in previous chapters. To repeat, I do not have a comprehensive program to rehabilitate biblicist evangelical Bible reading. Some of what follows I am quite confident about, but I am more tentative about other parts and welcome continued conversations. I am more than happy to see where I am wrong and to be persuaded of better alternatives. Some of the following ideas will seem obvious to many readers. Others will seem more challenging.
To reiterate, the guiding purpose in the remainder of the book is to contribute toward theorizing a nonbiblicist yet definitely evangelical approach to scriptural authority that particularly addresses the specific problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. I am not trying here to develop a full-fledged theory of all theologically relevant aspects of the Bible—such as inspiration or infallibility—a task well beyond both my scholarly competence and the scope of this book. At the same time, any attempt to rethink scripture and address pervasive interpretive pluralism will inevitably raise other related matters of concern. I will not hesitate to develop broader ideas as necessary to pursue this goal. But I will always try to bring the discussion around to this book’s core concern, which is how the Bible can function as an authority even if biblicism is impossible.
The Centrality of Jesus Christ
The purpose, center, and interpretive key to scripture is Jesus Christ. It is embarrassing to have to write this, for it should be obvious to all Christians. But I am afraid this is not always so obvious in practice in biblicist circles. At least the profound implications of this fact for reading scripture are not always obvious to many evangelicals. Truly believing that Jesus Christ is the real purpose, center, and interpretive key to scripture causes one to read the Bible in a way that is very different than believing the Bible to be an instruction manual containing universally applicable divine oracles concerning every possible subject it seems to address.
For one thing, seeing Christ as central compels us to always try to make sense of everything we read in any part of scripture in light of our larger knowledge of who God is in Jesus Christ. We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are “meaningful to” or that “speak to” us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ. This means that we always read scripture Christocentrically, christologically, and christotelically,[166] as those who really believe what the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds say. That is, for Christians, Christ is the center, the inner reason, and the end of all of scripture. From the Bible’s account of the creation of the world in Genesis to its final consummation in Revelation, it is all and only about the work of God in time and space in the person of Jesus Christ for the redemption of the world. “The [Old Testament] law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves” (Heb. 10:1). The reality is the sacrificial cross of Jesus Christ. Thus, the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834–92) wrote, “O you who open your Bibles and want to understand a text, the way to get into the meaning of a text is through the door, Christ.”[167]
This also means that we always read the Bible as committed trinitarians, as those who do not merely “believe in God,” but who actually believe in God in particular as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Furthermore, and crucially, we understand whatever we understand about the Father through Jesus Christ. And we understand whatever we understand about the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, God incarnate, God with us and for us, the only “image of the invisible God” in human form (Col. 1:15; John 1:1–18), is how we know God and know about what God is doing in history and our lives. The Bible seems to know about this itself. “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). “No one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Luke 10:22).
“You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life,” Jesus said, but “these are the Scriptures that testify about me” (John 5:39). Therefore, when Jesus “opened the Scriptures” to his unrecognizing companions on the road to Emmaus, which caused their hearts to “burn within” them, “he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:25–32). And when Jesus appeared to his own disciples after the resurrection, on what did he focus pertaining to learning from scripture?
“This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24:44–48)
In short, Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to truly understand the scriptures precisely so that they would see the evangelion of the gospel of Jesus Christ behind, in, and through all of scripture. If believers today want to rightly understand scripture, every narrative, every prayer, every proverb, every law, every Epistle needs likewise to be read and understood always and only in light of Jesus Christ and God reconciling the world to himself through him.
This does not mean trying to detect Christ in every piece of scripture or forcing every verse in the Bible to somehow be directly about the gospel. That itself would be bad prooftexting. Rather, every part of scripture and scripture as a whole—which obviously has background and foreground material, a center and a periphery—is read in light of the centrally defining reality of Jesus Christ. As Keith Ward notes, “For a Christian, every part of the Bible must in some way point to Christ, to the living person of Jesus who is the Christ, and to the unlimited, liberating love of God which is revealed in Christ. To put it bluntly, it is not the words of the Bible that are ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ It is the person of Christ, to whom the Bible witnesses.”[168] And as Bonhoeffer says of scripture, “In its entirety and in all its parts it is nothing but this witness of Christ, his life, his death, and his resurrection.”[169]
Another way to say that we must read the Bible christologically and as committed trinitarians is to state clearly that any doctrine of revelation, scripture, or inspiration must, in any larger theological system, be properly located within the doctrine of God and not as a foundational prolegomenon or epistemological preface. Unfortunately, the latter is what typically happens in biblicist evangelical theology: “Christian theological talk of revelation migrates to the beginning of the dogmatic corpus, and has to take on the job of furnishing the epistemological warrant for Christian claims.”[170] This “absorption of revelation into foundations,” John Webster rightly notes, is, however, a “mislocation and . . . reassignment to undertake duties which it was not intended to perform.”[171] Placing revelation at the start of theology also isolates doctrines of revelation and scripture materially from the rest of any substantive theological exposition.
There is a better way. Rather than using a doctrine of inspired revelation as a prologue to real theologizing in order to provide a foundationalist “defense of the viability of Christian talk . . . before the tribunal of [allegedly] impartial reason,”[172] Webster insists on locating all understanding of revelation and scripture within an epistemologically prior trinitarian doctrine of God:
The doctrinal under-determination and mislocation of the idea of revelation can only be overcome by its reintegration into the comprehensive structure of Christian doctrine, and most especially the Christian doctrine of God. . . . Revelation [thus understood] is the self-presentation of the triune God, the free work of sovereign mercy in which God wills, establishes, and perfects saving fellowship with himself in which humanity comes to know, love, and fear him above all things. . . . As the gracious presence of God, revelation is itself the establishment of fellowship. It is not so much an action in which God informs us of other acts of his through which we are reconciled to him; rather, revelation is a way of indicating the communicative force of God’s saving, fellowship-creating presence.[173]
Webster continues:
The proper location for talk of revelation is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and, in particular, the outgoing, communicative mercy of the triune God in the economy of salvation. Revelation is the corollary of trinitarian theology and soteriology. . . . What Christian theology has to say about revelation is not simply deployed as a means of dealing with epistemological questions, or primarily as an answer to questions of the sources and norms of church and theological discourse. It may address these concerns, but it does so as an application or extension of its material content, which is the sovereign goodness of Father, Son, and Spirit in willing, realizing, and perfecting saving fellowship.[174]
Thus, a Christocentric and trinitarian approach to the Bible does more than just help believers to read it better. It also provides a clue for revising our larger theological mentality and method in a way that places the Triune God, not modern standards of warranted knowledge, at the center.
