I’m sure most of you have met at some time or another a so called “Red Letter” Christian. If you have not met a Red Letter person let me quickly explain. The argument goes like this.
1. John 5:19 says “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
2. Jesus reveals the heart of the Father perfectly so His words carry the most authority in the whole bible. Even though all of the bible is God’s word it has to be interpreted through the visible character of Jesus. If the bible seems by us to go against the character revealed by Jesus then that particular passage is either wrong or does not mean what it sounds like it means.
This sounds good right? Here are a couple problems I see with this idea, which by the way is used by millions of Christians to defend the prosperity gospel, social gospel, no-hell gospel, and same sex marriage.
1. What text in the bible tells us that Jesus words are more inspired than the rest of the bible?
2. Jesus said in Jn 14:26 “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Meaning, you are going to need the Holy Spirit to teach you about me the purpose, and meaning of my life.
3. It’s Paul who said in 2 Tim 3:16-17 “All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
4. Basic Christian orthodoxy teaches the infallibility and inerrancy of the bible, affirming that all of the words of the bible are the very words of God.
As simple as I can put it, do we believe all the bible is God’s word or not? If so I think we can affirm a few things.
1. The 4 gospels help us to make sense of the Old Testament. How are we to understand the Old Testament rightly without seeing Christ as the fulfillment and the culmination of them. God’s further revelation of the gospels explains to us how we are to understand the Old testament.
2. The epistles do the exact same thing for the gospels as the gospels do for the Old Testament.
3. God’s further revelation helps us to know what the massage and purpose of Jesus life, death, and resurrection was/is.
4. The epistle writers were inspired by the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Gospels to helps us to know what to do the life of Jesus.
If I am right about this then we can clear up the non-sense of the Jesus gospel vs Paul gospel. We are not to understand the Gospels through the lenses of the Old Testament. Likewise we are not to understand the epistles through the lens of the Gospels. They are all the words of God without contradiction but with a trajectory of clarity from Gen to Revelation. In a huge way, we have to understand the bible backwards.
A great example of this idea can be found in George Smeaton’s works on the atonement called Christs’ Doctrine of the Atonement and The Apostles Doctrine of the Atonement.
Here is a Link to a similar conversation and way better post by Andrew Wilson
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