Evangelicals Living Off of Borrowed Capital

"Too often American evangelicals have settled for a Christology that can be reduced to a bumper sticker....Today's American evangelicals may be quick to speak of their love for Jesus, even wear their devotion on their sleeve, literally....But they may not be so quick to articulate an orthodox view of the object of their devotion. Their devotion is commendable, but the lack of a rigorous theology behind it means that a generation of contemporary evangelicals is living off of borrowed capital."

--Stephen Nichols, Jesus Made in America

How To Read the Bible

From Stephen Nichols and Eric Brandt in Ancient Word, Changing Worlds: The Doctrine of Scripture in a Modern Age.

Seven suggestions for how we should read the Bible:

1) Reverently. Remembering the Bible is the word of God, the revelation of the Creator and Redeemer, means above all reading the Bible reverently.

2) Prayerfully. We have the Spirit to guide us into truth.

3) Collectively. Reading the Bible solely or merely as an individual plays into the notions of modernism. Reading the Bible collectively is a good antidote to such privatized, individual reading....Reading the Bible collectively also puts us in the historical and global community, which means that the Bible is not our individual possession.

4) Humbly. It's helpful to read the Bible humbly, to be careful not to equate our interpretations of the text with the text itself. The Bible is innerant, in other words, but our interpretations are not.

5) Carefully. We also need to read the Bible carefully, which is to say there is a place for hermeneutics and rules of interpretation....Reading the Bible carefully also entails reading the Bible canonically. In previous ages of the church, this was referred to as the "analogy of faith," which amounted to reaidng particular texts of the Bible in light of the whole Bible.

6) Christologically. The Bible is ultimately the story of Christ. All of it points to or away from him, like spokes from the hub of the wheel. All of the Bible eventually finds its end, its design, its purpose in Christ....It's not too much of a stretch to say that we understand a text fully when we connect it to Christ and his mission.

7) Obediently. Reading and interpreting are first-order activities that lead to the second-order activity of obedience and practice (James 2:22-27). Reading and interpreting the Bible is actually the easy part, compared to taking the Bible seriously enough to act upon it.