The view commended here is a decidedly and unapologetically Christ-centered approach to scripture. It tells us, among other things, that if the Bible embodies an internal unity or harmony that helps point the way toward a common Christian mind about what scripture teaches, that unity centers on the living Christ. This Christocentric approach does not begin with a theory of the Bible that tells us deductively that scripture must not contain any serious internal tensions or contradictions since it reflects the mind of a perfect God. Such a view reflects a particular philosophical way of reasoning, not a Christocentric theological one. Peter Enns strikes the right note here:
Can Christians speak of a unity to the Bible? Yes, but it is not a superficial unity based on the surface content of the words of passages taken in isolation. The unity of the Bible is more subtle but at the same time deeper. It is a unity that should ultimately be sought in Christ himself, the living word. . . . We believe not only that the Bible is the word of God, but that Christ himself is the word. . . . The written word bears witness to the incarnate word, Christ. . . . The Bible bears witness to Christ by Christ’s design. He is over the Bible, beyond it, separate from it, even though the Bible is his word and thus bears witness to him. Christ is supreme, and it is in him, the embodied word, that the written word ultimately finds its unity. Christ is the final destiny of Israel’s story, and it is to him that the Bible as a whole bears witness.[175]
Of course, unless we are anticanonical hermeneutical nihilists, we must believe in some kind of internal biblical coherence or unity—despite the Bible having been written by many different authors who lived in highly divergent historical and cultural circumstances across thousands of years. But by this Christocentric account, the internal harmony that scripture embodies does not stem from all of its propositions and narrative accounts fitting together perfectly like a neat jigsaw puzzle.
Scripture’s internal unity or harmony, rather, derives from its central purpose in divine revelation of telling us about Jesus Christ. It prepares us for the coming of Christ. It witnesses to the incarnate person and work of Christ. It offers apostolic theological reflections on Christ for the church and the world. It shows the difference that Christ made in human life during the earliest years of the church. It tells us who and what we really are in light of Christ. And it sends us on a mission in life in response to the good news of Christ. Biblical unity comes not from an empirically observable, perfect noncontradiction evident among all of its many texts. Biblical unity comes instead from the real and living God/Man Jesus Christ who stands at scripture’s center. Everything revolves around him and draws its significance from him. It is Jesus Christ who runs as the consistently present thread more or less explicitly through its sometimes-meandering story.[176]
Reading the Bible Christocentrically does not mean dividing reality up into two realms—into “religious and faith” matters, on the one hand, versus purportedly “not religious” topics on the other hand—and then claiming that the Bible really concerns itself authoritatively only with the former. Some problematic versions of the position of noninerrantist biblical infallibility suggest that kind of approach, namely, that the Bible is only about “faith and Christian morals” but not about anything else in life. Inerrantists are right, in my view, to object to that dichotomy—though they usually do not object for the right reasons, in the end. It is true, as inerrantists say, that the strict division between the religious and not religious is artificial and impossible in practice to apply with any precision. Christocentrism naturally agrees that all of reality belongs to God and is subject to Christ’s authority and judgment. No allegedly “nonreligious” topic or issue in the entire world may then be set aside as not relevant to the Bible’s concerns, as if we lived in a dualistic reality.
But a Christocentric hermeneutic does not conclude from those objections that the Bible contains perfect and explicit instructions on every imaginable topic it seems to address, as well as indirectly to literally every possible topic, through the application of its “worldview.” A Christocentric reading of the Bible instead simply says that all topics both addressed in the Bible and not must be read and considered through the logic of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus, no part of life is cut off from Christ. But neither is any part of life allowed to be understood through any lens other than Jesus Christ.
I hardly stand alone in making this larger suggestion about Christ as the Bible’s hermeneutical key, of course; a number of solid evangelical theologians have argued the same idea. The evangelical giant, John Stott, for instance, is perfectly clear on this point. In his book Understanding the Bible, Stott begins by asking, “How can the Bible . . . possibly be said to have a ‘purpose’?”[177] His reply?
The Bible is primarily a book neither of science, nor of literature, nor of philosophy, but of salvation. . . . The salvation for which the Bible instructs us is available “through faith in Christ Jesus.” Therefore, since scripture concerns salvation and salvation is through Christ, Scripture is full of Christ. Jesus himself thus understood the nature and function of the Bible. “The Scriptures,” he said, “testify about me.” . . . Our savior Jesus Christ himself (in terms of promise and fulfillment) is Scripture’s unifying theme.[178]
Stott spends many pages demonstrating that Bible readers need primarily to seek to “appropriate by faith the riches of Christ which are disclosed to us in Scripture.” He then concludes: “There is a great diversity of content, style, and purpose among the books of the Bible, and in some of them the witness to Christ is indirect, even oblique. . . . [But] the conclusion is simple. Whenever we read the Bible, we must look for Christ. And we must go on looking until we see and until we believe.”[179]
The evangelical Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer (1903–96) was also emphatic about the Christ-centered nature of the Bible, arguing that
the significance [of scripture] can never be isolated from the redemptive-historical work of Christ. . . . Think of the description of the signs of Jesus focused on a concrete goal: “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). That which is written is like an arrow shot to hit a man’s heart. . . . The theological purpose of Scripture [is] that we might know God unto salvation.[180]
Repeatedly, Berkouwer underscored the fact that the Bible has a single “center” in Jesus Christ. “Scripture is not composed of a number of isolated words, theses, and truths expressed,” he notes, “but a centered witness.” Again, he writes, “In Scripture itself, attention is emphatically drawn to its nature as witness. We recall Christ’s words about Scripture testifying to him. . . . It witnesses of Christ.”[181] He goes on:
The purpose of the God-breathed Scripture is not at all to provide a scientific gnosis in order to convey and increase human knowledge and wisdom, but to witness of the salvation of God unto faith. This does not mean to separate faith and knowledge. But the knowledge that is the unmistakable aim of Scripture is the knowledge of faith, which does not increase human wisdom, but is life eternal (John 17:3).[182]
On this basis, Berkouwer calls readers of scripture to be “conscious of this centralization, mindful of that word of Paul which clearly indicated the center: ‘For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’” (1 Cor. 2:2). This means, he says, paying “concentrated attention to the very words, to the Word in the midst of the words, to its intent and purpose.” Berkouwer questions rhetorically: “How shall the God-breathed Scripture ever be understood without focusing on the one concentrated mystery of the Spirit of Christ?” Of course, he admits that reading the Bible with an eye always to Christ the center is “not a simple matter. But,” he adds in the strongest of terms, “fear of this idea of scopus [the center or target bull’s-eye] is fruitless, for Scripture disintegrates into many words without the goal, and its God-breathed character is thereby neglected.”[183]
Berkouwer therefore warns against biblicist readings of the Bible as a “flat” text: “The perspective of this centeredness of Scripture is easily endangered by a leveling process whereby the God-breathed Scripture is primarily approached in isolation. . . . Then the attention for contours and centralization fades. There is no room for emphasis and centralization when there is a leveling of the many words of Scripture.” Again, in the strongest words, Berkouwer calls the Bible “meaningless” when it is not read Christocentrically: “Believing in Scripture does not mean staring at a holy and mysterious book, but hearing the witness concerning Christ. . . . Every word about the God-breathed character of Scripture is meaningless if Holy Scripture is not understood as the witness concerning Christ.”[184]
Another important example is elaborated by Geoffrey Bromiley. In his fantastic little book, The Unity and Disunity of the Church, Bromiley addresses the ways in which the Bible itself may be a source of unity rather than disunity among Christians—precisely the concern of the present book. Bromiley insists that the Bible can serve as a means of Christian unity only when Jesus Christ is placed at its center. “In the first place we must remember,” he says, “that the Bible is not to be abstracted from Christ and made a center of unity in its own right. . . . Unity is grounded in Christ himself, and . . . it is served by the Bible when the Bible is understood in clear relationship to Christ as the authoritative prophetic and apostolic testimony.”
