So you're on a ship, and there's a kraken who demands a sacrifice, and there are two things on his menu: Jesus Christ or the Bible. Once you give him the sacrifice, it disappears forever.
So what's the main thing? Is it Jesus or the Bible?
Sophie's Choice is child's play by comparison.
Few of us could get past the stomach-lurching decision to throw Jesus to the kraken, so we would then throw to the deep the book that introduced us to our savior. Most of us would keep our Savior and lose the book.
That makes Jesus the main thing.
This is important to remember when we speak about our infallible, ineffable, inerrant, indescribable book. It is a book containing The Word of God - The Word Made Flesh, the Word was God, the Word there from the beginning. But it is not our Savior.
Thankfully, we don't have to make a decision to bin the book forever. As long as there are hotels, there will be Bibles.
But this thought was brought up by our study this week of the theologian the 20th Century will be remembered first a thousand years from now. Not Billy Graham or CS Lewis or any of our fine popes or Dietrich Bonhoefer or Rheinhold Niebuhr or Martin Marty or Hans Kung or Leo Buscaglia or Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King Jr or Soren Kierkegaard or Gustavo Guiterrez or Paul Tillich or Tim Keller but this man:
Karl Barth is the reason the 20th century will be remembered, theologically, anyway.
I've said that your place on conservative/liberal continuum of the Bible depends on how seriously you take the Bible.
On the one end, there are liberal theologians who claim that the Bible is a decent study guide and interesting artifact that has some interesting stories and poems which led to the start of a new church which changed the world. The Easter Event (whatever it is) led to the disciples being convinced that Something Important happened and their reaction led to telling others about Jesus (who may or may not be who he said he was) and thus giving us all a good reason to help others.
On the other end, there are the fundamentalist theologians, who spend most of their time trying to crack the code of the Bible, trying to forget that God's word said, "No one knows the day or hour." Their hermeneutic can be summed up by "The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it."
A similar statement was made by Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed Theologian, who in his only trip to America was once asked if he could summarize his entire life's work in one sentence. This is a man who set about a massive task of systematizing Christian doctrine (he was on Volume 13 when he died in 1968). But he did not pause, but said, "'Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'"
But before the fundamentalists begin passing around the celebratory snake, Barth did not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, felt it was a human book filled with such obvious flaws to beggar belief to the contrary. He believed fervently that everything was secondary to Jesus Christ, including the Bible. When we slavishly defend the Bible against error-seekers, we're missing the point of Christ crucified. When we try to argue for a 6000 year old earth, we're missing the pint of Christ crucified. When we treat the Bible like a game of Jenga That if we admit to one error in the Bible, the whole world will come crashing down.
Forgetting that Jesus is The Word of God, who died to save our sins.
I was introduced to a new concept of the Bible as "the paper pope." That ought to give us Protestants a little pause, true? Are we willing to throw our savior to the kraken in favor of the book that taught us about him? Or do we have a proper understanding of the relationship between our Lord and Savior and the holy book where we discover him anew each day?
Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. The Bible is the vehicle by which we discover The Main Thing.
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