Returning from my Thanksgiving visit home, I had a few hours to kill waiting for my lay-over flight to board. So after finding out this particular airport doesn't have wifi (seriously? It's 2011), I naturally ducked into the nearest magazine store, hoping I would find something better than Bieber's new hairstyle to read about. My wildest dreams were realized when I came across this article in National Geographic on the King James Bible. I immediately knew this article deserved a blog post thanks to its rather Western-sounding subtitle: "The Bible of James: First printed 400 years ago, it molded the English language, buttressed the “powers that be”—one of its famous phrases—and yet enshrined a gospel of individual freedom. No other book has given more to the English-speaking world."
Points for using the term "gospel," but all of these and then some are lost when the words "individual" and "freedom" are tacked onto it. We'll get to this later, but let's first talk about how the Bible itself is treated in this article. This writer is a perfect example of the natural humanist mistaking the Bible as a book. What I mean is that he does not recognize that this is the Word of God, meaning (a) it has one true meaning and (b) this meaning is authoritative and must be followed, as it is from God. In typical postmodern secular thought, this author blames the Bible for everything from slavery to old Scottish men trekking through the snow on the Sabbath; he labels this the "dark side" of the translation. Now, of course, evil men have used the Bible for evil purposes, but the key here is evil men, not the Bible itself. The Bible has intrinsic meaning as the Word of God and is therefore above all other roots of authority, including human tampering. Their is no "dark side" to the Bible, the "dark side" is ourselves.
Now, more importantly, let's talk about this gospel of "individual freedom." On one level, we maybe can affirm this. The gospel could be said to be individual, because individual souls are saved by it, and can bring freedom, as Christ is the only true rest and salvation from sin and death. But I can almost assure you this author has neither of these two things in mind when he says these things. This phrase is riddled with Western thought of the rights of the individual, and especially the right of a person to have nothing prohibited of them. The same thoughts have brought the social ills of homosexual marriage and adoption, pornography, abortion, drug legalization, the sexual revolution, the commonality of adultery and divorce, and the like. Of course, these have always been problems within humanity, but western "individual freedom" has not only put these things in vogue, but have made them a human right. This is not what the gospel is about; in fact, it is about the opposite.Our gospel places us completely under the Lordship of Christ. True, his yoke is easy and light, but it's still a yoke. Our gospel is not about individual freedom, but individual devotion and complete surrender. By the way, this western "individual freedom" is not freedom at all, but a pristine picture of the humans slavery to sin. This freedom is actually the ultimate bondage.
"But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness." Romans 6:17-18
"Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that come from the law, but that which come through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith" Philippians 3:8-9
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