Bromiley continues: “We may go to the Bible with very different views of what it is and how it is to be understood or applied. But if we go primarily to see Christ (John 5:39), i.e., to learn what the Bible has to tell us about Him, and our new life in Him, we shall be brought together at the one true center of the church and its unity.” The Bible, Bromiley insists, will only “unify as it is used for the purpose for which it was given, namely, as an instrument of ministering Christ to the people. . . . It will not be a means or focus of unity merely in virtue of the fact that we are all trying to present biblical truth. But it will certainly be this as we are all trying to present Christ Himself as the Truth attested in the Bible.” Bromiley concludes: “The Bible should always be seen in this relationship to Christ Himself and the given unity which there is in Him. Otherwise it can only be a center of division.” Truly spoken.[185]
The evangelical theologian Donald Bloesch likewise writes, “The biblical text is entirely truthful when it is seen in relation to its divine center, God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. When separated from this center, the text is not perceived in its proper context. . . . The truth of the Bible is available to us only when we strive to see the text in relation to the New Testament Gospel.”[186] Citing Hebrews 1:10, Bloesch continues: “The true or comprehensive picture of God’s dealing with humanity is hidden from us until the text becomes for us a window to the light of the glory of God in Jesus Christ. . . . The object of our faith is not the church or the scriptures, not even our experience of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ himself, but Christ testified to in Scripture and proclaimed in the church.”[187] On that basis, Bloesch peppers his theology of the Bible with statements reinforcing this key point: “The Bible comes alive when it is read in light of the cross of Christ”; “the text does not yield its full meaning until we see it in its theological relation to the wider context—the sacred history of the Bible culminating in Jesus Christ”; “the salvific content of Scripture is God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. What makes Scripture authoritative is that it focuses on Christ”; and “while fully acknowledging both cultural and theological diversity within Scripture, the Reformers held to its overarching unity. One of their key principles was that ‘the whole of Scripture presents Christ everywhere.’”[188]
Bloesch also points out that this Christocentric view of scripture was a hallmark of Martin Luther’s approach to the Bible. Luther insisted that “the source” of scripture is “the cross of Christ,” to which, when the reader is led, “then he will surely strike the center.” Bloesch notes that Luther also spoke of certain biblical passages as hard nuts whose shells had to be cracked by throwing them against the rock of Christ, which would then produce their “delicious kernel.”[189] According to Luther, “Christ is the Lord of Scripture.” And again, “Scripture is to be understood . . . for Christ. Hence it must either be referred to him, or it must not be held to be true Scripture.” Yet again, Luther declared: “The whole scripture is about Christ alone everywhere, if we look to its inner meaning, though superficially it may sound different.”[190]
For a final evangelical witness to the need to read the Bible Christocentrically, I cite Kevin Vanhoozer of the Wheaton College Graduate School: “The ground of Scripture’s indispensible role in the economy of the gospel is ultimately Christological. The Bible—not only the Gospels but all of Scripture—is the (divinely) authorized version of the gospel, the necessary framework for understanding what God was doing in Jesus Christ. Scripture is the voice of God that articulates the Word of God: Jesus Christ.”[191] Throughout his theology, Vanhoozer hammers away on this Christocentric theme: “Jesus Christ is the content of the Scriptural witness, the one who interprets the Old Testament witness, and the one who commissions the New Testament witness. Accordingly, Jesus is both the material and the formal principle of the canon: its substance and its hermeneutic”; “Jesus Christ, the Word/Act of God, is the internal meaning of the canon, and the canon is the literary form that normative witness to Christ now takes”;[192] and “Jesus Christ is the Christian’s ultimate ethic.”[193] Vanhoozer could not be more clear:
The biblical stories, commands, promises, songs, prophecies, and didactic discourse all mediate God’s communicative action, but not all in the same way. What they share, however, is the same basic orientation. The canon is a unique compass that points not to the north but to the church’s North Star: Jesus Christ.[194]
The answer, then, to what holds scripture together is Jesus Christ. The key response to how to sort through the diversity and seemingly different viewpoints expressed in scripture is Jesus Christ. It is only Jesus Christ—the real, living Lord, the Creator of all things, the source of any evangelical good news at all, the man who is God-with-us, the one person who shows and tells us what a real human is—who is the one in the light of whom anything and everything in scripture makes any sense, as anything other than quaint historical records. What holds scripture together is not simply accurate information or inerrant propositions about God, life, and the world. What holds it together is the reality of Christ himself, the living, eternal Son through whom God reconciles the world to himself in love.
The centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ not only guides the right interpretation of scripture, originally, in the early church, it also actually helped determine what texts were accepted as scriptural canon itself. Before there was a commonly recognized canon, “the rule of faith,” as the church called it, stood above the specifics of any written or oral tradition. The rule of faith was an essential summary of gospel Christian truth—of core “apostolic teaching,” “tradition,” “sound doctrine,” and “the faith,” as various New Testament writings put it—at the center of which stood the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ:[195]
The church in the first couple of centuries spoke more of the “canon of truth” or the “rule of faith” than the canon of scripture. This, rather than scripture itself, was the ultimate “canon” according to which all teaching had to be assessed. . . . [It was] a framework within which both Scripture and church teaching must be heard and assimilated, and against which both may be judged. This “rule” or “canon” provides a very basic outline of Christian doctrine, as we would call it, and underlies rather than is identical with any particular formulations. . . . If we are speaking of authority for Christians, it lies with such a rule rather than with Scripture itself; for scripture is capable of being read in many different ways.[196]
This Christ-centered “rule of faith” was so central an authority in the early church before the scriptural canon was universally defined that early church leaders relied on it to help discern which of the possible texts being considered for inclusion in the scriptural canon were scriptural and which were not.[197] That is, even early Christian writings that were eventually included in the canon of the New Testament (as well as those which were excluded) were subject to the authority of this christological rule of faith. In short, it was in part this evangelical rule of faith that helped determine what the New Testament even is by guiding the selection process.[198]
Happily, the germ of this Christocentric insight concerning scripture is actually already present in some official statements and declarations of American evangelicals who may otherwise tend to lean toward biblicism. The “2000 Baptist Faith and Message” of the Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, affirms that “all Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.” And the “Essentials of Our Faith” statement of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church states that “the infallible Word of God, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, is a complete and unified witness to God’s redemptive acts culminating in the incarnation of the Living Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Christocentrism also shows up in evangelical books on occasion. John Armstrong, for example, has written against human-interest-driven “topical preaching,” arguing that “preaching on marriage, family, or finance without the word of the Cross at the center is a new form of legalism. It is a modern moralism without Christ and the Cross. It is not, fundamentally, evangelical.”[199] And J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden write that “all that is in the Bible fits together as a single Christ-centered message of grace to sinners.”[200] So the present Christocentric proposal is not alien to all evangelicals.[201] It is already present in places as a potential theological resource that many evangelicals can appropriate and more clearly emphasize in order to move beyond biblicism.
