Beyond Bibliolatry

Barth’s challenge to evangelical bibliocentrism and the case for a Christ-centered faith

For many ex-evangelicals, the first crack opens inside the Bible itself.

They started reading more carefully. They noticed that the Gospels do not always line up in a clean sequence. They saw that Israel’s theology develops over time. They ran into laws, assumptions, and moral judgments that reflect ancient worlds rather than timeless universals. They learned that the canon was not handed to us directly from God. They discovered that doctrines they had been taught to treat as obviously true often rest on later theological constructs more than on the text itself.

For many, that realization did not feel freeing at first. It felt more like the floor giving way.

The reason is not hard to see. Within a large swath of evangelicalism, the Bible is not merely cherished or treated as sacred. It is made to carry far more weight than that. The whole structure rests on it. It is expected to function not only as Scripture, but as certainty itself: a perfect foundation, a final answer key, a safeguard against ambiguity, and a weapon against doubt. Once that picture begins to crack, however, everything built on it starts to shake.

That is one reason Karl Barth still matters.

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For some evangelical readers, Barth’s name alone will raise suspicion, and Peter Enns will do the same for similar reasons. Both men have often been treated as unsafe guides, not because most churchgoers have read them closely, but because they have been warned in advance that this kind of thinking leads away from biblical truth. In many conservative settings, “Barthian” and “liberal” function less as careful descriptions than as cautionary labels. That tendency is part of the larger problem, because it trains believers to distrust serious challenges to their theological system before those challenges can even be heard.

Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian who became one of the most influential Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century, is not the sort of theologian people usually meet on their way out of evangelical certainty culture. Peter Enns is often closer at hand, and for good reason. Enns writes in a voice many wounded evangelicals can readily hear. Barth, by contrast, tends to show up wearing a Swiss overcoat and carrying several thousand pages of dogmatics.

By bibliolatry, in my title, I do not mean loving Scripture too much. I mean treating the Bible as though it were God himself, or as though the right doctrine of Scripture could replace the harder work of listening for the living Christ. But for those willing to work through it, Barth offers something that remains desperately needed: a way to take Scripture with full seriousness without turning it into an idol. He offers a way to challenge bibliocentrism without tossing Christian faith into the weeds. He gives us a better center.¹

That center is not the Bible.

That will sound alarming to some readers. It shouldn’t.

The center of Christian faith, Barth insists, is Jesus Christ. Not a doctrine of Scripture. Not an inerrancy statement. Not a theory of inspiration constructed centuries after the fact. Christ. That is not a modern notion. It is a deeply Christian claim. “In the beginning was the Word,” the Fourth Gospel says, and the Word there is not a book but the one who “became flesh and lived among us.”² The Christian confession is not that the Bible became flesh. It is that God was made known in Jesus Christ.

That distinction is easy to affirm and surprisingly easy to ignore or get twisted.

A great deal of modern Protestantism, especially in its more conservative forms, says “Christ-centered” while operating in a way that is functionally Bible-centered. More precisely, it often becomes interpretation-centered. God, Bible, and our reading of the Bible get collapsed into one tight package. Certain readings are treated not merely as arguments about Scripture but as obedience to God himself. Disagreement is defiance. Questioning is rebellion. The result is that many believers are not really taught to trust God. They are taught to trust a particular doctrinal system about the Bible and to confuse that system with the voice of God.

Barth can help break that confusion apart.

His famous account of the Word of God comes in three forms: revelation, Scripture, and proclamation. Christ is the revealed Word. Scripture is the written Word. Proclamation is the preached Word. The order matters here. Christ is primary. Scripture bears witness to him. Proclamation bears witness to him through Scripture. That means Barth can speak about the Bible with great reverence while refusing to identify it with God in any simplistic way. Revelation, in the strict sense, is not a text. It is God’s self-disclosure in Christ. Scripture is the inspired and indispensable witness through which God speaks, but it remains witness. Here “inspired” need not mean what modern fundamentalism often means by it. It need not imply a kind of dictation, mechanical precision, or error-free textual system. It means, rather, that these human texts are taken up into God’s service and used by God to bear witness to Christ.³

That correction is one many ex-evangelicals need.

For a lot of people, deconstruction begins when they discover that the Bible does not behave the way they were told a divine book ought to behave. They were taught to expect perfect uniformity, direct answers, stable doctrines, and a level of internal precision that would satisfy modern polemics. But the Bible does not read like that. It reads like a library. It contains argument, development, memory, poetry, political struggle, theological reworking, and voices that do not always sound the same. It is not less interesting for that. It is more interesting. But if you were taught that God could only speak through a text scrubbed clean of human complexity, the discovery can be devastating.

