What kind of book is the Bible?
How should we read and interpret the Bible?
How should we tell the Bible’s story with our words and our lives?
These are the questions at the heart of this marvelous book by Dr. Brad Jersak. (A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way is now available for pre-order: CLICK HERE).
The fancy word for the art and science of interpreting the Bible is Hermeneutics. For the first twenty years of my adult life, during and after college and seminary, I devoured everything I could get my hands on regarding the interpretation of Scripture, the doctrine of Scripture, the nature and authority of Scripture, you name it. It remains one of my life’s passions. One of the things I discovered early on is that there is indeed an art to it. Some people are good at it and some people aren’t – regardless of how much academic training they had obtained. I’m not saying that learning the basic principles of good Bible interpretation isn’t important. They are invaluable. I immersed myself in studying the importance of genre, context, figures of speech, progressive revelation, redemptive trajectory, translation theory, and the editing, collecting, and canonization of Scripture. I also studied the use of Scripture in the liturgy of both the Jewish and Christian traditions. But beyond all of that, there remains an art to it. I guess you could call it a mixture of intuitive insight, Holy Spirit-led common sense, and the guiding, protecting, guardrail-like presence of the interpretive community, both past, and present. Ultimately, we interpret the Bible together or not at all. Having said that, however, there’s one more essential element to this whole enterprise. There’s something more to reading the Bible well. And that something more is what Brad Jersak’s book discusses and discovers.
In the 1980s, Clark Pinnock wrote a book entitled, The Scripture Principle, which launched me on that lifelong quest I mentioned. In the last twenty years or so, I began to encounter a cascade of writers and thinkers who were helping me understand what I now consider to be the crucial ingredient in Biblical Interpretation: that of reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus Christ. I knew in my gut that this was the right path. I learned that Jesus is the best place to start and the best place to end. I was reminded that Jesus is God’s Word in the fullest and truest sense. I was reminded that the best way to read the prophets and the poets and the apostles was to read them as Jesus taught us to read them: as being about Jesus, as pointing to Jesus, as witnesses to Jesus, as leading up to Jesus. In other words, the best way to read God’s Holy Bible is with Jesus Christ by our side: reading the Bible in Jesus, through Jesus, from Jesus, to Jesus, centered in Jesus, and beginning with Jesus. I began to learn that it is folly to journey into the Old Testament (or the New Testament) without Jesus as my guide. I committed myself to never venture into the Bible ever again unaccompanied by Jesus.
But problems and obstacles remained in my thinking. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how to read certain passages in both testaments that seemed to go against the clear revelation of God in Christ. I couldn’t put all the pieces in place. This book by Dr. Brad Jersak, more than any other book I’ve ever read, has helped me to finally begin putting some of the missing pieces together into a more beautiful picture. I’m not saying that I or anyone else will ever be free of the mystery that is God and his self-revelation in Christ through the Holy Scriptures. Not at all. But this book has made the Bible come alive more than ever. The Bible is more sacred in my heart and more beautiful in my mind. This book has indeed painted a more beautiful picture of a more Christlike word.
Full disclosure: I should tell you that Dr. Brad Jersak is a good friend of mine. He is both like a brother and a mentor to me. But this also gives me an advantage. After walking with Brad for many years, I can assure you that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Brad loves the Bible. He deeply reveres the Holy Scriptures. He continues to honor them, read them, pray them, teach them, and live them - in their entirety. I can honestly promise you that he has a very high view of the nature and authority of the Bible. Please know that Brad views the Bible as divinely inspired Sacred Scripture. He truly does and these are not just word games.
I emphasized Brad’s high view of Scripture because there is a type of Christian critic who simply cannot and will not believe someone’s claim unless that someone agrees with all of their opinions. So, before you slap Dr. Jersak’s position with derogatory labels such as “Progressive Christianity” or “liberal” or “unbiblical,” I have a word for all would-be critics, theological watchdogs, and self-appointed apologists: Many of you do valuable work. There really are enemies of the gospel out there and there really are wolves in sheep’s clothing. But Brad is not one of those. Not everything that moves outside of your cherished theological fortress is a heretic worth shooting at. And when you defend your camp like that you are doing a disservice to the kingdom of God. Not everything moving around out there in the woods is an enemy. When you shoot at anything and everything that seems to disagree with you and your perspective, you end up harming the gospel. You become like Doeg in the David story, verbally slaying every man, woman, child, and animal in your path, utterly convinced that you are in the center of God’s will, doing God’s work. By the way, verbally slaying someone else unfairly is called “slander” in the Bible and we all know where slanderers go, according to the Bible. This is definitely a good place to take the Bible seriously and literally. What I would ask of any reader of this book is to give it a careful and prayerful reading. Please consider the possibility that what sounds radical to our modern ears might just be the ancient orthodoxy. We may discover that a more beautiful and Christlike Word is precisely what we’ve had in our hands and in our pulpits all along.
