I.

One day a few years ago I got a call from a man who wanted to know something about the church I was serving at the time. This happens occasionally and I usually speak with people like this briefly, send them out a packet of literature, and invite them to worship.

But this particular man immediately engaged me in a long conversation regarding a whole lot of theological issues, from the Westminster Confession to whether or not we believed in eternal punishment.

I argued for the kind of approach we get from Jesus and from his foremost interpreter, the Apostle Paul. In our study of Romans we have already learned that our faith is based on the salvation God brings into the whole world in Christ. In Christ God acts to save and renew the whole creation. In Christ we see how God loves us, and forgives us, bestowing upon us new life.

The caller, however, seemed to have an obsession with hell, judgment, punishment, the devil, and a very narrow understanding of election. When I suggested that his approach took certain themes and verses from scripture and arbitrarily made them more important than others, he vehemently denied that he did anything the Bible itself didn’t do.

And not only did this man’s version of the deity resemble Joseph Stalin more than Jesus Christ, he also treated the Bible like a book of absolute, eternal written laws. Adhering to the letter of this set of truths and rules was all that Christians had to do to be saved. If you broke any part of the system, you showed yourself as one predestined to hell.

This kind of radical biblicism afflicts our Protestant tradition like a pervasive cancer. The Bible is often thought to be the only, self-sufficient, complete, and absolute authority in the church. And it is. But it is so, not in itself, but because and when it serves to point beyond itself as the unique and authoritative witness to the eternal Word of God, who is Jesus Christ. Separated from the revelation of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ, the Bible can be, and has been, twisted into a very nasty piece of literature.

II.

The Apostle Paul found himself dogged by exactly the same kinds of people and attitudes in his ministry. Paul’s opponents had basically one refrain: that we had to keep to their view of the Bible no matter what. We have to meticulously keep the whole law. The Bible constituted the only, complete, absolute, independent Word of God in human life, and believers must keep to every "jot and tittle" of it.

More specifically, they said you had to keep the food laws, you had to be circumcised, you had to follow the rituals of sacrifice, you had to keep the Sabbath in a certain way, and so on.

Paul himself comes out of this very tradition. The Pharisees raised the most vocal arguments in favor of this perspective; and before his conversion, Paul had lived as an enthusiastic, even fanatical Pharisee. He knows this mindset very well from the inside.

And because of his mystical experience on the Damascus Road, and what followed it, his whole perspective changed. He rejects this kind of radical biblicism in very forthright terms. Instead, he preaches a more directly available, universal, spiritual, and gracious good news in which God does something new. This new thing was certainly foreshadowed, predicted, prepared for, and witnessed to in the Bible. But in many ways it fulfilled the Scriptures, often with the effect of rendering whole sections all but irrelevant. In Christ, God actually does and fulfills what the Bible talks about, and looks ahead to.

Therefore, Paul approaches the Bible with a lot less rigidity. When he talks about "the law," or "the letter," or "the written code," he means, not just the 613 individual laws of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these terms denote Scripture as a whole. Paul was deeply concerned that Christians not fall into the same ways of using the Bible as his fundamentalist opponents. It must not become a divine rule book or measuring rod. It must not function merely as a legal code, a set of commandments in black and white which Christians must obey to the letter in every case. It must not be reduced to a bludgeon with which we hammer others for not measuring up.

Paul believes that it is God who gave birth to the Bible. The Scriptures are indeed "God-breathed." And it is by having some kind of contact with that source, even through the Scriptures themselves, that we come to know the truth of the Bible within us, and we within it. Rather than something out there which must be obeyed, the truth of the scriptures becomes something in here, in our hearts, and in everything God has made.

III.

Paul says that the law arouses sinful passions because it points them out and makes us aware of them. I suspect that this is what happened to the guy who called me; his twisted reading of the Bible obviously aroused in him an obsession with hell and sin and punishment.

When a child comes into the world, she is able to see things in their essential, universal, basic, original, state: colors, shapes, sounds; all without definition or reference. But gradually she begins making connections as to what feels familiar and comforting. Thus she starts making value judgments: distinguishing "good" from "evil."

