We can probably all agree that the Bible is one of the greatest gifts God has given us for knowing and following Jesus. It is inspired by the same Holy Spirit whom Jesus promises to His disciples in these final chapters of John. But Christianity is ultimately not centered on a book. It is centered on a Person, Jesus Christ. The purpose of Scripture is to reveal Him to us, preserve what God has revealed, and ultimately lead us into a life with Him.
Once we say that, however, a thousand questions follow. Who wrote each book? When was it written? How was it preserved? How was it translated? Is there a right and wrong way to read Scripture? Should we simply open the Bible and ask the Spirit to speak through whatever page appears, or should we study it carefully? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: if Christians are reading the same Bible, how can sincere people sometimes arrive at such different conclusions from the same words?
I think Jesus gives us part of the answer in His prayer to the Father in John 17: “Keep them from the evil one.” Jesus knows that merely hearing His words does not guarantee that we will understand them correctly or live by them. Judas saw the same miracles as Peter. He heard the same teachings. He ate at the same table. Jesus even knelt before him and washed his feet. Yet Judas betrayed Him. And perhaps even more tragically, Judas apparently failed to understand something Peter eventually understood: Jesus would forgive him. Peter denied Jesus three times, but Peter returned. He had come to know the mercy of the man he had betrayed.
That tells us something important about Scripture. When fear, pride, anger, temptation, ambition or sin cause us to put our hands over our spiritual ears, God has given us Scripture and our brothers to help lead us back to Jesus. Knowing that Scripture is divinely inspired can chase away our doubts about whether God has spoken. But that does not mean that every understanding I have of Scripture is therefore divine. Scripture is inspired; my interpretation of Scripture is not automatically inspired. I can misunderstand. I can emphasize the wrong thing. I can bring my prejudices into the text. Worse, I can convince myself that Scripture supports something I already wanted to believe.
St. Augustine gave us a remarkably simple test almost sixteen hundred years ago: “Whoever … thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures … but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.”
Think about that. Augustine is not saying truth does not matter. He is saying that the truth revealed by God has a destination: love of God and love of neighbor. If my interpretation of Scripture makes me proud, cruel, selfish, hateful or indifferent to another person’s suffering, I should not congratulate myself on how well I know the Bible. I should go back and read it again.
Peter Kreeft makes a similar point from another direction. We can approach Scripture as something merely to analyze, master and explain, or we can approach it knowing that through Scripture God intends to address and change us. Study matters enormously, but the purpose of Christian study is not simply to become an expert on a book. It is to encounter the God revealed through it. That requires something more than intelligence. It requires humility. I have to approach Scripture willing to discover that I am wrong. Otherwise, instead of allowing Scripture to interpret my life, I will gradually begin interpreting Scripture to justify the life I have already chosen.
And Jesus did not leave us alone to figure everything out. He chose Apostles. He taught them. He promised them the Holy Spirit. He formed a community around Himself and then sent that community into the world. From the beginning, Christianity is communal. We listen to one another. We learn from those who came before us. We allow ourselves to be corrected. And the Church has a responsibility to preserve and faithfully hand on what it received from the Apostles.
Look at what happens after Jesus makes these promises. Pentecost comes. The Holy Spirit descends, and almost immediately frightened men become bold witnesses. Peter, who had denied knowing Jesus before a servant girl, stands publicly and proclaims Him. People hear the Apostles preach, believe, are baptized and enter a community that begins living differently. They pray together, break bread together, care for one another and proclaim Christ together. Eventually many will accept persecution and even death rather than deny what they have come to believe.
Something supernatural has happened. Jesus has ascended, but He has not abandoned His people. The Spirit He promised has come.
And from that apostolic community come the writings that become our New Testament. The Gospels preserve the life, words, death and Resurrection of Jesus. The Apostles and their companions explain what His coming means and how Christians are supposed to live because of it. The spoken proclamation and the written Word are not competitors. They come from the same apostolic witness, under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit, proclaiming the same Jesus.
Those writings become a gift that crosses geography, language, culture and eventually thousands of years. We can sit together today and read the same Gospel that Christians read when following Jesus could cost them their lives.
But the battle does not end when the words are written down. The devil can quote Scripture too. Words can be removed from their context. A verse can be isolated and made to say something the whole Gospel contradicts. Human beings can use holy words to justify very unholy things. And so throughout Christian history the Spirit has raised up teachers, pastors, theologians, saints and philosophers who help generations of Christians understand Scripture and apply it to their lives, their families, their churches and their societies. They do not replace Scripture. At their best, they serve it, helping us hear more clearly what God has revealed.
C. S. Lewis helps us understand what all of this is ultimately supposed to accomplish. Christianity is not God’s program for making reasonably decent people a little nicer. Christ intends something far more radical. He intends to transform us. The Christian life is a gradual surrender of ourselves so that the life of Christ becomes increasingly visible in us. That changes the question we bring to Scripture. Instead of merely asking, “What does this passage mean?” eventually we also have to ask, “What is God trying to change in me through it?”