Now, you may ask, what wild and crazy things are in this book that would lead me to defend it before I even begin discussing it? Well, I’ve been around long enough to know that many people will simply dismiss it out of hand because it appears to fail a handful of “pet doctrine” litmus tests and it fails to parrot the catchphrases of the modern evangelical sub-culture. But, enough of that. What’s this book all about? As I mentioned above, the book is about how to rightly read the Bible. Here are some of the major themes:
CHRIST-CENTERED HERMENEUTIC. I mentioned Pinnock’s book earlier. In 1984, he argued for the recovery of a Christ-centered Hermeneutic, which he claims is not only the ancient way of reading the Bible but the Bible’s own way of reading itself. In Pinnock’s words: “this is the Christ-centered and nontechnical approach that the Bible itself seems to take.” In other words, one of the most important things we can do when reading the Bible is to let the Bible be itself – i.e. to take the Bible on its own terms rather than forcing it to do something that it was never designed by God to do. One of the beautiful gifts that Dr. Jersak’s book provides is to remind us to receive God’s gift of Scripture in the manner it was designed and purposed – and to avoid, at all costs, forcing the Scriptures to fit our modern, enlightened, scientific, foundationalist world view. When we do so, we force the Bible to carry a load it was never intended to carry. When we do so, we paint ourselves into a corner in which we have no business being in the first place.
This book is part of a consensus that emphasizes reading the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus. It presents Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone – the canon par excellence. Rather than reading the sacred Scriptures of the church as a flat collection of verses, it proposes that the entire Bible should be read and received as authoritative ONLY after passing through the life, teachings, and gospel of Jesus Christ. This is not some kind of new and novel idea. It is rather a return to the source of our faith and to the ancient orthodoxy of the early church. It is a return to Jesus himself on the road to Emmaus. This way of reading Scripture, admittedly, privileges some texts over others. In other words, when Christ tells us how to read the Scriptures, we are obligated to read them that way – in the Christlike way. When the New Testament tells us quite clearly that God is perfectly revealed to us in Christ and that everything else is a mere shadow or type, then we are obliged to read the Scriptures that way. When the texts of the Old Testament – written, edited, and collected by the ancient lawgivers, prophets, and poets - argue with one another or seemingly contradict each other, we allow Jesus and the Apostles to be the referees. We let the New Testament overrule the Old. As my father-in-law (and pastor) would often say, we let the New Testament interpret the Old. Or, as I like to say, we read the Old Testament in a Christian way. We have no other choice. When modern literalists read the Bible as a flattened collection of verses to be read like a textbook on theology or history or as a look-it-up encyclopedia of religious truths, they end up misusing and misreading the Bible. Furthermore, we not only let the New Testament overrule the Old Testament, but we also let Jesus overrule the entire Bible (New and Old). In other words, whenever we find ourselves using the Bible against Jesus, we are misusing and abusing Scripture.
A CHRISTOTELIC READING. This phrase, a Christotelic Reading, comes from Pete Enns and it speaks of the “end” or “goal” of Scripture. Of course, the very mention of Pete Enns will get the watchdogs fired up, but that is unfair. On this point, I think Dr. Enns is right on: the Bible is a lot of things but at its core, it is a sign pointing to Jesus Christ. It is a guide bringing us to Jesus. It is a pointer or a map to a destination which is Jesus Christ. It is not the destination itself. Jesus is. The Bible is a divinely inspired, infallible compass. As Brad Jersak puts it, “its authors, narrators, and events all employed by God’s Spirit, directing me to pursue the Person.” This distinction between the Bible and Christ is not a liberal or progressive move towards a lower view of Scripture. It is an absolutely necessary distinction. Biblicists deny that they are guilty of bibliolatry – the idolatrous worship of the Bible itself. But without this distinction between the Bible as Christotelic and the Person of Christ himself, this idolatry is always a near and present danger. If these words make you nervous, don’t forget that Karl Barth would likewise describe the Bible as “first and last, the word ‘Jesus Christ.’” Barth goes on to describe the entire Bible as “the name Jesus Christ, concealed under the name Israel in the Old Testament, revealed under his own name in the New Testament.” When Barth speaks like this he is not only echoing the early church fathers and the great Eastern theologians, he’s also walking hand in hand with both Calvin, Luther, and the great Protestant reformers. You can look it up.
