"AUTHENTICATING OUR CHRISTIANITY"

Thomas Linacre was the founder of the Royal College of Physicians and Henry VIII's court physician. He was also England's most preeminent Renaissance scholar, and renowned intellectuals such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More had been his students. He lived during a time when access to the Bible was restricted to the clergy and denied to the common people.Consequently, Linacre hadn't read the Bible much, if any at all and certainly hadn't ever read it in depth. Yet this was a time when almost everyone in England would have self-identified as being a Christian.

One day a clergyman friend gave Thomas Linacre a copy of the Four Gospels. He studied it for a long time with the detail and depth that a trained scholar is capable of. When he returned it to his friend, he said thoughtfully, "Either these are not the Gospels or we are not Christians."

I think that today, a great many professed Christians, like Thomas Linacre, have not read much of the Bible. I think that many more probably haven't read it honestly and with a real hunger for truth and readiness to conform their thinking and lifestyle to it. Honest readers of the Gospels will not read them, inclined to have them say what they want them to say in order to justify what they have already decided to believe and how they have already decided to live.

Professed Christians today need to simply read the Gospels humbly and honestly with a hunger for Truth, letting the Bible interpret itself according to context, and letting it say what it says. If they did this, I think a significant number would have to say, "Either these are not really the Gospels, or I am not really a Christian." See 2 Cor. 13:5 and 2 Pet. 1:10.

"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

—John 8:32

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