This is where Peter Enns has been so helpful to so many people. Enns has spent years pointing out that Christians often inherit expectations about the Bible that the Bible itself does not ask us to have. They are handed a modern doctrine and then told to project it backward onto ancient texts. When the Bible refuses to cooperate, they assume Scripture has failed. What has often failed instead is the doctrinal system. Enns has tried to help readers tell the truth about the Bible they actually have rather than defend the Bible their church culture needed. Barth, though writing in a different key, helps make a similar move. He refuses to make Christian faith stand or fall on a fragile theory of textual perfection.⁴

That refusal is one of his great gifts.

Barth does not try to protect Christianity by denying what readers can plainly see, smoothing out rough edges, or constructing tighter harmonizations. He relocates the center. Scripture has real authority and an indispensable role in the life of the church. But it is not the object of faith, and it is certainly not a fourth member of the Trinity, though some corners of Protestantism have wandered close enough to make that joke land.

That problem becomes especially visible in the Reformed tradition’s appeal to sola scriptura.

As a Reformation claim, sola scriptura was a protest against ecclesial overreach. It meant that the church does not stand above Scripture and may not use its own authority to override the witness of the biblical text. Fair enough. That is a serious claim, and one can understand why it mattered in the Reformation. But in modern evangelical and Reformed practice, sola scriptura often becomes something else entirely. It becomes a fantasy of pure access, as though believers can simply “go by the Bible” without mediation, without tradition, without inherited doctrinal assumptions, without theological habits, and without communities shaping what they read in the text.

Put simply, that is impossible.

No one reads the Bible without a set of prior commitments. No one arrives at Scripture untouched by history, language, culture, liturgy, training, or inherited assumptions. The person who says, “I just believe what the Bible says,” usually means, “I have been formed so thoroughly by my tradition that its readings now feel self-evident and obvious to me.” That is not unique to evangelicals. Everyone reads through lenses. But evangelical and Reformed bibliocentrism often refuses to admit it. It imagines an unfiltered relationship to the text that no actual Christian has ever possessed.⁵

The irony, of course, is that even the “Bible alone” impulse depends on tradition at every turn. The canon, and here we are speaking specifically of the Protestant canon rather than pretending there is only one universally received form of it, was received through the life of the church. The texts were copied, preserved, debated, translated, and handed down through communities of belief. The Protestant who insists on Scripture alone still relies on centuries of communal discernment simply to know which books belong in the Bible. He relies on translators. He relies on inherited doctrinal judgments. He relies on theological vocabulary that did not fall from the sky with the text itself. Sola scriptura, taken as a modest claim about final authority, can make sense. Treated as a denial of mediation, interpretation, and history, it becomes not just unworkable but a form of self-deception confused for piety.⁶

Barth offers a cleaner way through.

He takes Scripture with utmost seriousness but does not ask it to do what it was never given to do, turn it into a mechanism of certainty, or use it as a way to escape the risks of interpretation. He does not pretend that revelation can be reduced to correct propositions sitting safely on a page. Instead, he reminds the church that Scripture’s role is to bear witness to the living God who confronts us in Christ.

There is biblical warrant for that claim, and not just in John’s prologue.

In John 5, Jesus tells his opponents, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”⁷ That passage should unsettle every form of bibliocentrism. Jesus is not dismissing Scripture. He is exposing what happens when Scripture becomes the stopping point rather than the signpost. One can search the text, defend the text, memorize the text, even weaponize the text, and still miss the one to whom it points.

Luke gives us a similar picture in the resurrection narrative, where Jesus is said to interpret “in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”⁸ The point is not that every verse contains a secret code. The point is that Scripture, for Christians, finds its center of gravity in Christ. It points toward him. It is gathered around him. It is read in light of him. That is what a Christ-centered reading means at its best. It does not mean ignoring the Hebrew Bible’s complexity or reducing Scripture to a devotional slogan. It means that Christians read these texts under the belief that God’s character is disclosed most fully in Christ.

Hebrews says something similar in its opening lines: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us …”by a Son.”⁹ That line does not erase what came before. It orders it. It tells Christians where the clearest disclosure of God is to be found. Not in a doctrine of textual perfection. Not in a pile of isolated proof texts. In Christ.

