We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

JesusNotBible

The Bible is NOT the Foundation

Many people imagine that the foundation of their faith is the Bible. This is viewed as the ultimate center around which everything they believe revolves. However, the foundation of the Christian faith is actually centered on a person, not a book. Whereas Islam has always presented itself as a “religion of the book,” the kingdom of God has been from the start a movement that is centered on a person.

Jesus Christ is the foundation or the center of our faith, not the Bible. He is the one who perfectly reveals to us the love God eternally is, who perfectly embodies the love God has for us, who perfectly models the love we’re to have toward others, and who is the means by which we enter into a loving, faith-based relationship with God.

The only foundation that can be laid, Paul says, for example, is “the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). Jesus is, in the words of Peter, the “cornerstone” that “the builders rejected (1 Pet 2:6-7), which means that the entire edifice of the Christian faith is to be built upon him.

The earliest disciples certainly believed the Old Testament was inspired, but they never based their faith in Christ on this. They used it extensively, but only as a means of pointing people to Jesus, whom they already believed in for other reasons. This is the role that I believe the Bible should play in our lives.

I agree that we should affirm Scripture’s divine inspiration, and I believe we should use it to point people to Jesus. But it cannot bear the weight, nor was ever intended by God to bear the weight, of being the foundation for why we believe in Jesus.

Hence, I don’t see beliefs rooted in Scripture as an end in and of themselves. They rather point us to Jesus and help bring us into, and strengthen us in, our relationship with Jesus. The moment we begin to think that scripture, the our beliefs derived from scripture, are ends in and of themselves, we are in danger of making an idol of Scripture and our beliefs.

We do not relate to a book, or a list of doctrines that are rooted in that book. We relate to, and our faith is founded upon, Christ and his love for us. Participating in this love that is centered in Christ is the end to which all beliefs about the Bible point. This relationship is what gives significance to everything else the Bible teaches.

—Adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 163-170

Related Reading

Cruciform Aikido Pt 3: The Judge Who Lets Them Have It

We ended our last post noting that in the cross God ingeniously turned evil back on itself and triumphed over it. But what does all this teach us about the nature of divine judgment? Two things. First, as the one who bore our sin, Jesus experienced the judgment we deserved when the Father withdrew himself and…

The Centrality of the Cross in Church History

Some readers of Crucifixion of the Warrior God may be assuming that the emphasis I’m placing on the cross is unprecedented in church history. While I will not deny that the cross-centered approached to interpreting Scripture’s violent divine portraits is new, the fact that I’m placing the cross at the center of my understanding of…

Podcast: What Do We Do When the Bible Sends Mixed Messages?

Greg considers how to interpret mixed commands in the Bible—where one verse advises differently than another.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0364.mp3

How NOT to be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part III

In the previous two posts on Oliphint’s God With Us, we’ve seen that Oliphint is trying to reframe divine accommodations in a Christ-centered way, but that what he means by this is not that he is going to derive his understanding of God from Christ, but that he is going to use the “hypostatic union”…

Isn’t the Resurrection the Ultimate Revelation of God? (podcast)

Greg considers the relationship between Christ’s death and resurrection.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0744.mp3

Court-of-Law Theology: How It Falls Short

Courtney “Coco” Mault via Compfight Last week, we introduced a way of talking about theology with concentric circles. This approach is distinct from the common Western model of theology that depends upon a court-of-law framework. The following is an excerpt from Greg’s book Benefit of the Doubt regarding this: ____________________________ Within the legal strand of…