An idiot’s guide to life
Of late, I've been hearing an interesting line of thought swirling around the Christian circles in which I operate. A few weeks ago, I listened to a man thanking God for giving us his word as “our instruction manual for life”, and then, just the other day, I overheard another person describe the Bible as our “handbook for living”.
As innocent as these phrases sound, I wonder if they are, in fact, damaging to how we view God's word and ourselves. Consider the analogy: an instruction manual is never the object of our desire. It has been written to convey information about how to use the purchased item. It is simply a means to an end. The TV, the MP3 player or the cell phone is more of interest to us. As a result, many of us try to read as little of the manual as possible. Most of us just want to glean enough from it in order to make our new gadget do all its tricks.
Many who read the Bible, while not admitting to it (or even recognizing it), treat the Bible in just this way. Since the Bible is life's instruction manual, the subject of the Bible must be my life. Each passage, then, is read with one main question in mind: “What is God saying to me or about me?” How often is the thought “I need to read just enough of it to learn how to get God to bless my life” in the back of our heads as we do our morning devotions?
It's easy to see why some Christians think this way. Each week we show up to church to hear sermons about ... us! So we come away from Sunday thinking the passage is about us and our lives. And if a sermon is about something other than that, we complain it was too abstract and not relevant to our lives.
At the risk of sounding reductionist, I think it really comes back to Jesus. Reading through Graeme Goldsworthy's latest book on hermeneutics, I've been reminded that, as we've removed Jesus from being what the Bible is all about, we've removed him from being what our lives are all about, and in his place we've placed ourselves.
If the Bible is indeed an instruction manual for life, it is really nothing special. It is just another addition to the Idiot's Guide series, taking its place among the ranks of self-help books.
But Goldsworthy's words are a good remedy to this sort of thinking:
[T]he hermeneutical question about the whole Bible correlates with the question, ‘What do you think of Christ?’ The authority of Christ appropriates the spoken/written word in the Bible. The hermeneutic centre of the Bible is therefore Jesus in his being and in his saving acts—the Jesus of the gospel.
(Gospel-Centred Hermeneutics, Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, 2006, p. 62.)
Putting Jesus back at the centre of our Bible reading will restore the Bible to being the book of all books. It will make the Bible much more interesting, improving the subject matter a hundredfold. It will also restore us to our proper place—as being, dare I say, idiots clinging to the death of Jesus.