That distinction bears directly on how evangelicals use familiar verses to defend inerrancy.

Take 2 Timothy 3:16–17, for example: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”¹⁰ The passage has genuine weight, but it does not do the work later evangelical systems demand of it. For one thing, the letter’s Pauline authorship is widely disputed in critical scholarship, so the usual shorthand “Paul says” is already assumptive.¹¹ More important, the passage says nothing about autographs, nothing about modern theories of precision, and nothing about the doctrinal scaffolding later built around the word inerrancy. It also refers, in its original setting, to Israel’s scriptures, not to a finished New Testament canon that did not yet exist in the form later Christians would know. It says Scripture is God-breathed and useful. Barth can happily affirm that Scripture is used by God, that it is indispensable to the church, and that through it God addresses us. What he will not do is leap from that claim to the kind of airtight bibliology modern evangelicalism often treats as nonnegotiable.¹²

That is where the fight usually begins.

The bibliocentric crowd hears any refusal to endorse inerrancy in their preferred form and concludes that biblical authority is being abandoned. But that confuses two different questions. One question is whether Scripture is authoritative for the church. Another is whether authority requires the sort of textual theory conservative Protestantism developed in response to modern anxieties. Barth says yes to the first and no to the second. Scripture’s authority is not grounded in our ability to prove that it contains no tension, no development, no historically conditioned assumptions, and no marks of human limitation. Its authority is grounded in God’s freedom to use these texts as witness to Christ.¹³

It may actually be more secure that way, because it does not ask the Bible to be what it never claims to be.

The obvious question presents itself: if Christianity stands or falls with Christ, and Christ is known through Scripture, then does faith not still depend on the Bible after all? In one sense, yes. Scripture is the church’s primary and indispensable witness to Jesus Christ. Christianity is not built on vague spiritual impressions floating free of history. It is rooted in the witness of Israel, the Gospels, apostolic proclamation, and the church’s received testimony. But depending on Scripture is not the same thing as depending on a modern doctrine of inerrancy. Christians have always known Christ through witness. The question is what kind of authority Scripture has and what sort of trust it asks of us.

The Gospels themselves make that clear. Luke openly describes his Gospel as an ordered account based on earlier testimony.¹⁴ John says that Jesus did many things not written in his book.¹⁵ The evangelists are not presenting themselves as stenographers producing a modern transcript scrubbed clean of perspective, selection, and theological purpose. They are presenting themselves as witnesses. And witness can be true, weighty, and trustworthy without being forced into a later theory of textual perfection. The alternative to inerrancy is not guesswork. It is a more historically and theologically grounded account of how truth is mediated through testimony.

And that forces a harder, more critical question.

What if bibliocentrism is not actually a high view of Scripture? What if it is a way of overloading Scripture with demands that belong somewhere else? What if some forms of Protestant certainty have less to do with honoring the Bible and more to do with managing anxiety? A perfect book is, at bottom, a tool for managing anxiety. It keeps ambiguity out, historical complexity at arm’s length, and God safely within the doctrinal lines already drawn.

That may be too blunt for some readers, but the problem is real. The Bible can become a substitute for God, a place where certainty is stored and weaponized, a means of avoiding the living Christ rather than meeting him. Jesus’s argument in John 5 still cuts straight through the fog: one can search the Scriptures and still refuse the one to whom they bear witness. That is not a warning against immersion in the Scriptures. It is a warning against using Scripture as a shield against revelation.

This is why Barth can be such a help to ex-evangelicals.

He offers a way to let go of impossible claims about the Bible without concluding that nothing remains. He gives readers permission to admit what they can see with their own eyes: that Scripture is historically situated, deeply human, and not reducible to a doctrinal flowchart. But he does not leave them there. He points beyond the collapse of bad certainties to a better center. He reminds them that Christianity does not stand or fall with a modern evangelical doctrine of inerrancy. It stands or falls with Christ, who is known through Scripture’s witness, not through a later theory of textual perfection.

Discovering that the Bible is more complex than you were told does not have to destroy faith. You can stop pretending the text behaves like a systematic theology manual with no loose ends. You can acknowledge the canon’s formation, the diversity of voices within Scripture, the moral and theological development within the tradition, and the role of interpretation in every act of reading, without concluding that you have therefore abandoned Christianity. The loss of a stiff doctrine of Scripture may not be the loss of faith at all. It may be the loss of an idol.

