How Will We Use the Bible?
Friday, July 31, 2026
CAC faculty member Brian McLaren highlights how reading the Bible through a lens of love has inspired many Christians to works of goodness and compassion in the world:
Biblical Christians have thrived when we’ve used the Bible with the goal of becoming good people who, because we follow Jesus, do good works in God’s good world. And we have languished and wandered when we have used the Bible as a weapon to threaten others, as a tool to intimidate others and prove them wrong…. Sadly, sometimes the very people who most love the Bible have been those who have used it for these other purposes, sometimes to the neglect of its essential purpose.
But again, think about what truly biblical Christians (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, liberal, conservative, charismatic, whatever) have done when they have understood the profitable purpose of Scripture. Instructed by Scripture, they have … built hospitals and schools to heal bodies and strengthen minds. They have given money to needy people around the globe…. They have crossed racial, ethnic, and class barriers, seeing all people as brothers and sisters. They have chosen to suffer rather than betray their faith or make others suffer…. They’ve done their work as teachers, farmers, bricklayers, nurses, scholars, mechanics, sellers, public servants, scientists, homemakers, cab drivers, and cooks with a special sense of purpose, love, and joy. Their “good works” included doing “good work” from day to day … as part of their holy, sacred vocation in God’s creation.
Why? Since they understood the real purpose of Scripture, they let Scripture equip them for good works in our needy world. Their words and deeds together have qualified them to be bearers of good news. Sure they have never been perfect, but they have often been wonderful.
McLaren invites us to read the Bible through a lens of love:
We also have a choice today: Will our readings betray the way of Christ in our day, or will they set our course toward God’s dreams? Will we let the story continue in and through us, along its intended trajectory, toward God’s undying, embracing dream called the kingdom of God?
This … approach does not lessen the agony one feels reading the conquest of Canaan with the eyes of one taught by Jesus to love all, including enemies. But it helps turn the Bible back into what it is, not a look-it-up encyclopedia of timeless moral truths, but the unfolding narrative of God at work in a violent, sinful world, calling people … into a new way of life…. This is the struggle of common people in the journey of faith, hope, and love. And it challenges us: To be truly biblical does not mean being preoccupied with some golden age in the ancient world and God’s word to people back then. It means learning from the past to let God’s story, God’s will, and God’s dream continue to come true in us and our children.
______________________________________________
Alistair Begg
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8
When John Newton, the eighteenth-century hymn writer and pastor, preached on this verse, he entitled his sermon “No Access to God but by the Gospel of Christ.” Why would he use a title that seems to lack any connection to the verse?! Newton himself commented, “There is hardly any one passage in the Bible more generally misunderstood.”[1] His sermon title, it seems, was aimed at correcting the common misunderstandings.
Newton’s title alerts us to the danger of reading the virtues described here and then attempting to live them out without the gospel, or proclaiming them in place of the gospel, as a means of access to God. Neither of these does justice to what the prophet—and the Lord—intended. The best way to understand Micah 6:8 is not as a list of things that contribute to our justification but as evidences of our justification. When we view it this way, with the proper motivation and goals established, we can understand what the Lord was calling Israel, and is calling us, to do.
The Lord, through Micah, tells us first to “do justice.” This means a commitment to act in accord with God’s will and purpose. For example, in Deuteronomy, Moses says that God “executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). We want to care about the things God cares about, which means taking such priorities seriously, seeking to “do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
