The Straight Edge of Scripture
Revisiting the risen Lord’s hermeneutic.
At the risk of being accused of being a one-trick pony, I’d like to reiterate just how important your approach to Scripture is. Put differently, your biblical theology has the potential to seismically impact your entire faith. Biblical theology, of course, is the conviction that the Bible itself has an overarching narrative to it. Rather than just being a loosely connected collection of spiritual, historical, or moral anecdotes and legends, Holy Scripture is an intricately woven story, written and realized by God himself. Its plot is acutely centered on the Christ of God, through whom the Godhead is profoundly glorified on account of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, through which all things are reconciled to him (Col. 1:20). So, sure, get your “biblical nugget for the day,” just make sure it’s the nugget God’s eager to give you, which is undeviatingly related to the person and work of Jesus.
This is absolutely critical, especially since the way you read and study the Word of God will have a direct impact on the way you perceive the person and purpose of God’s Son. Your approach to Scripture will inform who he is and what he came to do, which bleeds into every other facet of the Christian faith. Depending on how you read the Bible, Jesus could be viewed as a magnanimous humanitarian, a witty politician, a good teacher, or simply just a good person. And as viable as some, not all, of those options are, they fall woefully short on the portrait of the Son of God that unravels from Genesis to Revelation.
If you’ve read this little newsletter for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with this rhetoric. This isn’t just a theological hobby horse, though, at least not as I see it. In my mind, reading the Bible rightly — with Christ at its very heart, and whispered on every page — is one of the foremost disciplines in one’s spiritual arsenal. This goes for both ministry leaders who are responsible for communicating the Word and the churchgoers who are eager to comprehend it. Clergy and laity alike are called to rightly handle the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15), that is, to cut it along a straight edge and set it forth without perversion or dilution. Needless to say, the straight edge of Scripture is Christ crucified and risen again for the sins of the world.
Far from being an oversimplification of Scripture, this is the hermeneutic of the risen Christ himself. This emerges from the scene in Luke 24, which I’ll never grow weary of revisiting. As two of Jesus’s disciples are taking a dazed and confused stroll from Jerusalem toward the village of Emmaus, a stranger joins their party and overhears their despondent discussion concerning recent events. Their Rabbi has been arrested, tried, and crucified. He’s dead, and so was the movement that was seemingly just getting off the ground that they were so eager to be a part of. This is when the stranger dares to call those grieving disciples fools for missing the story that had been unfolding right in front of their faces:
And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:25–27)
The stranger, of course, is the risen Christ, who had concealed his identity from his frazzled followers (Luke 24:16). But right then, he was letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by foregrounding what had been simmering under the surface of every age of history — namely, that all of it centers on and converges in him, the Christ of God, whose suffering had long been foretold as the means by which the ultimate deliverance of God’s people would be effected. However one defines biblical theology, one must grapple with Jesus’s claim that everything from the Pentateuch to the Prophets is about him. Like a magnet pulls objects to itself, the revelation of God in the Crucified One stands to draw the attention and inform the faith of all those who believe, from Abraham to Billy Graham.
I’ve probably buried the lede here, but the reason why this subject seems to be so urgent is that there are factions within orthodoxy who’d oppose such an understanding of Scripture. In an article from 2021, unambiguously titled “Is Christ in Every Text?” one writer attempts to push back on the doggedly Christocentric hermeneutic, to mixed results. The author appears to flatten Christocentricity and allegory, writing, “To dig underneath the text for a deeper (oftentimes, superimposed) Christocentric meaning is allegory.” The thrust of the article’s rather scattered argument seems to suggest that “looking for Christ on every page of Scripture” is akin to proof-texting, and is a modern impulse that ought to be resisted.
While I don’t aspire to some sort of biblical theology Pharisaism, I categorically deny what the above writer suggests. Seeing Christ as the center of Scripture isn’t homogeneous with allegorizing Scripture, although, admittedly, that’s been done in the past, to questionable effect. Seeing Christ as the epicenter of Scripture means seeing the Law and the Prophets and Psalms as fulfilled in him (Luke 24:44). While the ethico-historical reading is valid, there’s a divine undercurrent that’s teeming with better news. Thus, the Bible’s pages aren’t merely meant to convey practical theology; they’re meant to reveal him who, by means of his own blood, secures an eternal redemption for the likes of you and me (Heb. 9:12).
Reading and preaching the Word is only rightly done when the prevailing concern of the Word is likewise the prevailing concern of what we read and preach. And as Jesus told his friends, and us, all Scripture is concerned with him (Luke 24:27). This is no passing fad, like POGs or planking or fidget spinners or saying “YOLO” with a straight face. Preaching Christ from all of Scripture is always in vogue because that’s what the Living Christ has revealed that the Scriptures are all about. “It is they that bear witness about me,” he says (John 5:39). “Christ is the subject of Scripture,” attests R. Scott Clark. “The question is not whether the Bible is Christ-centered but how?”
The writer of Hebrews begins his thirteen-part treatise by claiming that the Word that God has been speaking all along is the same Word that took on flesh to die for us (Heb. 1:1–2). This is just to say that reading Scripture with an eye or two on Christ is not only the hermeneutic of the risen Christ, but also of his apostles. From Peter (Acts 2:22–24) to Stephen (Acts 7:51–53) to Philip (Acts 8:35) to Paul (1 Cor. 10:1–4) and even Jude, who professed that it was Jesus who emancipated God’s people from Egypt (Jude 1:5), the early church was inundated with the message that the one they had been looking for and waiting for had come and risen and ascended for them. Jesus of Nazareth is both Lord and Christ. He is the center and subject of Scripture. This isn’t a trend of modernity; this is reading the Bible rightly.
Again, while it might feel like I am retreading old ground, it’s not without reason. Recent years have witnessed an unending current of ministries and ministry leaders rise and fall, often ignominiously. And I can’t help but think that somewhere along the way, the biblical hermeneutic that understands Scripture with Christ at its absolute center was somehow suffused with a dash of pietistic conceit, political concern, or better marketability. The drift away from the apostolic decision to preach Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2) isn’t always overt, nor is it always downstream of some seismic rearrangement of doctrine. Rather, it’s a byproduct of ministerial impatience, which often leads one to succumb to novel messaging that aims to scratch the itch of those in the pews.
In a series of articles cleverly titled “Flannelgraph Preaching,” pastor and theologian Mike Abendroth presses this point home by warning against treating Scripture as if it is little more than a tidy compendium of moralistic storyboards. That’s very easily done, especially when the biblical metanarrative is jettisoned for something with slightly more mass appeal. Abendroth uses the Old Testament story of Ruth as a window into this phenomenon, showing how easy it is to slide into preaching sermons comprised of admirable characters and practical virtues, all while leaving The Story to fall by the wayside. The point isn’t that there aren’t lessons to be gleaned from the Bible’s characters — it’s that there’s a better, truer narrative to behold.
Instead of seeing David as an emblem for bravery, Abraham for obedience, or Joshua for courage, we’re beckoned to see how David points us to a better King, Abraham to a better Son, and Joshua to a better rest, all of which are downstream of the passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith. He is the one who finishes every plot line and fulfills every hope of reconciliation, with every prophecy, promise, and pattern finding their Yes and Amen in him (2 Cor. 1:20). The great task put before the church and its leaders, therefore, is simply to stay zeroed-in on him who holds every story, including yours, together.
Grace and peace to you.