A Journal Journey with Brad Jersak’s “Different” Jesus – Day 15

 

Examining "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak

Day 15 

“For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.” (Paul’s concern from 2 Corinthians 11:4) 

The False Filter	The Biblical Filter
The word OR the Word	The Word THROUGH the word

   Because of how huge it is that the BJs want us to believe that some attributes/characteristics of God are nothing more than “anthropomorphisms”, I will keep these two clarifications before us as we continue our journey:

The Anthropomorphic God	The God-is-who-he-is God
Select traits are treated as human qualities applied to God for illustrative purposes alone.	All characteristics of God described in God’s word, the Bible, are inherent qualities of his nature.
God’s “divine anger, judgment, or wrath” are “ever only anthropomorphisms of parental love aimed at restoration” (p. 52).	All characteristics of God described in God’s word, the Bible, are inherent qualities of his nature and mean exactly what they say they mean.

   Because of the direction we are heading in this next chapter, I will add one more:

The Anthropomorphic God	The God-is-who-he-is God
Needs to be corrected by BJ’s “another Jesus” whenever the biblical writers describe Yahweh in what BJ determines is unjust or immoral acts of subjugation or violence.	The same God we see revealed through the Scriptures we now call the Old Testament is revealed in an in-person way by the true Lord Jesus Christ in both his first and second comings.

   As we continue, I am treating BJ’s book like he is the challenger to what the church has long believed (as he has admitted from his misunderstanding about what it means that the Bible as the word of God is “the final authority on all matters of faith and practice"). Therefore, we are going to look at his challenges to see if he is making his point and we should change our beliefs from what we have understood to be the correct view of God and his word. After hearing him out by the end of the book, we can either come to the conclusion that he has found legitimate truth that requires us to adjust our beliefs, or we can present a rebuttal because we believe this is a false teacher and false teaching that Jesus warned us about and we must shine as the light of the world to help people see the truth and hold fast to what we are given by God. I am quite sure I will be making rebuttals to obvious misrepresentations of God and his word as we continue since that has been the case through the first three chapters. However, my focus is on treating BJ as a challenger to the longstanding belief that the Bible is the word of God and is to be treated as such. He will have to prove that we are to change our minds about the Bible, and his 100% failure rate to this point is not boding well for his success.

   We now begin, “Chapter 4 ‘What Are We?’: Reframing Inspiration” (p. 56). The “What are we?” question means, what is our relationship with the Scriptures. And the first thought is a “loaded question”! I see there are more following, so I will try a chart to address loaded questions/statements, and clarify what we know.

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“Our hearts ask, ‘What are we’ when the Bible begins to confront us with grossly unpalatable images of God and immoral acts committed in his name” (p. 56).	The author has not presented anything from the Bible that presents God in “grossly unpalatable images,” or describes “immoral acts committed in his name” (with God’s authorization).

      After sharing some heart-wrenching examples of people walking away from Jesus because they had never attached to him by faith, the author expresses his experience, “But if you’ve known intimacy with Christ and experienced actual liberation, walking away from his love isn’t an option" (p. 56). I will just add my personal testimony of facing all kinds of disappointing experiences with churches and church folk while continuing to grow in my relationship with God on a daily basis by seeking to get to know the Word THROUGH the word. So denigrating the Scriptures as the BJs suggest is not required to have a growing relationship with the Lord.

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“Once you stop drinking the Kool-Aid of biblical literalism, any further connection with Scripture needs to include the answer to that awkward question, ‘What are we?’” (p. 57).	Nothing has been shared to explain “biblical literalism” or to justify the Jonestown’ metaphor of “Kool-Aid”. And there is nothing awkward about the “What are we?” question in relation to Scripture.

   The author follows this with, “And it’s tough to know what we are without also asking of the Bible, ‘What are you?’” (p. 57). For sure. When we know what God has given us in his word, we discover that it is saturated with an amazing and clear message of who, whose, and what we are, along with the relationship God desires us to have with his word.