GOD LET HIS CHILDREN TELL THE STORY. Uh-oh! Here’s another phrase from Dr. Enns. This, I predict, will be the most controversial element of Jersak’s book. It was certainly the most difficult for me to grasp. As I have grown in my understanding, however, I think this is one of the keys to a proper and healthy understanding of Scripture. This is true not only of the obvious passages in the Old Testament that seem indefensible in light of Christ, but also many New Testament passages as well. In other words, we can receive the entire Bible as divinely inspired Holy Scripture without denying the obvious truth that Peter and Paul and all the others always used their own words from their own world views and from within their own cultural contexts. We’ve always known this, but we sometimes don’t know how to apply it. Brad’s book does a wonderful job teaching us how to do it well and how to avoid falling into the abyss on either side of the narrow way. Ironically, you have fundamentalist literalists on one side and modern liberals on the other – they are opposite sides of the same Biblicist coin. They are merely arguing over the facts – both immersed in tragic adventures of missing the point. One quick (and well-known) example is Paul’s instructions to slaves and their masters. Since God allowed his child to tell the story, he allowed the Apostle Paul to command the slave owners in his congregations to behave like Christian slave owners. If the Bible was simply a flat collection of God’s literal and timeless words, might we assume that God would just condemn slavery outright? But the Bible is not that kind of book.
We can fairly assume that God is not a big fan of one human being owning another human being as a piece of property. Might we also, along the same lines, fairly assume that God would never command some of the more horrific things he is said to have commanded in the Old Testament. When we make these assumptions, we are not imposing our own sensibilities upon the text, as some critics would accuse. Rather, what we are imposing on the text is the clear revelation of God in Christ. This is the point of A More Christlike Word. This is also the approach, as I keep saying, of ancient orthodoxy. As Jersak’s book discusses, do we really think that God would command, as the Bible “says” he did, that the Israelite men were to kill all the women in an enemy’s town except for the good looking virgins – which they could keep for themselves if they wanted them? And would God really say that after the men enjoyed the virgins for a month or so, they could send them down the road if they didn’t like them? (see Deut. 20-21 and Numbers 31. I could provide hundreds of other examples). But the Bible isn’t that kind of book. Yes, the Bible is divinely inspired Holy Scripture and belongs in the church’s canon. But it is up to the community’s best theologians and teachers, led by the Holy Spirit, to together interpret those passages rightly and in a Christlike way. You could even say that the entire Bible is God’s Word to us (and “useful” to us) – but in what way? That is always the million-dollar question.
By the way, I’m aware of the obvious objection: “but how do you know what you know about Jesus if the gospel writers themselves are just human authors (God’s children telling the story in their own way)? As you’ll read in Jersak’s book, the church worshipped the risen and living Christ – whose life and teaching were attested to by hundreds of eyewitnesses. The earliest believers go out of their way to say “this is different. We heard him with our ears, we saw him with our eyes, we touched him with our hands. This is a historical event. He suffered under Pontius Pilate. He was crucified, died, and was buried. On the third day…” This reliable witness and testimony is our beginning point. We either believe this testimony or we don’t. We then either encounter the risen Christ or we don’t.
WORSHIP PRECEDES THEOLOGY. As Jersak writes, worship precedes theology, “often by several decades.” This is important when it comes to the canonization of Scripture. But it’s also relevant to our view of the nature and authority of the Bible. At the core of the praying, believing, and worshipping church was the living Christ. He was the center of their faith, the focus of their worship, and the one with full authority over their faith and practice before the New Testament was even written. Another way to put it: the praying and worshipping community precedes the canon and the creeds. The creeds summarize and articulate what the worshipping community had always believed. The canon, likewise, validated and “closed” the list of Holy Scriptures that the church had always read and revered as part of its liturgical worship. Why this is significant to our biblical hermeneutics is because the Bible was created and interpreted by the worshiping community. It was never to be read as a separate flattened collection of verses – to be interpreted in a vacuum by an individual interpreter. To quote my father-in-law again, God is against all private interpretation. In my forty years of pastoral ministry, I’d have to echo that warning. Every crazy crackpot that has come through our church over the decades – without exception – was somebody who had interpreted the Bible all by herself or himself. The sad thing is that I’ve also witnessed this same spirit, albeit in a larger and more sophisticated context, in Christians who become devoted to defending particular factions within the church. Factions, fortresses, and camps arise, of course, from differing interpretations of Scripture – pervasive interpretive pluralism – to use Christian Smith’s phrase from his marvelous book, The Bible Made Impossible. Smith’s point (and my point and the point of Brad’s book) is that this never-ending factionalism is inevitable within the context of a “flat bible biblicism” (or what could be called Modern Literalism). It’s inevitable because each person, or each camp, views their positions as thoroughly “biblical” and judges anyone with a dissenting opinion as “unbiblical” and “progressive.” A More Christlike Word serves as a powerful antidote to this hermeneutical disease. Maybe, by God’s grace, the book might also help us grow out of this disease of conceit over our own opinions. May God bless this wonderful book and help us all to read the Holy Bible in a more Christlike Way.
Joe Beach is the pastor of Amazing Grace Church in Denver, Colorado and the author of Ordinary Church: A Long and Loving Look
Amen! May we all intimately know Jesus, The Word of God, as the true key of understanding the Scriptures!
Posted by: Andrew Chapin | June 25, 2021 at 03:01 PM
Just pre-ordered! Can’t wait!❤️❤️❤️
Posted by: Teresa Dalton | March 31, 2021 at 06:17 AM