Denby is not a church-goer. I don’t know if he believes in any sort of God at all. But he loves the Bible, and understands there is nothing like it anywhere. He particularly loves Jesus. He writes:
As I read Matthew…what I fealt was a delight in Jesus, an unanticipated elation and excitement. Reading the Gospels at eighteen, and then picking up the New Testament now and again over the intervening years I had noticed only .the doctrinal, and so to speak, the spectacular side of Christianity. I had missed most of what is so extraordinarily powerful about Jesus. He possessed an intellectual vigour that was without parallel…This man heading for death was invincible – not only moving and eloquent, but also supremely witty… Oh I loved Jesus, and I feared him. (pp174-176)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. John 1.1
Jesus also performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus it the Messiah, the Son of God, and that in believing you might have life in his name. John 20.30-31
I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ…that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings…Philippians 3.8,10
God, after speaking to the fathers and the prophets in many ways and portions, has in these last days spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He also made the world . Hebrews 1.1-2
I recently reread David Denby’s book Great Books. Denby, a film critic for New York magazine, and a contributing editor of the New Yorker, decided when he was in his early forties, to go back to college and take the freshman Lit courses he had taken years earlier at Columbia University. He wanted to reconnect with the landmarks of the written word, now that he was an adult. The book appeals to me for several reasons. One reason is that it is like having a friend to talk to who likes the same books I do. Books do that – allow you to have friends and to engage intellectually with people you will never meet, who have perhaps been dead for centuries, or even millennia. Another reason is that He, as I, believes you shouldn’t force kids to read books beyond their maturity level – that you have to be old enough to really “get” a book, and that there is enough great literature available for all ages that one can never catch up with all there is out there to read. The best part about the book are the chapters on the Bible.
As I read Matthew…what I fealt was a delight in Jesus, an unanticipated elation and excitement. Reading the Gospels at eighteen, and then picking up the New Testament now and again over the intervening years I had noticed only .the doctrinal, and so to speak, the spectacular side of Christianity. I had missed most of what is so extraordinarily powerful about Jesus. He possessed an intellectual vigour that was without parallel…This man heading for death was invincible – not only moving and eloquent, but also supremely witty… Oh I loved Jesus, and I feared him. (pp174-176)I am always challenged by this marginal believer when I read those lines. So many deny the clearly stated truths of the Bible, and I spend so much time and mental resources identifying and defending them that it is easy to forget we are called not to follow a set of true propositions, but a man who is also God – who can be known, who must be known if we are to know God and have eternal life.
“Oh, how I love Jesus,” “What a friend we have in Jesus,” we sing. Is that true? Do we know him as a person, whose voice has a particular timbre, whose choice of words and manner of speaking are familiar and easily discernable, whose undeniable strength, and overwhelming affection are palpably felt? The Bible was not written, as was the U.S. Constitution, in order to codify and embody a set of values to govern a body politic. The Bible was written so that people across cultures, continents, and centuries, could have a real, visceral as well as intellectual, experience of Jesus. Knowing Jesus produces the faith that saves, empowers obedience, enables compassion, and connects us with eternity.
God’s WORD is a person, not a list. What a friend we have in Jesus…do we? Do we know him that way?
