We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.
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
Category: General
Tags: Benefit of the Doubt, Cruciform Theology, Hermeneutics
Related Reading
Atonement: What is the Christus Victor View?
Most western Christians today understand the atonement as a sort of legal-transaction that took place between the Father and the Son that got humanity “off the hook.” The legal-transaction scenario goes something like this: God’s holiness demands that all sin be punished, which in turn requires that sinners go to eternal hell. The trouble is,…
When the Law Demanded the Death Penalty
The Sinai covenant is significantly structured around violence. It motivates behavioral conformity by promising rewards and threatening violence. Without the threat of violence, the law looses its “teeth.” If the law is an acquiescence to sin, then the divinely sanctioned violence that is associated with it must also be considered an acquiescence to sin. The…
Jesus, the Word of God
“[T]he standing message of the Fathers to the Church Universal,” writes Georges Florovsky, was that “Christ Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of the Scriptures both the climax and the knot of the Bible.”[1] It was also unquestionably one of the most foundational theological assumptions of Luther and Calvin as well as other Reformers. Hence,…
How The Imperfections of Scripture Reveal God Perfectly
In my previous blog I discussed one important implication of a cruciform (“cross-centered”) approach to biblical inspiration. On the cross, I noted, God revealed his perfection by identifying with human imperfection. Jesus in some sense became our sin and our curse. In this light, I argued, why should anyone find it surprising, let alone disturbing,…
The Rule of Love
The traditional confession that Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres (“Sacred Scripture is its own interpreter”) presupposes that there is one divine mind behind Scripture, for example. Moreover, Church scholars have traditionally assumed that Scripture’s unity can be discerned in a variety of concepts, motifs, themes and theologies that weave Scripture together. And to speak specifically of the…
The Cruciform Way of the Lamb
In this video, Greg offers insight into how to read the Bible with the cross at the center of the revelation of God, thereby reframing how we interpret the violent and nationalistic passages of the Old Testament. Travis Reed from The Work of the People did a series of interviews with Greg a while ago and…