Yet such short, isolated Christocentric statements are rarely if ever strong enough to counter the implications of the many other declarations about complete coverage, the handbook model, and so on, which tend to lead to a flat, centerless, biblicist reading of scripture. The reality is that it is not possible to take fully seriously a Christocentric hermeneutic of scripture and to hold to biblicism. One or the other must give. In most cases to date, the biblicist tendencies overwhelm Christocentric gestures and intuitions. Nobody ends up explicitly denying that Christ is the purpose, center, meaning, and key to understanding scripture. But in actual practice Christ gets sidelined by the interest in defending every proposition and account as inerrant, universally applicable, contemporarily applicable, and so on, in ways that try to make the faith “relevant” for everyday concerns.
Vern Poythress’s book on “symphonic theology” provides an interesting case in point, demonstrating how easy it is for an initial focus on a Christ-centered, rule-of-faith approach to scripture to slip into trying to offer “biblical” teachings on every dimension of human life imaginable. “There is,” Poythress argues, “a single dominant perspective in the Bible. That is, the Bible teaches us a particular view of God, ourselves, and the world.” This statement suggests strong assumptions about scripture’s internal consistency, univocity, complete coverage, and universal applicability. But then Poythress’s summary of that “view” in the next sentence nicely echoes the kind of authoritative rule of faith noted above: “According to the Bible, there is one God, there are three persons of the Godhead, humans were created good but fell into sin, Christ came to save us, died for us, was raised bodily from the dead, sits at God’s right hand, and will come again to renew us and the world and to condemn the wicked.”[202] Almost sounds like the Apostles’ Creed. Perhaps Poythress will be evangelically Christocentric after all?
Right away, however, the purpose of scripture begins to open wider: “In short, the Bible provides us with a world view. It explains the origins and purpose of everything, tells us who we are, tells us how to deal with sins, and shows us our basic responsibilities toward God and toward our neighbors.” It is true that, viewed through a christological lens, scripture can tell us these things. But then the argument immediately slips into underwriting a biblicist comprehensive “handbook model”: “These teachings and other central doctrines of the Bible are intended to provide us with a basic framework for serving God in every area of life—in our Bible study certainly, but also in our study of science, our use of money, our activity in government, and every other area. The Bible, then, provides us with a Christian world view, or a Christian perspective, on everything.”[203] Somehow, in the space of four contiguous sentences, Poythress’s biblical concern with the gospel of salvation transformed into a worldview telling us how to live in “every” area of life and providing a Christian perspective on “everything.” The initial, apparently Christ-centered vision easily slips out of focus, so that the Bible once again effectively becomes a handbook or instruction manual for living in all areas of life. With this kind of theology in the background, is anyone then surprised to see Christian publishers selling books about biblical cancer cures, financial prosperity, cooking, business operations, alternative medicine, feminine rites of passage, science facts, marital intimacy, leadership communication, racism, stress management, understanding the weather, and so on, ad nauseum? I’m not.
If my argument so far is correct, then the weight of interpretive gravity needs to shift decisively and irreversibly in the hermeneutically Christocentric direction. The centrality of Jesus Christ and the gospel of reconciliation make sense of all of scripture. But we must also consider the meaning and relevance of various parts of scripture that do not clearly fit its gospel message centered on Jesus Christ—such as, for example, New Testament passages that assume and grant the legitimacy of human slavery or say nasty things about Cretans. Goldingay suggests some of the helpful interpretive implications of this approach:
Paul . . . values the Torah and the Prophets primarily as witness rather than command, and his own letters, even when issuing imperatives, may be seen as [a] more fundamentally reflective witness to Christ than a body of commands. . . . [This] enables us to give some account of the fact that the contents of such parts of scripture do not always seem permanently valid or relevant in the way one might expect. This material witnesses to what God was doing in the life of Israel and of the early church as they sought to reshape their lives in the light of God’s involvement with them. The . . . Epistles record the solutions that early Christian groups reached to the questions facing them, and we understand those solutions in relation to their specific problems as part of their witness. We do not have to assume that these solutions are always universalizable and directly binding on us. They are part of the witnessing tradition.[204]
Unfortunately for some evangelical authors and publishers, once this Christocentric hermeneutic is grasped and embraced, more than a few of the popular books they write and publish will become sadly inappropriate and embarrassingly misguided. The Bible is not about offering things like a biblical view of dating—but rather about how God the Father offered his Son, Jesus Christ, to death to redeem a rebellious world from the slavery and damnation of sin. The Bible is not about conveying divine principles for starting and managing a Christian business—but is instead about Christ on the cross triumphing over all principalities and powers and so radically transforming everything we consider to be our business. Scripture, this view helps us to see, is not about guiding Christian emotions management and conquering our anger problems—but is rather about Jesus Christ being guided by his unity with the Father to absorb the wrath of God against sin in his death and conquering the power of sin in his resurrection. Scripture then ceases to be about teaching about biblical manhood and womanhood or biblical motherhood and fatherhood—and becomes instead the story of how a covenant-making and promise-keeping God took on full human personhood in Jesus Christ in order to reconcile this alienated and wrecked world to the eternally gracious Father.
That is not to say that evangelical Christians will never have theologically informed moral and practical views of dating and romance, business dealings, emotions, gender identities and relations, and parenting. They may and will. But the significance and content of all such views will be defined completely in terms of thinking about them in view of the larger facts of Jesus Christ and the gospel—not primarily by gathering and arranging pieces of scriptural texts that seem to be relevant to such topics in order to pinpoint “the biblical view” on them. Those are two very different kinds of theological exercises that can lead to very different outcomes.
