Should We Choose Jesus over the Bible?

In response to the biblicism of some corners of Christianity, other Christians have wrongly pitted Jesus against the Bible. Do you know what biblicism is? It’s a careless way of handling the Bible concerning what to believe and how to behave. It assumes a no-creed-but-the-Bible stance on doctrine or denies that we all come to the Bible with an interpretive lens. Biblicism produces problematic ethics and clumsy theology.

The remedy often given for biblicism is to emphasize Jesus over the Bible. Scripture is not God, the argument goes, so we must not venerate it as such. We must see that the Bible points to Jesus, but not the other way around. As stated by Brian Zahnd, a pastor who rejects the orthodox understanding of the Bible, Scripture is a witness to Jesus in the way that John the Baptist is a witness. Scripture, like John the Baptist, testifies about Christ.

Therefore, the argument goes, if we are going to read the Bible as a guide to life, we must read it in the light of Christ. Christ is perfect, not the Bible. Christ is the second person of the Trinity, not the Bible. There is one Mediator between God and man, and it is not the Bible. “The church must always be in conversation with Scripture, but to the end that we must submit to the rule of the living Christ,” Zahnd says. In this view, troubling passages are understood as submissive to Christ, and they therefore can be disregarded or weighted differently.

It may sound good to say we need to submit to Christ over the Bible, but there are deep problems with this view. Read More