Enns has helped many people take those first steps because he names the mismatch between the Bible evangelicals expect and the Bible they actually have. Barth helps by giving that insight theological depth. He shows why the collapse of bibliocentrism need not end in rubble. If Scripture is witness, then its humanity is not a threat to its role. If Christ is the center, then the text does not need to carry the weight of every apologetic demand placed on it. If revelation is God’s self-disclosure in Christ, then the Christian task is not to defend a paper fortress but to attend to the One to whom Scripture points.¹⁶

That does not make interpretation easy. Quite the opposite.

A Christ-centered reading is harder than a bibliocentric one because it removes some of the shortcuts. It will not let us hide behind slogans about “the plain meaning” when the issues are morally and historically more complex. It asks us to read the Bible as Christians rather than as collectors of proof texts. It forces us to ask how any given reading aligns with the one Christians confess as “the image of the invisible God.”¹⁷ It requires discernment, moral seriousness, historical awareness, and a willingness to admit that we do not approach the text without bias.

In that sense, Barth is not a soft landing. He is a demanding guide.

He does not flatter ex-evangelicals, tell them all doctrine is power play, or dissolve Christianity into ethics, metaphor, or generic spirituality. He is far too confessional for that and far too convinced that God has actually addressed the world in Christ. But he also refuses the fantasy that Christians secure this truth by erecting a perfect doctrine of the Bible and then mistaking that edifice for revelation itself.

That refusal may be one of the most important things he can still teach the church.

A great deal of Protestant Christianity, especially in America, has become trapped in an argument about the Bible that is too small for the Bible itself. One side treats inerrancy as the only thing standing between order and collapse. The other side, having seen through that illusion, often assumes nothing serious can be rebuilt. Barth does not fit either camp. He will not let conservatives make the Bible into a mechanism of control, nor let former believers assume that the failure of a bad doctrine exhausts the question of God. He places both under judgment. Then he points them back to Christ.

For readers coming out of evangelicalism, that can be the beginning of something better than either certainty or ruin.

Something more difficult and more honest. A faith willing to tell the truth about Scripture’s humanity, to admit the role of tradition and interpretation without pretending sola scriptura resolved those questions, to stop demanding from the Bible what it was never meant to provide, and to read Scripture as sacred witness rather than substitute deity.

It changes how one reads, how one argues, how one prays, and how one imagines God.

That may be one of Karl Barth’s clearest contributions to the journey out of evangelical certainty. The collapse of bibliolatry is not the collapse of Christianity. It may be the first real chance to encounter the living Word again.

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Endnotes

1. On Barth’s understanding of revelation, Scripture, and proclamation, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), especially §§1–7; and Church Dogmatics, I/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), especially the discussion of Scripture as witness to revelation.

2. John 1:1, 14 (NRSVue).

3. Barth’s threefold account of the Word of God is foundational to Church Dogmatics I/1. See also John Webster, Barth (London: Continuum, 2000), 57–74, for a concise secondary treatment.

4. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015); Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It (New York: HarperOne, 2014).

5. For useful discussion of the interpretive limits of modern appeals to sola scriptura, see Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2001), especially where he distinguishes the magisterial Reformation view from modern individualism. For historical context, see Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 4th ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 154–76.

6. On canon formation and the church’s role in receiving Scripture, see Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, rev. and expanded ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995); and John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book (New York: Viking, 2019).

7. John 5:39–40 (NRSVue).

8. Luke 24:27 (NRSVue).

9. Hebrews 1:1–2 (NRSVue).

10. 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (NRSVue).

11. On the disputed authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 668–86; and Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 8th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 395–407. In this essay, references to 2 Timothy therefore avoid assuming Pauline authorship.

12. For the modern evangelical doctrine of inerrancy as distinct from the claims of the biblical texts themselves, see John D. Woodbridge, ed., Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), as a classic defense; compare Enns, The Bible Tells Me So, 27–49, for critique. On Barth’s refusal to ground authority in such a doctrine, see Webster, Barth, 66–70.

13. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, on Scripture as human words taken up into divine service; see also Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 1–25.

14. Luke 1:1–4 (NRSVue).

15. John 20:30–31; 21:25 (NRSVue).

16. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 13–18; Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1–I/2.

17. Colossians 1:15 (NRSVue). Because Colossians is among the Pauline letters whose authorship is disputed in critical scholarship, one could also frame this more cautiously in a formal academic setting by referring to “the author of Colossians.” For the purposes of this essay, the verse is cited for its Christological claim rather than as part of an argument about authorship.