Real evangelicals will think about the issues and problems they confront in life not by searching a holy handbook for instructions and information but by passing them through the perceptual and mind-transforming “lens” of the fact of the living Jesus Christ and of God’s reconciling the world to himself in Christ. Therefore, for instance, “The central function of the Old Testament may not be there to ‘tell us what to do.’ It may be more a part of a larger story that God brings to an end many hundreds of years later in Christ. And this story, which ends with the incarnation of God’s Son, had an incarnational dimension from the start.”[205]
I have in my argument been criticizing popular biblicist teachings on cooking, dating, parenting, gardening, marital intimacy, dressing, career development, voting, aging, finance and business management, medicine, science facts, organizational leadership, stress management, and so on. But those are easy targets. Let me now take the Christocentric argument one step further, though more tentatively. It may be not only that God, in giving us the Bible, does not intend through it to inform us about topics like biblical cooking and stress management. It also may be that God does not even intend the Bible to provide us with direct, specific, “nonnegotiable” instructions about things like church polity and government, the “end times,” the ethics of war, divine foreknowledge, the “scientific” aspects of the Genesis creation, the correct modes of baptism, proper elements of correct Christian worship, the exact nature of sanctification, or the destiny of the unevangelized.
Perhaps those are simply not scripture’s central point. Perhaps at least some of those are what the church has long called “matters of indifference,” adiaphora. Perhaps others of them are subjects about which we are simply not completely informed. Perhaps by making the Bible provide us specific, definite answers to such matters we are forcing the Bible to be something quite other than what it intends to be: a witness to Jesus Christ and the gospel of salvation from sin. Perhaps, if and once people have really grasped the good news of Jesus Christ—what really matters, in light of which anything else must make sense—God is happy to let his people work their lives out in different forms of church government and using different modes of baptism, for example. Perhaps some diversity in such matters is okay. And perhaps God has no interest in providing to us all of the specific information people so often desire about the “end times,” divine foreknowledge, and the destiny of the unevangelized.
Further, perhaps God wants us to figure out how Christians should think well about things like war, wealth, and sanctification, by thinking christologically about them, more than by simply piecing together this and that verse of scripture into an allegedly coherent puzzle picture. Perhaps a major error of biblicism has been to try to extinguish the large sphere of “things indifferent,” what for Christians truly are adiaphora. Perhaps evangelicals today could recover a truly valid and defensible understanding of how scripture really is authoritative and definitive by first focusing christologically on the scripture’s center as the definitive and nonnegotiable truth and then greatly expanding the boundaries of much of what is left to “things indifferent,” to adiaphora—and then actually behaving as if they really are adiaphora. There seems to be biblical warrant for such an approach (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 8; 10:31; Col. 3:17). It would seem to lead to a more genuine Christian unity-in-diversity. And it would certainly help to dissolve much of the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. At the very least, I suggest that such an approach is well worth evangelicals considering seriously.
The standard biblicist response to such a suggestion, I am well aware, is that such an approach places the Bible interpreter in the position of having to make judgments, of having to decide what is central and what, by contrast, allows for different understandings and practices (consider again, for example, the charge of “precarious subjectivism” made by G. K. Beale against noninerrantists,[206] noted in chapter 3).
My reply? Making judgments and decisions? Of course! That is the world in which we have always lived. That is the situation we always find ourselves in, whether we admit it or not. That is a task and responsibility we humans simply cannot escape. It is much better for us to “own” that task and to take responsibility for our active role as interpreters of scripture, always drawing on historical Christian tradition, than to pretend that everything in the Bible—not just the gospel of Jesus Christ, but everything else it says as well—is self-evident, self-interpreting, and perfectly self-consistent, so that we merely need to passively absorb and obey it.
The standard objection asks, if humans have to actively interpret and make judgments, who will decide and how can we be certain that they will not decide wrongly? Very good questions. But asking those questions does not make the inescapable need to discern, judge, and decide go away. Every reader of the Bible in one way or another ends up actively interpreting, discerning, judging, and deciding all sorts of matters in scripture. The only question is how honest or in denial about that fact we all are. Biblicism is a strategy that pushes us toward denial. I am here suggesting that we accept honesty and responsibility. “But,” the standard objection still presses, “does not this Christocentric and adiaphora approach cast us into ‘subjectivism’? Do not humans then subjectively decide what matters and what doesn’t?”
Well, yes and no. The hermeneutical approach I am suggesting entails “subjectivism” only to the extent that it acknowledges that all good Bible readers are active subjects seeking to understand the truth, with the Spirit’s help, and that our own minds and spirits necessarily play an active role in that process. That is true about every human scripture reader (and reader of any other text), whether they realize and admit it or not.
However, what I am suggesting here does not need to become “subjectivism” in the sense of the reading subject acting as the sole arbiter of truth, as if the Bible itself simply becomes putty in the reader’s hands to be molded as the reader wishes. That of course can happen and sometimes does happen—including among biblicists. But simply denying the active interpretive role of the Bible reader as involved subject does nothing to prevent the inescapable and legitimate kind of “subjectivism” to which nobody can or should object. How else could humans possibly know truth, other than to involve themselves as personal subjects in the discerning and understanding of it? Of course that can become “precarious,” as Beale warns. But what else is new about life, even redeemed life, as finite humans in this broken world?
Biblicism does nothing to eliminate our precarious positions—it merely hides the precarious from us and, in so doing, often makes our positions even more precarious. The bottom line, then: standard biblicist objections to Christocentric biblical hermeneutics—in which human scripture readers actively interpret texts using discernment and judgment about what is central and what are “things indifferent”—simply do not hold water. They are red herrings. There are no other alternatives in reality, and we should not pretend otherwise.
Having said that, I now return from engaging the standard objections to further developing my main line of argument in this larger section. Such a Christocentric approach to scripture has implications not only for Bible reading but also for biblical preaching. Four days before I wrote this very sentence I heard a sermon preached on a passage from the book of James at a good evangelical church. The sermon was a fine exposition of the text and was well crafted and delivered. At one level it was impressive and edifying, and I am glad to have heard it. Unfortunately, however, that sermon could also have just as well been preached nearly word-for-word at any Unitarian or Mormon meeting. With a slight bit of editing, it might also have been shared after a dinner banquet at any secular humanist association. To be sure, the sermon—which was essentially about being good and our need to do better—was, strictly speaking, “biblical.” But it said almost nothing about Jesus Christ and nothing at all about the gospel story as context for even thinking about “being good.” It did not talk about Christian behavior in light of the overridingly important, cosmos-defining reality of the amazing news of an absolutely gracious God reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ. It was about the damage our wrongdoing can wreak and our need to apply James’s words to try harder to avoid living wrongly. The sermon’s “text” consisted of good, straightforward, expository preaching. But its subtext told us essentially that Christianity is moralism and the Christian life consists of trying to do better.[207]
The subtext of that sermon is flat wrong—a travesty, actually. Yet it is the fruit of biblicist tendencies. Without a clear commitment to Jesus Christ as the sole purpose, center, and interpretive key to all of scripture—and all the implications thereof for all of our hermeneutical practices concerning scripture—that is exactly the kind of “good” sermon that can, and I suspect does, get preached on a regular basis at many “biblical” evangelical churches. The homiletic result is all too often what Goldingay calls the “three-point ‘thoughts that have occurred to me and that I am prepared to attribute to the Spirit and inflict on you,’ which can be the fare of the pulpit.”[208] A Christocentric understanding of scripture, however, points us in a different direction.