Jesus did not simply leave us a book. He left us Himself. He gave us His name. He gave us His words. And He gave us His example. We do not have to wonder endlessly what “love God and love one another” looks like. Watch Him. God kneels down and washes feet—including the feet of the man who will betray Him. He sees hungry people and feeds them, not merely with words but with food. He encounters grieving people and weeps with them. He touches the sick. He welcomes the rejected. He forgives sinners. He speaks truth when truth is costly. And finally He accepts the Cross in obedience to the Father and out of love for us.
That example becomes one of our greatest safeguards against twisting His words. If my interpretation of Christianity produces pride, hatred, selfishness, cruelty, dishonesty or contempt for others, I should stop and compare what I have produced with the man kneeling on the floor washing Judas’s feet.
Something has gone wrong.
And then something remarkable happens when we leave John’s Gospel and listen to Paul.
In John 17, Jesus prays for His disciples before going to the Cross. He asks the Father to protect them from evil, sanctify them in truth and make them one. “That they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you.” Jesus is praying for a community that does not yet fully exist. Pentecost has not happened. The frightened Apostles have not yet become missionaries. Jesus is praying for what His Church will become.
Years later, Paul writes to the Christians at Philippi, and Philippians 2 almost sounds like an answer to that prayer.
Paul tells them: “Complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing.”
There is John 17: that they may be one.
But then Paul tells us something enormously important. He tells us how this unity happens.
“Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves.”
And then comes the sentence that may summarize everything we have been talking about:
“Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus.”
That is the goal.
Paul does not say, “Make sure everyone wins the argument.” He doesn’t say, “Become better debaters.” He doesn’t even begin by saying, “Make sure everyone understands everything exactly the same way.”
He says: Become like Jesus.
And then Paul describes Jesus.
Though He was in the form of God, He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant. He humbled Himself. He became obedient—even to death, death on a Cross.
Suddenly John 17 becomes even clearer.
Jesus prayed that His disciples would be one, and Paul tells us how people become one: they acquire the mind of Christ.
Pride divides. Selfish ambition divides. The desire to be first divides. The need to be right divides. But Christ empties Himself. Christ serves. Christ obeys. Christ gives Himself away.
And perhaps this is what Jesus means when He speaks so mysteriously about glory in John 17. “The glory that you gave me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
What does the glory of God look like?
John has already shown us.
God gets down on His knees and washes feet.
Paul shows us the same thing from another direction.
God empties Himself, takes the form of a servant and becomes obedient unto death.
The glory and the humility are not opposites. They reveal the same God.
And then Paul says something else that connects directly to Jesus’ promise of the Spirit. Jesus is leaving His disciples physically, but He promises that God will remain with them and within them. Paul tells the Philippians, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work.”
Jesus leaves.
But God continues working inside His people.
That is John 14, John 15, John 16 and John 17 becoming the life of the Church.
And look at the result Paul expects: Christians who stop grumbling and arguing and begin to “shine like lights in the world.”
That is important because Jesus’ prayer for unity was never merely about Christians getting along with one another. Jesus says their unity will itself become testimony: “that the world may believe that you sent me.”
Our unity is supposed to reveal Jesus.
And Paul tells us how that happens.
Not by becoming better at proving one another wrong.
By becoming more like Christ.
That brings us directly back to Scripture.
Perhaps the question is not simply, “Do I know the Bible?”
The Pharisees knew Scripture.
Judas heard Jesus Himself.
The more important question is:
Is Scripture giving me the mind of Christ?
Augustine asks: Is it increasing my love of God and my love of neighbor?
Paul asks: Am I becoming humble enough to regard another as more important than myself?
Jesus asks: Am I willing to wash feet?
These are really the same question.
If reading Scripture makes me more forgiving, more courageous, more humble, more generous, more willing to serve, more faithful in suffering, more concerned for the poor, more obedient to God and more capable of loving the person standing in front of me, then the Word is accomplishing what it was given to accomplish.
But if I know a thousand verses and have become proud, angry, judgmental and divided from everyone around me, perhaps I have learned the words without yet hearing the Word.
Jesus did not leave us orphans.
He gave us His name. He gave us His words. He gave us His example. He gave us the Apostles. He gave us Scripture. He gave us the Church. He gave us one another. He gave us His Body and Blood.
And He gave us the Holy Spirit to lead us into truth.
These are not competing gifts. They are all gifts from the same Jesus, through the same Spirit, pointing us in the same direction.
John 17 gives us the prayer.
Philippians 2 shows us what the answer to that prayer looks like.
A people united because they are becoming like Jesus.
And maybe that is the simplest way to understand what Scripture is supposed to accomplish in us:
Not merely that we know His words.
Not merely that we can explain His words.
But that, little by little, we begin to look like the One who spoke them.
