I regularly have conversations with Christians who self-describe as “Jesus-centered” types who will say something like this about the Bible: “I’m over the apostle Paul and all those over New Testament letters. I just read the gospels and stick with Jesus now.”
Those making such statements have almost always come to this position as a response to significant problems in their prior Christian experience. Some belong to churches that preach constantly on justification while ignoring Jesus’ call for everyday discipleship. Some have seen nationalism or rigid hierarchies defended by a few verses from the letters without reference to the broader frame of how Jesus taught and modeled power. Some have been frustrated by the apparent discrepancy between the amount of attention given to Paul’s teachings on sex versus Jesus’ teachings on money.
With all this in the background, it’s not hard to understand why some feel compelled to narrow their focus. And yet…the idea that the gospels could be cleanly severed from the letters or that the letters could be dispensed of without enormous losses to the church strikes me as reflecting a profound misunderstanding of how these two kinds of witnesses relate.
To begin with, it’s worth noting how much the letters and gospels share in common. Both are contextual documents, written for specific real-world audiences whose circumstances affected what was recorded and how. Both trace their authority to the same source—the Spirit’s inspiration and the church’s discernment in preserving these particular documents over other possibilities. Many of the letters even predate the gospels as expressions of early Christian faith. Most importantly, the letters are just as Jesus-centered—even Jesus-obsessed—as the gospels. The difference ultimately lies in the kind of work they are meant to do for the church. Letters and gospels serve complementary, non-competing functions.
The gospels capture what Jesus said and did, the actual events of his birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection. They preserve a sampling of the miracles that astonished his contemporaries and gave weight to his words. They recall stories Jesus told and things that he taught. Above all, they meticulously document eyewitness accounts of the events surrounding his death—and his reappearance beyond it.
These are the events that Christians believe history turns on. In the letters, the church begins to work out their significance. What did all that Jesus said and did reveal about who he was? What did Jesus’ death and resurrection actually accomplish? What is different about the world now because he has been here? What is different about a person in whom the Spirit of Jesus now dwells?
Christian faith does not center on a man who brought out some wise moral teachings to tell us all how to be good. It centers on a man, fully God and human both, who changed the human condition and the course of history. The world is fundamentally different because God has entered into it. We become fundamentally different when we enter into Christ.
It is the letters that begin to tease out this shift in our existential position. And it is that shift in existential position that makes the radical new way of life that Jesus taught—recorded in the Gospels—meaningful, urgent, authoritative, and most of all, possible.
Another critical contribution of the epistles is to apply the revelation of Jesus—all of it, his life, teachings, and death—to an ever-increasing diversity of social and cultural contexts. The early Christians did not believe that the Way of Jesus was only for first century Jews residing in Palestine. They had come to believe that it was a revolution coming for the world, for people from every nation, tongue, culture, and tribe. Playing a vision this large out required an unprecedented level of translation, learning to put the truth of Jesus in terms new groups could understand, applying it to new contexts and questions that no one had thought of before.
The letters are the result of Jesus-followers scattering with good news across the world and bringing the Way of Jesus home with localized and culturally-appropriate applications. Jesus never addressed religious intermarriages or what it looked like to eat together across vast economic divides. But in the letters, we see the early church working out these applications. We learn from them lessons crucial to our own contextualized discernment. We see how Christ’s sacrificial self-giving can become a lens applied to an infinite array to possible questions and dilemmas.
It’s one thing to claim to belong to a faith centered on Jesus. It’s another thing to learn to see Jesus everywhere in the world, to learn to think with his logic and to view our neighbors through his eyes. It’s still another thing get to be formed to live with the holiness, fearlessness, others-centeredness, and self-sacrifice that Jeus modeled. To have a hope of doing any of these things, we need every resource that can be brought to bear, the entire witness of Spirit, Scripture, and church, woven inextricably together.
Our discomfort with the letters, I can’t help suspecting, might actually reflect our discomfort with the church and the journey of discerning God. But there is no way around this. There never was. There is only Jesus, who changes everything. And there is only the community who follows him, trying to understand how they are being changed by his presence among them. Over and over again.
