The Truth was there all along

It is fascinating to notice that God sends His church great teachers who open the Scriptures according to the needs of the times. The Scriptures do not change, but the Bible is such a broad and deep book that though its pages contain the answers to the heresies of each age and for each age, the Lord must send us His disciples to open our eyes to the treasure we had all along in the Word He has given us.

In the sixteenth century, Luther reminded the church that salvation is by Grace alone through Faith alone. Indulgences, fasting, and rituals do not buy our way through the heavenly gates, and Luther reminded us that the Word of God is the starting point and the final authority for theology. It is the Word of God because in it, Jesus, the Word Incarnate, comes to us.

In the eighteenth century, Wesley brought enthusiasm, a "heart strangely warmed" to a moribund church mired in debates over dogma and rationalism. The Spirit had been there all along, but His witness had been subdued under a simplistic rationalism. The spiritualist movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought the Gospel Word to those who had little or no education. Breaking through the rigid structures of the Anglican church of his time, Wesley’s preaching went out into the highways and byways and open fields with the Word validated by the Spirit. The evangelical question, "Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?" focused attention on the individual and on a personal spirituality grounded in Scriptures.

Wholesome as that was for its time, it has a danger: religious subjectivism tends to make God over in our own image, and Karl Barth reacted, insisting that God is never ours, and that Jesus is the Word of God, and the Bible witnesses to Him. Bonhoeffer, his disciple and the evangelical hero, relished Barth’s insistence on revelation from above, from outside of man, but our times are still focused in subjectivism and personal experience. But what is man? Materialism says we are chemicals and atoms. Some Darwinists tell us we’re advanced apes. Historical criticism and the "Jesus projects" tell us that the Bible is merely a collection of mythical stories, and yes, myths speak truth but since they’re myths, we can choose what suits our experiences and felt needs. Or, we can choose what "feels right" or what "witnesses to our spirits." That leaves us prisoners to ourselves and our feelings, lost in the cosmos.

John Paul II, it seems to me, continues the trajectory from Barth and Bonhoeffer, looking at Scriptures through the lens of Jesus’ own words. Jesus the Word of God who became man, fulfills the Scripture even as Jesus the Word validates the Scriptures "from the beginning" as He teaches. It seems to me that The Theology of the Body is not only a Biblical anthropology—it is supremely that--but also a method of reading the whole Scripture through Jesus. He came from God, from outside and beyond us, but became one of us to show us who God is and what we were meant to be. John Paul II’s meditations develop the implications of Jesus’ own commentaries on the Scriptures so that in reading we must focus not on what we feel but on what God says in the whole book. What Evangelical can do other than rejoice over that? The Truth was there all along, but God sent a teacher for our time to call our attention to its eternal relevance.