What does it really mean to be a Red Letter Christian? How does our commitment to living out Jesus’ words (the ‘red letters’) impact the way we engage with the rest of the Bible? Are we simply ignoring all the words that Jesus DIDN’T say?
In this article, I hope to unpack a Biblical hermeneutic that aims to bring the words and life of Jesus into the very centre of how we read and understand the whole Bible. But I’m not starting there. Because reading the Bible does not start there – not for me, anyway. I do not claim to speak once and for all who call themselves Red Letter Christians (which may frustrate some). Instead I will start with a story. Mine.
Why do I say I am a ‘Red Letter’ Christian?
When I focus on the words and life of Jesus, my Christian faith asks me to confront whether I am willing to attempt to live by the teachings of Jesus, not just whether I say I believe certain doctrines and can make good arguments to defend them.
Those who know me will tell you I’m not averse to the push and shove of a good intellectual debate. I was born critical and inquiring and developed precocious and confident in my early Christian faith. I observed that other evangelicals around me were focussed on the importance of right answers and how to argue them.
But, by God’s grace, I was also born within a working class community – more ‘salt of the earth’ than ‘stars of the age’ folk who practised their faith through loving actions. These were pre-Alpha days. I was discipled by a mother who would voraciously welcome anyone the world had shut the door to. She told me this was what Jesus demanded. Christianity was a call to follow Jesus himself. Or, (for those champing at the bit for some highfaluting words) orthopraxis shaped orthodoxy. Put in practical terms, my reflective practice meant attempting to follow an ethic of sacrificial love, and then reflecting on the Bible to show me why I could not do it without a serious degree of intimacy with Jesus. I was aware of the heated debates other young evangelicals gave so much energy to, but my active church life meant I had little time to fully engage. Thank God.
The Sermon on the Mount
Knowing truths can never trump living by truths. That is why the Sermon on the Mount has become a touchstone for many Red Letter Christians. Could these particular ‘red letters’ be the ultimate weapon to dismantle the idea that following Jesus is mostly about orthodox belief?
In Matthew chapters 5-8 Jesus sets out what it looks like to follow him; the ethical guidelines for those in his counter-cultural Empire. It contains the highest moral code and is given to a rag-tag bunch of colonised, marginal folk whose religion may well have given them a penchant for arguing every toss.
Go ahead and read it. Do you think Jesus means what he says? Do you think Jesus is inviting you to debate the best hermeneutic to understand it, or is he calling you to live it?
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus riffs from the Old Testament to offer a fulfilled vision of spirituality imbued with compassion, lived out not just assented to, and as Ghandi said, sadly unpractised by many bearing Christ’s name.
Inspired by those ‘red letters’ in Matthew 5-8, Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship. He described the Sermon on the Mount as the offer of costly grace: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”. Bonhoeffer gave fully a third of his book on discipleship to a meditation on Jesus’ words in the Sermon on The Mount. And then he was killed for attempting to live them. Now that’s taking ‘red letters’ seriously. He wrote at a time when the Church needed to be shaken free of moral laxity, often disguised beneath intellectual rigour – a clarion call for costly discipleship we still need to hear.
I too got stuck and unstuck reading the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ sermon puts into words a gnawing fear I have about my evangelical tradition – it is selling us short: too many offers of ‘cheap grace’ through assenting to doctrines, never-ending interrogations of what is ‘orthodox’; too few calls to live a costly discipleship of meekness, mercy, peace-making, thirsting for justice.
That’s where I got stuck with the standard ‘evangelical’ package of my day. We’d been sold a dud. And it was also how I got unstuck – I knew we weren’t sold it by Jesus.
I needed to get back to a practice of reading Jesus’ words, simply, child-like, and trying to live them. As I did so I found there were a ‘crowd of witnesses’ in grassroots Christian communities, cheering me on. Attempting to live the words of Jesus would indeed be, as Bonhoeffer promised, the way to recover my humanity and really become a disciple. Faith-led praxis won.
But do you ignore the ‘black letters’?