   Now we come to the crux of the conflict, “As I keep insisting, Christ gets the final word, and the Scriptures testify to his authority. I relate to Christ as God’s Word and to the Bible as one (and not the only) venue where I can hear the living Voice” (p. 57). This is why the author needs to create a conflict between the word and the Word. It allows him to bring in other “venues” that are just as authoritative as the Bible (in his mind). Again, he will need to prove that this is necessary and good.

   The two sides BJ puts against each other are simplified into this chart:

Relationship to the word 1	Relationship to the word 2
“the Bible is God’s inspired, infallible, inerrant canon of His self-revelation” (p. 57).	“the Scriptures are actually a witness to Christ and a revelation of human hearts—” (p. 57).

   I am going to counter this challenge with a clarification. BJ wants us to believe that the Scriptures are “a witness to Christ”, which means they are human testimonies about Christ from which we can learn things about him from the best the people knew and understood. The Scriptures want us to believe they are “the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17), which means they are Christ speaking to us directly. Whenever BJ shares about Jesus speaking of the Scriptures as bearing witness about him, I think we will find that it is the way Jesus affirmed that the Scriptures were God’s word, not human words bearing witness to him.

   The author’s claim from here is “When I realized this, it meant I had to reframe how I see, read, and interpret Scripture, especially in its all-important role as the Word’s witness” (p. 57). Yes, if you change what you believe the Bible is, you would then change how you relate to it. This also works for the cults that change what people believe the Bible is which then changes how they relate to it, so we must be careful what we believe and how we behave accordingly.

   Two questions have not been answered. First, are the Scriptures merely a “witness to Christ”, or the “word of Christ”? Second, are the Scriptures merely “a revelation of human hearts”, or the revelation of God through human hearts? Neither of BJ’s claims about this have been shown to be the case. However, he speaks as if “I realized this”, but without any evidence that would make this an objective realization.  

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“Nevertheless, it gets a little tricky when I say Christ is my final authority while I’m also dependent on a witness that I call inspired yet seems unreliable at times” (p. 57).	There is nothing tricky about viewing Christ as the final authority and his Book as the final authority he has given us to govern everything we do in the church while he is away. And, to this point, nothing has been stated that shows the Bible to be unreliable, but plenty has been stated to show the author is unreliable in his use of the Bible.

   As to a friend’s question regarding what we can trust in the Bible if the parts BJ doesn’t like aren’t “accurate”, BJ replies, “Let’s begin by addressing the question of inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, and canon. Then we’ll move on to how our convictions about what Scripture is impact our faith in the Gospel narratives about Jesus” (p. 58). It appears that these will be the three areas that shape what people believe the Bible is, and therefore adjust their relationship to the Bible accordingly.

   Another theme we will need to track is what the author means by “a literalist reading of Scripture” (p. 58). If this means that a person takes every verse of the Bible literally without regard for its genre, then that would be one of the pendulum extremes. The other pendulum extreme would be to take the whole Bible metaphorically or symbolically. The plumbline would be to take Scripture to be the word of God in all its genres. This attention to the literalist focus leads to the next loaded description.

Loaded Question/Statement

Clarification of What we Know

“Our church believed the Bible described a six-day creation (calculated by biblical genealogies to seven thousand years ago). We believed that Noah’s flood was actually global and must have covered Mount Everest. We also believed that literally every living species survived on an ark. At the same time, we weren’t so naïve as to believe Christ is an actual lamb with seven horns and seven eyes2” (p. 58). Note: this is a loaded statement since it words things inaccurately as if that is the biblical view (strawman) which then requires us to pick sides based on those misrepresentations.

Believing the biblical description of creation is good. It is clearly taught all through the Scriptures and is affirmed by science all the time. Believing that the global flood covered Mount Everest as we now see it is a misrepresentation of the facts and the Bible even says so![1] And it is not clear if his church really did teach these things, or if this is merely the author’s take on the matter. No, not every living “species” categorized by modern science was on the ark, but only the “kinds” described in creation (really BIG difference!). And, we can always take the historical accounts as true history while also recognizing the apocryphal accounts as true symbolically.

   I’m surveying the next ground the author leads us on, his journey of learning to question the Bible. His loaded points continue with things like,

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“I questioned whether God’s commands in the Old Testament to carry out acts of genocide without mercy truly came from the Abba whom Jesus revealed” (p. 60).	As already pointed out, there has been no evidence of God carrying out any acts of genocide, nor executing justice without mercy. We are not obligated to resolve this problem for him because he has yet to show that the problem exists (20% of the way through the book!).

