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Holy Scripture is Not the Word

Posted by Jess Austin Michalik, 1/13/05 at 11:36:42 AM.

And in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God

----John 1:1

And another time this priest came to another meeting a-top of the hill, and fell a-jangling.  First he said that the scriptures were the word of God, and I told him they were the words of God but not Christ the Word.

----George Fox, Journal

One of the common myths that one finds in the sermons and writings of many contemporary Christians is that the Scriptures are the “Word” spoken of in the prologue to the Gospel of John.  This myth is, to my eyes, symptomatic of the more general afflictions of the religion today and is therefore worth rebutting.

Firstly, it is worth stating that the Greek word translated as “Word” is logos.  This word is the root of English words such as logic, logical, and even logo.  Except in this very particular case the word logos is never translated as “word,” but rather as a number of somewhat related concepts such as “reason,” “statement,” “utterance,” “principle” and “plan.”  The translation of logos as “word” is certainly lacking in the richness of the original concept which had a long history in Pre-Socratic and Platonic thought.  In the creation theology of Philo Judaeus, an Alexandrian Jew who was a contemporary of Jesus, the logos represents God’s plan, or the reasoning principle of God by which the material world is brought into being.  Thus, when John writes that Christ is God’s logos, this statement would have been understood at the time as signifying the principle of reason and discernment through which God creates and brings about knowledge and truth.

For early Christian theologians such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, the statement that Christ is the logos was taken as meaning that Christ is the principle of true reason which dwells in all of us.  Augustine, writing in the late 4th century, saw Christ as the only true teacher whereby a person could learn anything.  Christ as the logos, as the principle of discernment, is according to Augustine, the “light” of the mind.

It is easy to see how far this brief look at early Christian philosophy takes us from the notion that the “Word” of God is the Bible.  Certainly it is a tenet of nearly all Christians that the scriptures are inspired words of God, but the notion that the Scripture should be thought of as the “Word” written of in the prologue to the Gospel of John is nowhere supported by Scripture and is, in fact, a view which it is only possible to hold so long as one ignores the writings of philosophers and theologians before and after John, all of whom used the term logos to mean something far more interesting.

I consider this distinction, between the Word as the indwelling and cosmic Christ and the Word falsely thought of as the Bible, to be all important for the future of Christianity.  To put it simply, the idea that the Word is the Bible seems to me to be symptomatic of the willingness of so many fundamentalists to utterly turn their backs on the difficult path of self-transformation found in the teachings of Christ and Paul (who speak of the Word and Spirit of Christ as abiding inside of us (Rom. 8:9; John 5:38)).  These Christians love to look outside of themselves and to point to this or that passage in Scripture.  See! they say.  Look right here!  It says that we should do this; and we should do that!  But when we ask these Christians about the true Logos, the Christ who has come to teach us Himself, the Light which will enlighten us, the Spirit which indwells, they have nothing to say:  They can only point to the dead letter.  They call this “the Living Word,” as if it were not obvious that the Word-that-lives is the one Paul spoke of when he said “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Ga. 2:20).

It is one of the tragedies of our time that the religion of Christ Jesus has become a mawkish and ridiculous joke.  The doctrine heard in the steeplehouses of our day is worthy of those children which Paul spoke of as still being under a master, but is entirely unworthy of us as grown-up and made free in the Spirit of Christ.  It is simple enough to find Christians who can quote the scriptures this way and that, but to find a Christian who has ever sat still and listened for that still small voice, to find a Christian who has ever waited upon the Lord and called upon the Light that the dark recesses of his or her soul might be illumined, that is another story.

What I wish to say is this:  Don’t worry about words outside; worry about the Word inside.  Christ has never stopped teaching.  Through prayer, meditation on higher things, and silence, the Light remains available to transform us.  Here in this inner space there is no doctrine, no letters that tell us the way things should be, but rather, as adults, as grown-up in Christ, we must face our responsibility and, standing in the light, seek a path of justice, whatever that might be.  No one can think for us.  There is no authority, which, in truth, can provide us with the answers.  We ourselves must become enlightened, because the power to choose, the power to craft a better future, cannot be retrojected back upon ancient writings (as though one could sneak away from one’s own freedom).  Therefore let us pray for the awakenment of our own hearts and minds that we ourselves might be given words by the Light of Lights, by the indwelling Spirit, by the One who is our Teacher.

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