I did not imagine it would be controversial to say that as a Christian I prioritise the words of Jesus. But for some this has proven to be a source of fear and concern. So let me be clear:
When we refer to Jesus’ ‘red letters’ we don’t see Jesus’ words as distinct from his actions! How could they be? No more than when I quote anyone else that I imagine their words fall, disembodied, from the sky. It is the words, life, death and resurrection of Jesus together which I take as the focal point for my Christian faith. This seems to me a rather orthodox way of viewing what it means to be a Christian (for those claiming the ‘red letter’ title or otherwise).
‘Red Letter Christian’ is a kind of short-hand for a hermeneutic (a way of reading and understanding the Bible) that sees the words and life of Jesus as a spirit level or a ‘You are Here’ pinpoint on the complex map of scripture. Perhaps it would be helpful to unpack these metaphors? First, another story.
From Marcion to Metaphors
In my short reflection on the Sermon on the Mount, I mentioned Jesus ‘riffing from the Old Testament roots’. How did that make you feel? Any reaction? Is this a slippery slope to a dangerous destination or a reasonable way of reading what is on the page? If I say that I prioritise Jesus’ words in red, what does this mean about how I see the black words in the rest of the Bible?
Could ‘Red Letter Christians’ be heading off into a Marcion heresy? (Or perhaps you are simply wondering, who is Marcion?) Marcion was an interesting character who lived in the first decades of Christianity (c. 85 – c. 160). Looking at his story brings a useful counterpoint to some of the ways many of us engage with the Bible today.
With the earliest written Christian texts in one hand and the Hebrew Scriptures in the other, Marcion concluded that the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with many passages in the Old Testament. Marcion may have been among the first to voice this concern, but he has not been the last!
I have some sympathy for the tension he found himself in, though I wouldn’t defend how he resolved it: Marcion took the scissors out.
He decided which parts of the Bible fitted with the God he saw in Jesus and cut the rest out. For Marcion, when Jesus was speaking about Abba, he wasn’t speaking about Yahweh. So out went the Old Testament and with it the idea that Christianity was a continuation of the Jewish faith. Instead, using ideas from his philosophical and cosmological context, he bought into an idea that God has two levels: Yahweh was the lower tier, a Demiurge, a tribal deity of the Jews. This helped him to resolve the disjuncture he felt between Jesus’ Heavenly Father and Yahweh.
According to Marcion, we need not pay attention to the Old Testament – it’s been trumped by the higher level God showing up in Jesus. The Gospel accounts, too, were not spared Marcion’s shears. He could not believe Jesus would have had a human birth and death, so those parts were also cut. When he was done cutting, Marcion ended up with a set of eleven books in two sections: the Evangelikon, mainly cut from Luke (with parts removed that he did not agree with), and the Apostolikon, selections from ten of Paul’s epistles.
So what do I make of Marcion and his cut and paste endeavour? Firstly, let’s be absolutely honest. He’s far from alone in the practice. Though few admit it, we all cut and edit, mostly through the hidden curriculum of the parts of the Bible we preach from and refer to. This is not the way to take the Bible seriously. But that said, Marcion’s angst is real. I, like many others, grapple with how to hold together the idea of God I see enfleshed Jesus with some passages in the Old Testament: the genocides, the militarism, the misogyny. I find these stories repulsive. That is because they are. I know I will never accept the view ‘well that’s just how God is’ as if Jesus’ Abba had an alter-ego that he learnt to grow out of. So what to do? My fingers twitch for scissors, too.
The Spirit-Level
Could it be that some of the Bible stories we struggle over are in fact accurate reflections of the dominant consciousness of the day, written in certain historic contexts, and are there precisely to shock and upset us now? And how would we know how to react to them this way? Because of the God we see revealed in Jesus, the ultimate revelation of who God is, The Word of God, who becomes a spirit-level to understand the big picture and measure my reactions to these stories; to allow them to read me. That’s what I believe Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17) where he claimed to fulfil the Law and the Prophets. He starts with texts the crowds are familiar with and takes them on a journey.