   The next section continues his journey of processing in his mind how the Scriptures can be breathed out by God but not his authoritative word.

Loaded Question/Statement

Clarification of What we Know

“We don’t read the ugly parts of the Bible as bygone histories or dismiss them for their bad theology. Rather, we enter these stories and experience them as floodlights revealing our own issues” (p. 61).

Terms like “ugly parts” or “bygone histories” or “bad theology” all project imperfections on the Scriptures that have not been demonstrated. And, since the focus is to have a Jesus who reinterprets how we read about Yahweh in the Old Testament, there should have been something from Jesus supporting this viewpoint. It has also not even remotely been demonstrated that some of the descriptions of Yahweh by the biblical writers were nothing more than “a floodlight revealing our own issues”. I get that BJ wants that to be the case, but he has presented zero evidence to that effect.

   What I find along this leg of the journey is that I am constantly correcting bad information. It is like coming to a viewpoint, reading the sign describing what is before us, and pointing out that the sign is describing something different than we can see with our own eyes. So, as I have shown this with BJ’s own thoughts, it is there also in those he quotes as his affirmation for what he believes. Quoting David Goa,

“[I invite] the faithful to a particular spiritual discipline when they read the hard texts in the First (Old) Testament that speak of the anger, wrath, and judgement of the divine, including those that seem to be the wrathful words of God spoken directly, but are instead revelations of human passions, of the appetite for divine justice, assigned to God (p. 62).

   To claim that the words the biblical writers declared were Yahweh’s own words were “instead revelations of human passions, of the appetite for divine justice, assigned to God” is the continuing thread of unsubstantiated claims. I keep asking myself, “Says who?” And where does BJ’s Jesus say these things about Yahweh? If the Scriptures Jesus spoke about in his day were full of human passions parading as his Father’s words, he would have had to say so!

   The quote continues,

…All biblical revelation, along with the revelation of the Holy Spirit, is a light shone on our passions and thus on our way of seeking and knowing the world and our presumptions about God’s ways and God’s will. Revelation illuminates God’s love for us, but we need it also to shine light on our personal and collective darkness, the shadows in our life, our relationships, our moment in history, our place in culture⁵ (p. 62).

   All I can say right here is that something is missing. Revelation is first a revelation of God. It shows God to us. “In the beginning GOD!” it declares, and then begins revealing what God did and said. It is in revealing God to us that we discover everything he wants us to know about ourselves, but so that we are always seeing him first and understanding ourselves through his self-revelation. 

   And, since the author has yet to give any evidence that there is anything in the Scriptures of Jesus’ day that was a false revelation of Yahweh, we still haven’t been given any reason to disbelieve that the ways God executed justice against evil people is exactly the way God wants us to know how he feels about sin. Yes, we will see ourselves in the “collective darkness” as we see God in the holiness and righteousness of his judgment against sin. Whatever anyone believes about these things up to this point, I’m simply pointing out that the sign says one thing, but the scene says another. And nothing in any scene has shown us a Yahweh that Jesus corrected in word or deed.

   And that is a good spot to stop and catch a breath before continuing our journey. 

 

 

© 2024 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.) 

A More Christlike Word © 2021 by Bradley Jersak Whitaker House 1030 Hunt Valley Circle • New Kensington, PA 15068 www.whitakerhouse.com 

Jersak, Bradley. A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way. Whitaker House. Kindle Edition. 

Definitions from the Bible Sense Lexicon (BSL) in Logos Bible Systems

  

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[1] The tectonic activity during the flood is described in Psalm 104:6-9.

You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
    the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they fled;
    at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down
    to the place that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
    so that they might not again cover the earth.

Mount Everest as we know it is after “the Mountains rose”! Before that, it was part of the dry land described in the creation week. During the flood, it was covered with sediment and dead creatures that became the sedimentary rock and marine fossils that are found at Everest’s present height. The deep ocean valleys are “the valleys sank down”. What we see on the planet is quite consistent with Scripture.