What's at the center of Christianity? (3 of 3)

Sorry I said I’d post this yesterday and I’m just getting to it today. Life is unpredictable! This is part 3 of a series of posts on the center of Christianity. If you haven’t read part 1 or part 2, please read those first.

In those two posts, I challenged the way we ask the Bible questions, wondering if it’s the lens though which we should see Jesus/God and our relationship to him instead of a spiritual encyclopedia to serve our questions. I have just a few closing thoughts:

I typed in “Bible answers” into Google, and the very first link, at Bible.com, was typical of the results. Twenty topics are covered on that page, and none have to do with answering the question “Who is Jesus?” or “What does who Jesus is mean?” Instead, they include masturbation, school shootings, finding a spouse, tattoos, beer, gender roles, being gay, and smoking.

My mom once bought me a shirt that had a picture of a Bible on it along with the words, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” I appreciate my mom’s high reverence for the Bible, but to think of it as life’s instruction manual misses the points it’s making, as well as insulting our own ability to think things through if we’re given a framework to work with. It’s silly to suggest that the Bible addresses some of these topics, like school shootings and smoking, since they didn’t exist when the Bible was penned. Still other topics are not addressed directly, while others are of secondary importance at most.

If you investigated that site more, you might say their answers are taken out of context, and there are better, opposite answers elsewhere in the Bible. But why not avoid the controversy by not asking those questions at all? After all, if the Bible is not the center of faith, maybe we should look to who is at the center in order to answer those questions. The Bible does not point to itself for all the answers, but points beyond itself to a man who was God in the flesh.

If we look at Christ’s life, his death and his resurrection, and use the Bible to think about the implications of these events, I argue we would then be better equipped to answer those 20 questions than if we did a Bible word search and just went with what we felt like it said.

And even better than that, revolving our faith around Jesus would allow us to go beyond addressing the issues we care about by actually molding and influencing the questions we even want addressed, fixing my agenda to make it God’s agenda.

Jesus is the center of Christianity, and the Bible is the important, authoritative middle man, telling us about Jesus and fleshing out some implications of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, so that we can know him accurately and respond accordingly.

Let’s never cut out the middle man. But let’s also never mistake the middle man for the for the ultimate source of faith, hope, love and all things. It’s Jesus Christ.