Don Francisco on the Bible as Idol

Christian music artist Don Francisco shared this striking reflection about the Bible on his Facebook page:

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Answer: They can rebuild them.

The foundations have been destroyed, but not in the simplistic way most of Western Christianity imagines– it has taken centuries of knee-jerk defensiveness, blind acceptance and willful ignorance to reach our present state of ruin. We have become idolaters, and we worship the Bible. Calling it infallible and inerrant, we have exalted it to a place between humankind and God. Paradoxically, we have made the Bible an antichrist.

Those are hard words, but we must hear them. In our foolish attempts to defend the Faith, we have turned the Scriptures into a solid piece of cement and blocked the doorway to Life with it. The Word of God IS perfect, infallible, and inerrant– and by the age of eighteen He had grown a beard. The Bible is many wonderful things, but it is not the Word of God– only the Father’s beloved Son is. When that living Word is redefined by men as words on a page, they murder the prophets of every age, from Adam down to the present, blocking the Holy Spirit from their own hearts as they deny His voice can be heard in anyone else’s. And His voice IS heard by anyone who will listen.

Before the foundations can be rebuilt, the rubble must be removed– the lies, misconceptions, and half-truths, and the unstable, dangerous, and hurtful structures that are built on them. The first step is exposing the rubble for what it is.

Francisco uses really striking imagery – such as when he talks about the perfection of the Word of God, and then mentions him growing a beard, jolting the reader into recognition that he had been talking about Jesus and not the Bible.

Many progressive Christians would emphasize that the Word of God transcends even Jesus, and thus avoid a simple identity of the two (just as the Logos precedes the life of the human Jesus in the prologue of the Gospel of John, and presumably does not cease to permeate the cosmos even during his life). But in general, we emphasize, as Francisco does, that the Bible does not present itself as the Word of God, and in the New Testament, in places, points to the life of Jesus as embodying God’s Word in a way that no text ever has or could.