Pastor Jacob Birch and are we Christ-ians or Bible-ians?

Mark Moore - a blogger my brother Rich Birch linked to - wrote a very intriguing post today that i want to interact with. The post is entitled The God Who Is Like Jesus. It's an introduction of sorts to three sermons he has preached on similar topics that i have yet to listen to, but hope to soon.

The 1 sentence observation that summarizes his message is:

Christians in all times and all places are CHRIST-ians, not BIBLE-ians.

I get it... I mean the founder of my denomination preached the same sermon over and over again so many times he turned it into a hymn entitled Jesus Only. A ramped up recent adaptation of its lyric and tune is here:







Dr. Simpson's 1st stanza and chorus are:

Jesus only is our message,
Jesus all our theme shall be;
We will lift up Jesus ever,
Jesus only will we see.

Jesus only, Jesus ever,
Jesus all in all we sing,
Savior, Sanctifier, and Healer,
Glorious Lord and coming King.

So my tradition for the last 25 odd years of life and ministry has been a CHRIST-ian one, to use Pastor Moore's word and emphasis.

And this seems to be all that lots of important bloggers, pastors, thinkers and leaders can talk about these days... the need to read and interpret the text of the Bible Christocentrically if not Christologically.

In a way it begs the question... what other ways were we reading the Bible before we all arrived at this revelation as Christ-followers?

We've read it moralistically... looking for rights and wrongs to govern our faith communities by.
We've read it psychologically... looking for everyday wisdom and guidance on "How to" make it in this world
We've read it politically... looking for texts and stories that emphasize our particular niche on the political spectrum be that Cash and Compassion liberalism or God and Guns conservatism.
We've even read it ecclesiastically... looking for directions, prescriptions and priorities for how to grow and govern our churches.

All of those approaches of course fall short of finding what Norman Geisler defined as the "Christocentric structure" of the Bible.

It is at this point i fear that Pastor Moore has broached Paul's admonition to the Corinthians when he says in 1 Cor. 4:6 “Do not go beyond what is written.” 

The jist of the saying is "Check yourself"... "In your zeal for some teaching or some teacher, don't push your ideas past their point of either usefulness or orthodoxy." 

I think Pastor Moore has pushed too far in this emphasis on Jesus, and that is saying a lot for a guy in the C&MA. Its okay... i get it. 

Counselling believers today to live as if they didn't have the Bible is like asking a ship to sail without a rudder. Sure you can put up the sails, the wind can even fill them, but you'll have no ability to set a course and harness the energy of the wind that is so furiously driving you about. 

Let me take Pastor Moore's application question to heart and try to show that separating our following of Christ from a devotion to His Word is at best naive and at worse... well. Mark asked at the end of his blog post:  "If you woke up tomorrow in the first century without a Bible, having never had one, what would you do?"

Well in a sense we KNOW what the believers did when they woke up without Bibles and never having had them:

Acts 1:14-16
14 They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.15 In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) 16 and said, “Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long..."

Pastor Moore was right. The early church did spend LOTS of time in prayer, as Acts 1 noted. We should all do the same. 

But look at what else took up their time. Right there in verse 16 Peter preaches and he doesn't begin his sermon with his eyewitness account, this "unschooled, ordinary man" begins with what the Old Testament taught about Christ as revealed by the Holy Spirit. 

Now i know this blog is falling exactly into the very error Pastor Mark wants us to avoid. He wants us to put down our Bibles and "spend less time trying to sort out the meaning of obscure verses...[to] spend less time forming airtight theological constructs." 

Yet in trying to answer his question we find that the very "unschooled, ordinary men" of the NT Pastor Mark wants us to try to emulate looked constantly into the Scriptures for guidance... preached constantly from the Scriptures... prayed consistently, inspired from the Scriptures ... and proclaimed boldly the Christ of the Scriptures. 

When the Muslims come along 500 years later it will be - instructively i think - the Christians that the Qu'ran identifies as "the people of the Book". 

The apostles - who had actually been with Jesus - even counselled that their letters should be copied, distributed and read elsewhere; Christians joining the long Jewish tradition of text preservation and transmission that has resulted in the Bible we hold in our hands today. 

If simply joining their story with Jesus' story was enough for Paul, we wouldn't have the Bible with His story in it nor the record of how Peter and James and Paul and Barnabas' stories did join with all that Jesus "had begun to do and teach". 

Elsewhere in this blog i have noted the folly of the "next great Christian curriculum" and called for more living out what we already know and less biblical gluttony. With Pastor Mark's call to let "Jesus.. shape your understanding of God and ...believe that God is love and that you were called to be like him." I fully concur.

But THAT Jesus, that life-changing, world-altering, Spirit-filling Jesus is not revealed to us in the fictions of our fickle minds, countless people that ACTUALLY sat, talked and encountered Christ were led astray in their own thinking about him.
That Jesus in who dwells "all the fulness of the Diety" is not found by introspective self-talk.
That Jesus who "is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being" can't be found wandering the trails and hiking the vales of the local conservation area... no matter the cathartic feelings the fresh air engenders.

That Jesus isn't even revealed to us in history books. There is next to nothing anywhere outside the NT about Jesus that can be learned by studying primary sources from the 1st century.

That Jesus is encountered in one place and one place alone... through Holy Spirit illuminated study of God's Word. 

To counsel believers to live as if they didn't have or need the Word of God is to disarm them for the spiritual war in which we are engaged.
To counsel believers to live as if they didn't have or need the Word of God is to starve them of the very nourishment that can sustain them.
To counsel believers to live as if they didn't have or need the Word of God is to risk doing what so many of Jesus' 1st century acquaintances did ... make Him in their own image.
Lastly to counsel believers to live as if they didn't have or need the Word of God is to risk breaking the 1st commandment: setting up an idea or thought of who god is, based on our own devising, suiting on own ends, in the place of whom God reveals Himself to be.

So by all means live out Jesus' story as your story... but do so by knowing what His story is based on your Spirit-illumined study and meditation on God's Word.