Jesus Unbound

Keith Giles new book Jesus Unbound will have the Christian community talking for a long time. He challenges status quo ideas like the only way to know Jesus is through the Bible and the dangers of Biblicism and bibliolatry. Keith uses scripture over and over to show that true authority does not reside in a book but a person---Jesus.

The problem today is many Christians are trying to live biblically rather than Christianly. The Bible can be used as a weapon against all kinds of people and be captured by the whims of an individual interpreter. When Christians are reading the Bible through the lens of God's heart in Jesus, they see things very differently and live out their faith in more counter-cultural ways.

Some people will get hung up on Keith's approach to the hard and violent texts in the older testament where he approaches it as the words of men in the voice of God. Reading these texts with Jesus glasses on is still a better approach than when others take the approach of reading the Bible like it is a flat-one-dimensional book.

Keith has so much to say even where some people may disagree with some of his points. We need a more beautiful God and gospel and that is exactly what Keith Giles delivers. Maybe one should try the method of looking at the Older Testament like Jesus and the Apostle Paul did that often quoted how Jesus fulfilled the old covenant without applying, utilizing, or simply ignoring the broader violent points of the ancient near eastern cultural world.

If we do not heed Giles warning about the dangers of Biblicism, we can be biblically right while missing the heart of God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, we can miss Jesus while we blindly put our confidence in our own interpretations of scripture.