What does this do to address the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism? It gives us a crucial hermeneutical principle: read everything in scripture, however unrelated it may seem to be, in relation to Jesus Christ. To accept this Christocentric hermeneutical principle is to admit that not all the texts in the Bible can be read as if each of their words, sentences, paragraphs, and even books as a whole are equally significant for one’s larger theological understanding. The fact is inescapable (nor should we wish to escape it) that “certain parts of scripture which are [believed] to be central tend to condition their reading of the rest.”[209]
It is inevitable to have a “canon within a canon.” But our canon-defining canon must only and always be Jesus Christ. Anything else abuses the Bible for purposes other than that for which God gave scripture to us through Israel and the church. This is true even for the Old Testament: “Christ is the goal of the Old Testament story, meaning that he is the ultimate focus of Christian interpretation. Not every verse or passage is about him in a superficial sense. Rather, Christ is the deeper sense of the Old Testament—at times more obvious than others—in whom the Old Testament drama as a whole finds its ultimate goal or telos. . . . This is something we seek after. A christotelic coherence.”[210] What, I ask, could be more evangelical?
We must be clear: a resolutely Christocentric approach to scripture in and of itself will not resolve all the problems of pervasive interpretive pluralism. But this hermeneutic is a necessary and crucial first step in moving in that direction. By choosing decisively to read all of scripture only and always in the light of Jesus Christ, we knock off the table a number of other interpretive instincts and tendencies that tend toward biblicism and foster pervasive interpretive pluralism. A Christocentric reading of the Bible, then, is a crucially helpful step in the right direction.
Jesus Christ: The True and Final Word
Jesus Christ is the true and final Word of God, in relation to whom scripture is God’s secondary, written word of witness and testimony. This line of reasoning carries the prior point one important step further. Biblicists are often so insistent that the Bible is God’s only complete, sufficient, and final word that they can easily forget in practice that before and above the Bible as God’s written word stands Jesus Christ, who is God’s living Word and ultimate and final self-revelation. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1, 14).
American evangelical biblicists often fall into the trap of talking and acting as if the Bible is God’s highest self-revelation. They have done this for various understandable reasons. One has been to exclude other forms of revelation, such as private prophetic revelations. Another has been to undercut perceived Catholic claims to extrabiblical teaching authority. Yet another has been to protect the Bible from the corrosions of modernist and liberal views of scripture.
But talking and acting as if the Bible is God’s only and highest self-revelation is completely “unbiblical,” even when considered in biblicist terms. God’s truest, highest, most important, most authoritative, and most compelling self-revelation is the God/Man Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ—and not the Bible—who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). It was in Jesus Christ that “God was pleased to have all of his fullness dwell” (Col. 1:19). As C. S. Lewis wrote, “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit, and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”[211]
Such a view of scripture is rooted in the earliest church. For instance, the first-century church father Ignatius of Antioch, in answering those who said they can believe about the gospel only what they can find in the Old Testament scriptures, claimed in response that the “records” that really matter are not written texts but “Jesus Christ. For me, the sacrosanct records are the cross and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the faith that comes through him.”[212] If we want to know anything authentic about who and what God is, that is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. If we want to know the message that God truly and reliably speaks to us, we need to look to Jesus Christ. The evangelion, the gospel, is not simply some cognitive information gleaned from the Bible to which we have to give intellectual assent. Jesus Christ himself is the gospel.[213] And Christ is not simply a figure who once lived in Palestine and has left us alone on earth with nothing but a written historical record of the past, which we are to believe. Jesus Christ is the living Lord who is present in and to his church through his Spirit, the sacraments, right preaching, and the written word of scripture.
The Bible is of course crucial for the Christian church and life. But it does not trump Jesus Christ as the true and final Word of God. The Bible is a secondary, subsidiary, functional, written word of God, the primary purpose of which is to mediate, to point us to, to give true testimony about the living Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ did, could, and will live and reign and make his home with us without the Bible as we know it. The Bible did not and could not exist or have any meaning without the higher, truer, more final Word of God, Jesus Christ. The Bible points. Jesus Christ is the amazing person to whom the Bible points. Scripture mediates God’s revelation. Jesus Christ is the fullness of revelation, which scripture helps mediate. The Bible is passing.[214] Jesus Christ is eternal. The Bible points us to the truth, proclaims God’s truth; Jesus Christ himself is that Truth.
Biblicism borders on idolatry when it fails to maintain this perspective. The living reality of the resurrected, victorious Jesus Christ at the Father’s right hand and throughout the world in the Holy Spirit is God’s ultimate Word to and for us. Scripture too is God’s word, but a secondary, subsidiary, penultimate, written, pointing, mediating, testifying word. The same is true of biblical preaching, except that preaching is a tertiary form of God’s word—subsidiary and accountable to scripture, though, like scripture, always and entirely oriented toward pointing to the living reality of Jesus Christ. Therefore, “Faith does not rest simply on texts, but—also and more—on persons and events. Faith stands or falls not with the status of a holy text . . . but with the knowledge and meaning of these persons and events, which can be mediated by the text.”[215] The important person and event here, of course, is Jesus Christ.
Some biblicists may be tempted at this point to label this thinking “liberal.” That would be an ill-informed mistake best to avoid. Theological liberalism is all about rethinking Christianity from an anthropological perspective, making it essentially about human consciousness and experience and progress. The view just elaborated—in which everything is all about its definition and existence in relation to the reality of Jesus Christ—offers the starkest contrast to liberalism imaginable. Liberalism wants to reconfigure Christian faith and doctrine in the terms of modern, human categories and concerns. The view just elaborated says that every category, concern, idea, and identity must itself be reconceived in light of the ultimate fact of Jesus Christ. Liberalism wants to “demythologize” Christian stories and beliefs in view of “modern” scientific knowledge and plausibility systems. But the view elaborated here tells us that every knowledge system—including, if not especially, modern epistemologies—is literally lost and needing to be rescued and reoriented by the living person of Jesus Christ.
Liberalism gives prior authorization to some or other human philosophical or political system. The view elaborated here acknowledges that all authority has been given to the living Lord, Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:18; John 17:2; Eph. 1:17–21; 1 Cor. 15:24). To label such a Christ-centered understanding of the word of God as “liberal” would betray an ignorance of what theological liberalism is. It would also reveal a motivation to use the “liberal” label defensively to police sacred cows rather than to engage in helpful, constructive, theological discussions. And those kinds of responses are below the best of a thoughtful, informed evangelicalism.
