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Bible the “Word of God?”

11.17.05 | 9 Comments

The evangelical claim that the Bible is the “Word of God” is a curious one. In the John 1:1-18" target="_self" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%201:1-18;&version=31;">first chapter of John’s Gospel we learn that Christ is the Word of God. If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, then is the Bible the Word of God made ink? Yet for all of evangelicals’ trust in the Bible, it never itself makes the claim of being the Word of God; it only claims that honor for Christ.

Giving divine status to sacred literature is a belief more at home in Islam, whose eternal Quran stands in roughly the same place as Christianity’s Christ. Christianity’s central, radical claim is that the historical person Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Word of God made flesh. Evangelicals who claim the Bible and Christ are the Word of God place themselves at odds with that central message. Is the Word of God a living, breathing person who walked this earth—or a book? Is Christ not only fully God and fully man—but also fully book? Did a book die for the world’s sin? If both claims are true, how they can both be true has never been explained, or even attempted, to my knowledge. The theological acrobatics required boggle the mind.

The evangelicals’ Bible worship balks at the truth that the life Jesus of Nazareth led among tax collectors and prostitutes, the words he spoke against the scholars and lawyers, the healing he gave to lepers and the possessed, and the lynching he suffered at the hands of an occupying power and its collaborators is, for Christians, the penultimate conversation between god and humanity—which is to say, the Word of God. For all of this, evangelicals substitute a book and a “personal” Jesus no bigger than their individual hearts. How can this even be called Christian?

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