In response to a common appeal for Christians to search their Bibles and “be like Bereans,” Griffin Gulledge has a provocative piece entitled “The Bereans Had No Bibles.” In it, he makes some important points worth your consideration:
- Bereans receive the truth.
- Bereans learn in the context of the gathered church.
- Bereans believe the Christian faith from the Old Testament.
Gulledge concludes:
Being a Berean is a lost label for Christians. These days, most of the people who appeal to the term are bloggers on the internet, mostly engaged in heated polemics at best or vicious attacks on those they disagree with at worst. What we see here instead is that Bereans are those who receive the truth in the context of the church, and thereby together prove Christ is both Savior and Lord from the Scriptures. What is the end of all of this? It’s not to win debates or to fill our heads with knowledge for its own sake. The passage tells us: many believe.
The goal of emulating the Bereans is to bring about and strengthen faith. It is Christ’s work and who he is, preached from the Scriptures, that saves and sanctifies. The Bereans had no Bibles. But they did have Christ. We have the Bible. And together, we should seek to find Christ there, and thereby be transformed into his image (2 Cor 3:17-18)
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