At this year’s meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, Al Mohler introduced an amendment to the convention’s constitution. His intent was to clarify, in the most specific terms possible, that only men may speak for God.
Mohler couched his rationale for such a clarification under the guise of the need for truth and unity. He argued that only by defending the truth of its confession of faith could the unity of the convention be maintained.
Listening to Mohler’s argument, I was reminded of the question Pilate asked Jesus just before he sentenced him to death: “What is truth?”
Jim Holladay
I want to believe Pilate was more or less sincere when he asked that question and that his encounter with Jesus had rattled, if even the tiniest bit, his certainty about what was true.
What concerns me as I listen to many defenders of “truth” in the church today is that they have substituted secondary (or derivative) truth for the Truth.
Years ago, I was confronted by someone who called me a heretic because I believed (according to him) the Bible contains the word of God, but is not the word of God. I asked him to answer me a question: “Do you believe the Bible is the ultimate word of God or the penultimate word of God?’
He replied, “I believe the Bible is the ultimate word of God.”
I responded, “Then if either of us is a heretic, it is probably you, because the Bible itself bears witness to the truth that Jesus is the ultimate word of God.”
In John’s Gospel, the conviction that Jesus is the truth is repeated over and over again, beginning with the Prologue: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In the middle of one of the many arguments Jesus has with the Pharisees, Jesus turns to “the Jews who had believed in him” and says to them, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you shall know the truth, and the truth will make your free.”
“We finite human beings have a tendency to concretize our doctrinal statements, giving them a weight of authority they cannot bear.”
Again, in the midst of his farewell discourse in John, Jesus responds to Thomas’ frustration with these words: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also.”
Clearly, for John, Jesus is the truth, the Word of God for us. Truth, therefore, is not in a thing or an institution, but in a relationship with the living God who comes to us in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
Daniel Migliore, in his book Faith Seeking Understanding, points out that our faith is not in the Bible, but “in the living God to whom the Bible bears witness.” He goes on to argue that Scripture is authoritative, because it “sets Christ before us.”
The Baptist Faith and Message of 1964 agrees with Migliori’s insight when it states, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.” But that line was deleted in the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.
If that statement is true for Scripture, how much truer when applied to doctrinal statements. Doctrinal statements are secondary to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Indeed, any doctrinal statement that runs counter to the person and spirit of Jesus Christ is flawed and cannot bear the moniker of ultimate truth.
Part of the Baptist witness always has been that doctrinal statements never can bear the weight of being final statements of the truth. The recognition of human limitations and finitude formed the basis for this conviction.
Unfortunately, we finite human beings have a tendency to concretize our doctrinal statements, giving them a weight of authority they cannot bear.
Truth is inherently bound up in the relationship of the living God to human creatures, created in God’s image. That relationship, like any relationship, cannot be set in concrete, unchanging. To try to make it so is the death of that relationship. Only in the relational God, who comes to us, will we find the unity of the human community we so desperately seek and need.
Jim Holladay serves as pastor of Lyndon Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.