Biblicists may reply that Christ is, of course, the ultimate Word of God, but nevertheless object that the only way anybody actually knows about him is the Bible—and so all anyone is left with today for knowledge of God and Christ is scripture. This claim has a grain of truth in it, but it is overstated when put that way.
Of course the Bible as described above is the primary testifying, mediating witness to Jesus Christ. Of course the Bible comes to the church in writing and therefore enjoys a durability and some level of material objectivity over time (leaving aside the problems of copying and translating). But something is nevertheless wrong with the idea that all presence, communication, fellowship, exchange, and commerce between God and humans always and only transpire somehow through the paper and ink of the Bible. That is an overly rationalistic, modern approach to faith and life. John Webster rightly notes, “Accounts of scriptural inspiration are not infrequently curiously deistic, in so far as the biblical text can itself become a revelatory agent by virtue of an act of divine inspiration in the past.”[216]
But what does the Bible itself say? Jesus Christ is present to his people in the church in the bread and the wine. Jesus Christ is personally present with the believer, who in baptism dies with Christ and is raised in Christ to new life—and so to those already baptized who baptize others as well. Jesus Christ is made present through the Holy Spirit to all people who hear him in the faithful preaching of the gospel. Jesus Christ is the mystical head of the church body in which all his people are united to him. Jesus Christ is present, as promised, with any two or three of his own who gather in his name. Jesus Christ is present to the church generally in the Holy Spirit, who is sent to call, teach, lead, enlighten, comfort, and heal. Jesus Christ is present to the believer in prayer. Jesus Christ is present to the believer in the form of his or her needy neighbor. So the Bible is a crucial but not an isolated nor a sufficient mediating means of knowing, living with, and sharing in the life of Jesus Christ. To argue that our only lifeline to God is the Bible is way off base. It also fails to recognize the many ways we know about and simply know Jesus Christ. It fails to explain how the Christian church for its first three hundred and fifty years—when it did not possess the defined biblical canon as we now know it—managed to know Christ. “The Christian faith,” Craig Allert rightly observes, “did not grow in response to a book but as a response to God’s interaction with the community of faith.”[217]
Again, what does this recognition—that Jesus Christ is the primary, true, and final Word of God to whom scripture as written word only secondarily testifies—do to address the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism? For starters, it prevents us from turning the Bible into an idol. It removes from us the temptation to turn the printed book into the way, the truth, and the life. It reminds us that the Bible is only a means, a testimony, a pointer. What really matters is Jesus Christ as the end, the object of the testimony, the one to whom we are urgently pointed. That helps to keep the Bible in its proper place in the economy of salvation.[218]
This approach also provides an interpretive center to guide our scripture reading. The Bible is not about offering tips for living a good life. It is about Jesus Christ who is our only good and our only life. By ceasing to look to the Bible to answer inerrantly all of life’s questions, we thus remove from the table the temptation to take definitive moral and theological stands on a number of issues that the Bible does not exist to address. Such a view forces us to back up and approach some of those questions within a very different framework of inquiry—a gospel-centered, not a biblicist, framework.
When done well, this can have the salutary effect of taking some “biblical” ammunition out of people’s hands that ought not to be there in the first place, fostering greater humility and openness in areas of disagreement, and providing a more coherent Christ-centered framework for engaging in deliberations on matters about which scripture seems to be multivocal. The ultimate reference of authority in sorting out such matters becomes, then, not variously collected pieces of biblical texts but rather the real and living person and work of Jesus Christ, in relation to whom every and any scripture text makes any sense. The written and reproduced text becomes subordinate to and ordered toward the living and life-giving Christ.
This essentially repositions Bible readers in a way that addresses the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. It does that not so much by somehow hammering out definitive answers to which all must consent, but by dissolving many of the original differences and problems that create the intractable logjams in the first place, and then reconstituting them to be addressed with a different frame of mind—one that thinks of everything in life in terms of what God has done and is doing to and in the world through Jesus Christ. Such a perspective, again, does not automatically resolve every problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. Instead, it reorients our approach to scripture in a more truly evangelical direction that promises to change the grounds upon which we approach differences in understandings about Christian faith and practice.
Learning from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics
At the risk of being redundant, I here underscore the above two points in a more theologically pointed way. American evangelicals have generally given Karl Barth a very poor reception during the last eighty years. This is unfortunate, in my view, and unfair, because Barth offers a very powerful, sophisticated, biblically grounded, antiliberal, evangelical vindication of historically orthodox Christianity that is essentially committed to Reformation principles yet equipped to smartly address and engage modern biblical and theological scholarship. Many American evangelicals consider Barth a liberal, but that is sadly erroneous. Barth was one of European Christianity’s strongest critics of theological liberalism and advocated for evangelical faith during the middle of the twentieth century.
It is obvious from reading American evangelical critiques of Barth that many if not most evangelicals who criticized him have not actually read him—or at least have not read him seriously enough to truly understand his theological program. I all too often see Barth written off by evangelical writers as merely part of a “neo-orthodox” or “dialectical theology” fad of the early twentieth century, which has thankfully gone out of fashion. That is unfortunate and misguided. It would be very good for American evangelicalism today if that mentality were to change.
The poor reception given Barth on this side of the Atlantic is actually understandable for sociological and psychological reasons. In the 1930s and ’40s, American neo-evangelicalism pulled itself up out of the wreckage of the largely failed fundamentalist-modernist battles of the 1900s to 1920s. Those battles had been intense and traumatizing, and the fundamentalists did not fare well in them.[219] I believe that most of the neo-evangelicals who personally lived through those battles, or who through socialization received the evangelical heritage shaped by them, suffered something like what we now call “postcombat stress reaction” or “post-traumatic stress disorder.” What I mean by this is that I think at least two generations of evangelicals living after the fundamentalist-modernist battles and comprising the evangelical subculture continued in various ways to suffer at a primal level something like ongoing, collective, negative, cognitive-emotional effects as a result of that traumatic experience. American evangelicalism as a developing subculture simply had difficulty shaking various analogous forms of flashbacks, anger, hypervigilance, and unwarranted fear of ideas and people associated with the trauma. It was all too easy to suspect new liberal threats lurking around every corner, especially since some serious liberal threats, in fact, were lurking.
But Barth was not one of them. Unfortunately, the writings of Karl Barth came to America in the 1930s and ’40s, which was probably the worst possible time for battle-traumatized US evangelicals to consider a bracing yet unusual voice like Barth’s seriously and with a receptive mind. Barth’s theological orthodoxy was not a brand of orthodoxy conceived from a biblicist perspective and so it was easily labeled “liberal.”[220]
Cornelius Van Til’s misguided but highly influential early book on Barth played a huge role here in poisoning the American well for Barth.[221] That problem was compounded by the fact that the “early Barth” that hit America first—his Letter to the Romans—was by his own admission less well formed, coherent, and mature than the “later Barth” of the Church Dogmatics. It also had something of a Kierkegaardian existentialist tone that receded in the later Barth, after many evangelicals had already made up their minds about him. Many in those years simply dismissed the first Barth that they had read or heard of, failing to consider all of the Barth that followed in the next decades.