In all of his ‘You have heard that it was said…but I tell you’ I don’t see Jesus rejecting parts of the Old Testament, but calling out the way his audience was interpreting them, which was often to oppress the weak (see John 8:5).
With Jesus as The Word made flesh front and centre we know how to see all other ideas about what God is like, in all accounts, in all religions and in my own thinking. God is like Jesus (John 14:9). That’s the central tenet of my Christian faith.
So, for instance, those stories of killing enemies jar because we know, in the example of Jesus, retributive violence is precisely not the way of God. Perhaps the stories of senseless violence are there to teach us that, yes, violence is senseless.
Navigating the Map
Viewed this way the Bible starts to take a typography, a landscape with highpoints and low points. Jesus is the point on the map that says ‘You are here’ by which you can navigate. The Bible sets out an epic story, an arching one, but an uneven one; a complex map.
I find this view of the Bible holds an important truth: God meets us right in the middle of the messy story our culture tells and calls us forward. Sometimes this call of God is discerned right in the middle of the horrendous stuff; it shines.
Like when right in the middle of stories about casting out and dividing between holy and profane there’s suddenly a call to provide systems of welfare for refugees, a warning not to exploit workers, a command to “love your neighbour as yourself” – all of those are from Leviticus 19: 9-18. (I wonder if Marcion might have wanted to keep those bits?)
A Thoroughly Jewish Jesus
For me, recovering the context of scriptural passages has been part and parcel of taking them seriously. I am given to asking, “What was the socio-political context for this passage? How would the original audience have heard it?” This means we need to have a thoroughly Jewish Jesus in a very real and particular colonised setting speaking to issues of that day. Advance warning: exploring the context of the ‘red letters’ may politicise the words of Jesus and mess with your comfortable high-capitalism. It did mine. Because taking context seriously has a second level. It leads me to ask, “What is OUR socio-political context and what are the ‘red letters’ asking of US?” I’m a minister, so this is a central part of my role in my community. Here’s an example of how this works for me.
Cooking a Sermon
I was preparing to preach on Jesus’ claim to be the bread of life in John 6:35. Lots of other stories about bread were starting to circle around this claim. So I dig down into the context of Jesus’ audience unearthing interesting contextual things about the Empire offering ‘pax romana’ and how ‘bread and games’ were used to subdue the colonised people of Jesus’ day. Then, as I often do, I took my sermon prep to out to our Wednesday community; a foodbank and community meal for homeless neighbours. We spent a good hour or more talking about what the staples of our life are and what we are willing to trade for them. New avenues were opening up in my thinking. I was hearing God’s Word through those who were hungry and it challenged me in ways my concordances could not hope to reach. I kept returning to the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” and these community conversations fed into our weekly liturgy group where we try to put into words what God is speaking to us about. How could we pray ‘give us daily bread’ as a community where many need our foodbank to put meals on their tables? We were struck by the Eucharist-like serving of bread at the community meal; challenged by our own complicity in the social structures which offer ‘bread and games’ in return for passive consent. The ‘red letters’ read us.
The hermeneutic of having the words and life of Jesus as a spirit-level or point on a map does not lift them out of their context at all; I am finding this process navigates me beyond understanding them in the pages of commentaries to seeing how they sound in communities that seek justice and faith.
Where does this leave us?
I return to the Bible, but not to wield scissors. Rather, Jesus’ words help me discern the Word of God everywhere else: in the Old Testament, in my personal devotion, and in the voices around me in my community. I hear Jesus a lot, all over the place (make of that what you will) but I can only be sure I am hearing Jesus when I take it back and measure it against the spirit level I find in the ‘red letters’.
Still, Red Letter Christians has not been set up in the UK to win an argument in Biblical hermeneutics. It has come about from a desire (shared by many) to shift our focus back towards Christian praxis; to see disciples’ lives looking more recognisably like Jesus. The words and life of Jesus have the power to transform who I am at the deepest level. That is why I own the Red Letter Christian label.