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There are many Jesus Christs that roam this world. There is the Muslim Christ – the one who did not die on the cross, who paved the way for Muhammad, who taught profoundly of a god; there is the Buddhist Christ, the person whose teachings pointed to the self-negation at the heart of true wisdom; there is the Republican Christ, the Christ whose sole passion is for the rights of individuals to forge their own path in life, who looks with favor on the American capitalist state and its democratic structures; there is the Liberal Christ, whose definition of love is something like self-actualization, self-care, self-liberation. There is even the Modernist Christ, the first-century Jewish man whose perfect God-consciousness helped the rest of humanity cultivate their own God-consciousnesses. This one even changed the face of the political, social, and economic state of the ancient world, and was a great moral teacher.
And then there is the Scriptural Christ. Or, in other words, the biblical Christ, the one whom the Christian Church worships. This Christ is the one for whom and through whom all exists (Col. 1), the Word made flesh who dwelt among us, who was God and was with God in the beginning (John 1), the one whose Spirit cries out “Abba, Father” within the hearts of Christians and groans with groans too deep for words (Rom. 8), the one whose sorrowful Passion propitiated the sins of the entire world (Isa. 53), the one who fulfills his own teachings about Blessedness with perfect consistency (Matt. 5), the one whose righteousness justifies and unites us with Himself by faith (Rom. 5-6), the one who is love (1 John), the one whose flesh and blood men and women must eat in order to have eternal life (John 6), the one who chose to empty himself and take on the form of a servant, forfeiting his privilege as the Son of God (Phil. 2), the one who entered the world alongside the Spirit to form the world from the waters of chaos (Gen. 1), and the one who has made peace by the blood of his cross (Col. 1).
The Scriptural Christ is the Person at the heart of the Old and New Testaments, the hermeneutical key to unlock its infinitely-deep structures. He is the one Christians meet when, in faith and in the Church, they read the Scriptures with the eyes the Scriptures themselves bestow. The logic the Bible invites its readers to inhabit and live within is a Christ-logic. There is no thinking about or with the Bible or its many sayings – across the wide variety of its genres and metaphors and imageries – without an inhabiting of this Christ-logic. The Scriptures will always be read in error when this Christ-logic is forsook for the latest philosophical or hermeneutical lens (which, to be fair, are many of the times interesting, well-thought-out lenses, but just not Christian lenses). To read the Bible correctly, says the history of the Church, you have to both start with and end with the Scriptural Christ.
Theologian John Behr teaches us this when he writes, in The Way to Nicaea, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it, so justifying the claim that Christ died and rose ‘according to the Scriptures.’ It is important to note that it is Christ who is being explained through the medium of Scripture, not Scripture itself that is being exegeted; the object is not to understand the ‘original meaning’ of an ancient text, as in modern historical-critical scholarship, but to understand Christ, who, by being explained ‘according to the Scriptures,’ becomes the sole subject of Scripture throughout… Christ, the Word of God, is often said to be the key to Scripture.”[1]
May the Church’s reading of Scripture not fall prey to the kind of scriptural interpretation that would approach its Book like any other ancient text, but may she read and interpret it as the locus of revelation, the place wherein her Lord may be seen, kissed, and loved.
Soli Deo Gloria
[1] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea: Formation of Christian Theology Vol. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-29.
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