These problems were no doubt also greatly compounded by the fact that Barth is not easily read and understood, at least until a great deal of work has been invested into really “getting” his approach. His theological writings are a challenge to get into, take real effort to understand, and ultimately demand of most American evangelicals a kind of paradigm shift in thought and sensibility to grasp as a whole. It was (and is) too easy for the uninitiated and skeptical to give Barth a quick try, find him inscrutable, and set him aside as unhelpful.
Many American evangelical criticisms of Barth that I have read amount to little more, frankly, than misinformed, quick, cheap “pot-shots.”[222] Others, perhaps by not reading the Dogmatics in their entirety, simply fail to understand certain key aspects of Barth’s thought—such as the nature of time and eternity, for instance—and consequently fundamentally misunderstand and mischaracterize other arguments that rely on those (misunderstood) ideas.[223] But all of that was and is American evangelicalism’s great loss. Even if he is “foreign” in certain ways, Barth is not a stealthy enemy but rather a good friend and valuable ally of genuine evangelicalism.
Karl Barth is relevant for this book because he provides an immensely promising way out of the cul-de-sac of biblicism. Here I can do little more than offer a few suggestive ideas how and why that is so. Barth takes the Bible with the utmost seriousness as God’s true and authoritative, even if not always strictly inerrant, word. Serious readers find that Barth’s Church Dogmatics abounds with thousands of pages of careful exegetical wrestling with scripture as the basis of all his theological contributions. Barth engages liberal, humanistic, and modernist readings of scripture and usually smartly dashes them to the ground for their fundamental failings, which he was so deft at showing. Barth made two crucial moves with regard to scripture that overcome biblicist problems—both of which I have already addressed above. Precisely because they reframe understandings in key ways, they both can help American evangelicals but also can make some uncomfortable. As we seek a way out of the biblicist mind-set, however, some discomfort will be unavoidable.
The first of Barth’s moves concerning the Bible is to properly affirm scripture as God’s word, written within the larger context of God’s true Word in Jesus Christ and God’s word spoken in church proclamation. Revelation, Barth helps us to see, is threefold. The highest, truest, most real and authoritative divine revelation to humanity is the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity (John 1:1–18). Jesus Christ is God’s absolutely authentic revelation, the truth to which persons are drawn. The Bible, Barth says, is also God’s word, his word written. But Jesus Christ is the highest, most final, most real word of God. The Bible is God’s word written, which exists as a witness and testimony to the Word of God, Jesus Christ. Finally, God’s word also consists of truthful church proclamation, right preaching, and teaching in the voice of the church.
The Bible is thus affirmed as a divine word of revelation spoken by God through and to humans, the key authority for coming to know the truth. Scripture thus speaks a real truth that mediates knowledge of the Real Truth. But the Bible is not God’s only revelation, or ontologically the highest and most authentic. Jesus Christ—the object and purpose of scripture itself—is that. Scripture is thus removed from the vulnerable position of encouraging an “idolatry of the book,” of which biblicism is sometimes, if not often, guilty.
Scripture is not worshiped. It is not in scripture that we place our hope. It is not on scripture that we stake our lives. All of that is reserved for Jesus Christ alone. Scripture, rather, is God’s true word written—as faithful church proclamation is likewise God’s true word spoken—both of which attest to, bear witness about, and give testimony of the Word of God, Jesus Christ.
The second crucial move Barth makes concerning scripture follows naturally from the first: that all of scripture must be read through a strongly christological lens, just as I argued above. The Bible is given to tell us about Jesus Christ, about God’s reconciling the world to himself through Christ. The Bible must therefore be read with a strong Christocentric hermeneutical perspective as a guide by which to make sense of its message, given scripture’s multivocality and polysemy.[224] It is simply misguided to read the Bible as a jack-of-all-trades handbook for life or an owner’s manual that answers every question about nearly everything. Biblicism falls prey to what Barth unmasks as the idolatrous quest to find an absolute foundation of truth and knowledge that we can hold in our hands, manipulate and control in our minds, and promulgate in our textbooks.
Biblicism often slides into reading the Bible as a “flat” and “centerless” book, as if every one of its verses and words and ideas and propositions—or at least the ones needed to make a particular point of concern at a particular time—was as equally central, important, meaningful, and instructive as every other.[225] Barth helps us to refocus on the purpose, point, and meaning of all of scripture: Jesus Christ. Scripture then must consistently be read christologically. The Old Testament, for instance, must be read retrospectively, through the subsequently revealed knowledge of Christ as the Word. Helpful hints for living or scientific facts with which to battle secular humanists are not what matters in the Bible. What matters about the Bible is knowledge of Jesus Christ, first, foremost, and finally. This strongly christological—and therefore trinitarian—crux of all scripture is what enables believers together, the church, to discern God’s truth amid the rich, often complicated, sometimes confusing, abundantly polysemous, and occasionally even strange and boring pages of the Bible.
American evangelical biblicists would do well to study and consider making these moves regarding scripture. They resolve many of the problems inherent to biblicism in a way that remains firmly committed to a high view of scripture, centers Jesus Christ theologically as the point of the Bible, and provides the proper hermeneutical guide to better biblical interpretation. To remain Protestant and yet to refuse to make these moves is, among other problems, to invite a bad outcome. In the words of the Scottish Presbyterian theologian T. F. Torrance, “The effect . . . is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God’s self-revelation [in Christ] which is mediated through the Bible. This effect is reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the Truth itself to which they refer. . . . The living reality of God’s self-revelation through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit is in point of fact made secondary to the Scriptures.”[226]
In short, biblicism confuses a true and reliable testimony about reality with that reality itself. It naturally replaces that reality with a written book whose sole mediating purpose is to point us to and bring us into the presence of not the book itself but of the real reality, the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the true image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). In biblicism, the Bible becomes the thing itself to which Christians become devoted, what they call “holy,” the basis upon which they build their faith.
It starts early: “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me. I stand alone on the word of God. The B-I-B-L-E.” It becomes easier than many would like to imagine to begin to cling to the Bible and forget about Christ—in fact, perhaps, sometimes to use the Bible precisely to avoid a real encounter with Christ. At worst, the Bible becomes an idol that literally confuses the scriptures with their rightful subject matter. Slightly less perilously, the Bible becomes a preoccupation ironically distracting believers from attending to the living, trinitarian God. Though not inevitable, these very strong tendencies are inherent in biblicism, and they are outcomes hardly worthy of true evangelical faith. Karl Barth helps us greatly to avoid them.[227]