The Church and the Eclipsed Christ – Mark Rich
You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. (John 5:39-40)
Yesterday we looked at how one prominent example of academic correctness and ignorance partially eclipses the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly in its shabby treatment of Jesus’ economics. However, by comparison with the church’s almost entire ignorance, we should praise Hays for the short inclusio he does have on economics. We also noted Hays’ reflexive biblicism, somehow incapable of doing just what Jesus urges in John 5 and what John Howard Yoder advocated in his classic The Politics of Jesus.
Today we widen our view to look at the church. Hays’ reflexive biblicism is mild compared to what goes on in the church. What I want us to see (at least in part) is how we use the Bible to cover over, to eclipse, the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Let’s recap why the Bible is vitally important to the church, and also why it’s not. Its chief importance to the church is that it bears Christ to us. The profundity of the transformation effected by Christ is hard for us Christians to understand for ourselves and then also to bear along to our neighbors and children without the Bible to help us. But the reverse is also true: without intimately knowing the gospel we cannot in turn see it within the Bible.
To observe the obvious, the Bible contains gospel, non-gospel, and anti-gospel. That’s just the fact of it. Without knowing Jesus’ gospel we cannot possibly distinguish and appropriately value those three. Without that we slosh about in the Bible heedlessly, like the disciples caught in a windstorm on Lake Galilee. “Christ is the Master; the Scriptures are only the servant.”[1]
So the Bible is not a stand-alone revelation. It does not reveal God’s will just by the fact of its existence. One cannot simply read it directly and in doing so automatically receive the word of God. The endless gush of lazy sermonizing that merely takes a Bible verse and then extracts from it, while reading into it, a variety of spiritual insights is not quite Christian proclamation. Apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ, we’re just making up what Luther called “self-spiritualism.”
I once had a person who styled themself (please excuse the barbarism; I don’t want to give away the person’s identity) a prayer warrior boast to me in front of others about how what s/he really wanted to do in life was to obey all the commandments in the Bible. No, I didn’t burst out laughing. Not only is that goal impossible to actually do, it’s also not what we are called to do as Christians.
Our calling as Christians is simply to follow Christ, or as the end of Matthew puts it,
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me (Jesus). Go therefore to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to do all that I have commanded you.
So that actually leaves out a lot of stuff, non-gospel and anti-gospel, that is in fact in the Bible. To give a very few examples:
— Prostitution, which is accepted in the Torah but is prohibited by Jesus for his followers to take advantage of.
— Slavery, which Jesus both canceled and commanded his followers to adopt their ex-slaves as brothers and sisters.
— Animal sacrifice, which Jesus not only preached against (like Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, and others) but actually stopped in the Temple, thus engineering his own crucifixion.
— Fertility, which disappears as a value in the New Testament.
More to the point, our modern biblicism blinds itself and many others to the gospel. Its politically convenient obsessions with sexuality, modern Israel, and militarism are all flat-out opposed to the gospel, but just try to get a hearing on that. The biblicists have wrapped themselves in the American flag and the Bible together, giving themselves the appearance of being both super-patriots and super-Christians (which superior appearance is exactly what they crave).
This appearance then has a perverse double effect. It abashes more modest Christians, who in their ignorance of the Bible allow the biblicists to keep the field of argument, feeling incapable of matching them. The obverse of that is that the media, being even more ignorant of the Bible, credulously credit the biblicists with being genuine Bible interpreters, thus making Christianity itself appear to be conservative foolishness to the mediated yet biblically ignorant many. So both the cultured despisers of Christianity and the extreme biblicists win, and the gospel is not allowed to make a genuine appearance.
The Bible can be fatal to the gospel when, in the grip of biblicism, we fool ourselves into believing just anything that we find in the Bible. Ain’t it funny how that ‘just anything’ always just happens to be non-gospel or even anti-gospel?
[1] Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians: 1535” in Luther’s Works vol. 26 of the English edition; p. 295.