The New Testament is an inspirational classic in the history of the world’s great literature, but surely we can forget about the Old Testament! The Sermon on the mount is a masterpiece of ethical teaching, but surely we can do without all this talk about Jesus Christ dying to be our Saviour! Statements like these represent the ‘faith’ (if we can call it ‘faith’) of a great many people in our modern world. Statements like these have been made by people who have achieved a great deal in the academic world. These attitudes seem so modern. They sound intelligent. They have a certain plausibility about them. Some, who are regarded as great theologians, come to the Bible with the attitude that they have the right to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they wish to believe. They rarely take the Old Testament very seriously. When they come to the New Testament, they reject as naivety the idea that God has miraculously intervened in our world in the sending of His Son to be our Saviour. For such theologians, all we really need to take seriously is the idea that we should be nice to other people and hope that they will be nice to us in return. This kind of reduction of the Biblical and Christian Gospel to a Jesus-ethic has been very influential on the thinking of many, ordinary people in today’s world. So many people have a vague respect for Jesus, the ethical teacher, but they have lost faith in the God - the Lord of history - who became man in Jesus in order to bring men and women back to Himself. What are we to make of this kind of thinking? - We could not even read the first chapter of the New Testament without finding a direct and emphatic refutation of such man-centred and godless unbelief.
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