Who Did You Say the Word of God Is?

It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah
—Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”

I have a question for those of you who agree the Bible should be taken seriously—literally, metaphorically, ethically, or however else. But still seriously, as a book that deserves to be read and listened to, as you would listen to a wise friend when they had something important to say, even if you disagreed with them, and even if they’re not the only friend you would listen to. That ought to widen it to include just about everybody.

Here’s my question: If the Bible came out and said what the Word of God is, would you be interested in knowing what it had to say about that? To put it another way, if God had some sort of singular message for us, and the Bible said it could narrow it down, would you be interested in knowing what it narrowed it down to?

The problem with asking this question is that everyone supposes they already know the answer, whether they like that answer or not. What everyone—liberal or conservative, Christian or not—assumes is the anwer to “what is the Word of God?” is “the Bible.” But that isn’t what the Bible itself says, not at all.

Asking what the Word of God is, it turns out, is the wrong question. The better question is who the Word of God is. Here’s the passage he’s referring to in the video:

In the beginning was the word
And the word was with God
And God was the word.
The word was in the beginning with God.
Through it everything came about
And without it not a thing came about.
What came to be in the word was life
And the life was the light of people
And the light in the darkness shines
And the darkness could not apprehend it…
And the word became flesh
And lived among us.
And we gazed upon his glory,
The glory of the only son born of the father,
Who is filled with grace and truth.
—John 1:1-5,14 (Restored New Testament)

You’ll find no other passages in the Bible claiming the Word of God is this or the Word of God is that. This is the only one that says the Word of God = X.

Let’s pause here for a moment. Notice it doesn’t say the Word of God is a book. It doesn’t say “the Word became ink on a page and was published among us.” It also doesn’t say “the Word became a set of beliefs and was believed among us.”

No, it says the Word of God was a single human life.

So if we want to take seriously—and notice I haven’t even gotten to agree or disagree, because how do you agree or disagree with a life?—what the Bible says the Word of God really is, we have to look at one human life in particular, the life of Jesus.

Here are seven things I’ve noticed about the story of that life:

1. Jesus was born under scandalous circumstances to a poor family in a country occupied by Empire. They were even political refugees for a few years.
2. He grew up and did most of his public ministry just outside his ethnic group’s heartland and would have likely been viewed as a hick by the residents of that heartland.
3. He mainly taught (a) radical love of neighbor and (b) the universal parenthood of God, and he used these two points to critique both his own religious tradition and Empire, even though his own religion was ultimately the source of those two main ideas.
4. He regularly healed people experiencing real suffering and performed other wonders, often in a way that underlined his two main points.
5. He expected the world to end soon, with people judged according to how they treated “the least of these.”
6. Perhaps because of his “cleansing of the Temple” during Passover, collaborating religious authorities and the Empire came to see him as a threat, and Empire publicly executed him for it. He did not try to rescue or even defend himself, and his execution is now almost universally seen as unjust.
7. His students were surprised to discover, soon after his death, that this single human life was still very much with them, an experience that empowered them to spread his message to others, a message their religious descendants still haven’t fully heard.

To my liberal friends, I ask this: Whatever our theological positions, can’t we agree that we can see at least this much of worth in the life of Jesus, whatever we make of the more supernatural claims of healing and resurrection?¹

And to my conservative friends, I ask this: Aren’t these things enough to transform lives? Why add anything else? We haven’t even absorbed this much, without adding theological baggage about Original Sin, hell, and so many creeds.²

I’m not going to be able to wrap this all up in a neat little bow, because how do you wrap a single human life up like that? But it’s enough to say that understanding the identity of the Word of God like this opens up a radically different way of approaching the Bible than most of us were taught. Instead of reading it for a list of doctrines to agree or disagree with, it opens the Bible for us as a focus on a single human life to model our own lives on.

(Photo by doug88888. Used under Creative Commons license.)

1. Whether or not we believe Jesus healed people, there were people who honestly believed Jesus healed them. And whether or not we believe in the resurrection, there were people who believed they encountered a risen Jesus, and this experience changed their lives, and ours, immeasurably for the better. [↩]
2. In fact, I can’t see how these post-Jesus doctrines are making much of a positive difference in people’s lives, especially considering that studies show that evangelicals sin as often non-evangelicals, if not more often. By your fruit, as Jesus would say, we know you. Your lives aren’t working out any better than the rest of us, so why should we take your word on what we ought to believe about Jesus? [↩]