The idea of a commandment sort of enters our life the first time we have to be told NO. And NO enters our own vocabulary. The word "no," signifying nonbeing, negation, nothingness... comes as an early sign of emerging consciousness, and therefore introduces us, technically, to "sin." So, while we are told "no" for our protection and growth, "no" also limits and separates us from our essential unity with God and the world.

"The very commandment that promised life proved to be death for me," says Paul. The very "no" that kept us out of the street and away from the hot stove, also separates us from our natural connectedness with all things. The "no" we see in a red traffic light may protect us from an accident, but we can also feel it as a repressive, negative, brake on our self-expression. God gives the Bible and the laws in it as a guide in how to live creatively and joyfully together; but we can mistakenly hear it as a great big "no" to us and to creation.

How many people have we known who only hear the Bible as "no!" and "Thou shalt not!"? How many have let the Bible strangle them and separate them from the Spirit? How many comatose souls have we met, who have suffered from an obsessive devotion at least bordering on idolatry concerning the written code? How many experience God's Word as a colossal NO to everything in their lives, as a giant red light hanging over their every dream?

The guy who called me insisted that we need to emphasize this "no" and sharpen the fear it strikes in people’s souls. He saw this threat as essential and basic to the Biblical message. He even saw hell as the main, central point of the Bible!

So much for good news.

IV.

But Paul makes the point that Christ's death, and our participation in it through baptism, has liberated us from bondage to the law. "You have died to the law through the body of Christ," he says, "So that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead." Basically we are able to correctly interpret the law by having direct contact with the law's Source: Jesus Christ. Having access to the source of the law, we are able to understand the law’s true meaning and purpose.

In Seminary I had a friend who studied architecture at Princeton University. She had this paper to finish on the work of an architect named Robert Ventura. After reading his books, she still had questions. Now, most people would simply bring these questions to the professor, or would look up critiques or reviews of his work to find answers. These kinds of approaches work when the author, like most of the authors of things you read in college, is dead. But Robert Ventura was, and I believe still is, very much alive.

So, she finished the paper and included definitive answers to some of these questions about Ventura’s work, and the professor asked her where she got them. What book, or review, or commentator came up with these interpretations? How did she know that this is what Ventura was trying to do? My friend explained that her authority was Ventura himself; she simply called him on the phone.

Paul says that in Jesus Christ, by the Spirit, we have more direct access to the ultimate author and subject of the Bible. We can tell from Christ what the text really means. We don’t have to rely on elaborate cross-references; we don’t have to approach the text as a self-contained, independent, closed authority. We can go right to the Source, or rather, the Source has come to us in Jesus Christ.

In Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, we know the subject matter of the Bible. We thus have a relationship with the One who gives us the Bible. Therefore we have some idea of how to interpret it. The Scriptures are correctly interpreted when we hear them witnessing to the saving love which God brings into the world in Jesus Christ.

God is not determined by the Bible any more than the terrain or the highways are determined by what it says on a map. God is not bound to do what we think the Bible says God should do. Rather, the Bible is determined by God the way a map reflects and represents reality. It is given by God and God gets to decide what it means, not humans.

The Bible is given by God as our primary access to the revelation of Jesus Christ. We cannot understand the Scriptures without being in a relationship with the One to whom it refers on every page. Instead of needing the law, the Bible, the written code, to shape our behavior, now we rely upon our experience of the love of God revealed and given in Jesus Christ. This is something we are supposed to experience by the power of the Holy Spirit in the gathered community, the Church. By means of this spiritual knowledge, we know the truth of the Bible. Only then does it become a fruitful guide for us in the shape and nature of the new, resurrection life.

Once we understand and participate in God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, and see how the Bible reflects and expresses and gives form to that love, we emerge into the kind of spiritual maturity Paul intends for the believers. In Jesus Christ God has changed everything; now we need to see how this truth has changed us. If we are connected to the Source, we will be able to see how God’s message of love, acceptance, joy, peace, goodness, forgiveness, and hope is the only reliable truth in the world.

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