Morgan Guyton has an excellent post on what should be the Christian approach to Scripture, namely approaching it as Jesus himself approached it. And so he takes Jesus’ Sabbath healing, and his principle that “the Sabbath was made for human beings, and not human beings for the Sabbath” as a criterion by which to evaluate the way Christians today use the Bible. Many are found wanting. Here are some highlights:
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). This is one of the most radical statements that Jesus ever made…But in evangelical Christian culture today, it’s as if Jesus never said these words. Because we measure our spiritual credibility according to how toughly we talk about sin, we are invested in making morality burdensome…The degree to which you’re scandalized by the possibility that Jesus might tell you to do something contrary to the Bible is the degree to which you worship the Bible instead of Jesus.
And here’s his conclusion:
So are there people in our world today who are dishonored in the same way that lepers and paralytics were in the synagogues where Jesus worshiped because of Biblical commands whose letter kills the Spirit for which they were written (2 Cor 3:6)? If so, then who will have the courage to receive the “competence from God” that makes us ministers of a covenant that is “not of the letter but of the Spirit”? Jesus did not interpret Torah objectively and dispassionately. He was willing to slant it and twist it in all sorts of ways in order to serve His nakedly biased agenda of affirming the dignity of the lepers and paralytics of His day. Should we not do the same?
All of that articulated within the context of a broadly Evangelical framework. Click through to read the whole thing. And see as well Derek Penwell’s explanation of two different approaches to the Bible.
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