"A Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ"

Relationship rhetoric dominates the presentation of the gospel among Protestant Evangelicals today. I believe this is a bad thing, and we should adjust our rhetoric.

When I listen to the local Christian radio station, I often hear an announcer say, "If you would like to talk to someone right now about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, please call..." and they give the phone number. If you click on "Knowing Christ" at this station's website you will read, "The Bible, as God’s Word, proclaims how a person can come into a living and vital relationship with Jesus Christ." Later it says, "God invites you to come into a relationship with Him through faith in Christ’s death on your behalf." And it concludes, "If you put your faith alone in Christ alone, you will come into a loving and eternal relationship with Christ."

Where did this omnipresent word "relationship" (or the phrase "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ") come from?

It certainly does not come from the Bible. You can verify this for yourself very easily. Search the word "relationship" in an online concordance of the New Testament and you will get zero hits in all the literal translations - e.g. New King James, ESV, NASB, Holman and Young's. In the NIV the word appears just twice, but in neither case does it refer our relationship with God or Jesus.

Only in the free paraphrases (many, many steps removed from the Greek) do you see the word "relationship" connecting us with God. The New Living Translation uses the word this way eight times, and Eugene Peterson's The Message uses it 17 times. I have reviewed each of these texts carefully, and cannot find even one instance where the word "relationship" accurately reflects a close reading of the Greek text.

But does that matter? Just because a particular word does not occur in the Bible does not mean the concept isn't there. I believe in the Trinity even though the word "Trinity" never appears in Scripture, and I believe in plenary inspiration even though we have to cobble that doctrine together from several texts that never use those exact words. Maybe "come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is like that - a handy phrase that, while not strictly biblical, is nonetheless useful because it accurately communicates a truth that we otherwise could not express succinctly.

But I am afraid I am not convinced by this defense of "personal relationship" usage and rhetoric. To me there are two very sound reasons for discarding the phrase entirely.

First, we already have several words in the Bible that express clearly and powerfully what we are supposed to do with Jesus Christ. That is, there was never a gap in the Bible's own language that necessitated the crafting of "have a personal relationship" with him. I cannot agree that the Bible's own words were vague or unwieldy or in any dire need of a robust summary.

Here are two good words that the Bible uses very often with respect to our relation to Divinity: "follow" and "obey." In the New Testament I count 19 instances of "follow" and 26 instances of "obey" (along with its cognates "obedient" and "obedience.") These are conservative counts. I eliminated all duplicate occurrences in the gospels, all concrete usages of "follow" (e.g. "they followed him around the lake"), and all instances of "obey" that had nothing to do with obeying God or Jesus (e.g. "Children obey your parents"). That still leaves dozens of passages like these:

Matthew 10:38:
And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

1 Peter 2:21:
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.

John 3:36:
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

2 Corinthians 10:5:
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.

There are other good words in the Bible that likewise tell us what to do with Jesus, words like "trust," "worship," "thank," "love," "glorify," "praise," and "bow the knee to." If there exists in the English language a summary phrase that contains all these elements, "have a personal relationship with" is certainly not it. We would need something far deeper and stronger than that.

So my first objection to "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is simple and procedural: We have plenty of good words in the Bible already - why not use them? My second complaint is more substantial and has to do with the weakness of the phrase itself. I'll be blunt: "have a personal relationship with" is mild, mushy, flimsy, non-committal, indefinite and so unclear that it is hard to see it as anything other than misleading. While "worship," "trust," "obey," "love," "follow," and "thank" are all meaty words you can sink your teeth into, "have a personal relationship with" dissolves on your tongue like verbal cotton candy. In the Bible's own words a man can read his mission clear, but our latter-day substitute is just a pastel blur.

And I believe that this lack of clarity provides for many people a fog of escape from the duty of submission to God's will. That is because "have a personal relationship with" says nothing about our position relative to God nor our obligation to serve him. We all have "personal relationships" with our spouses, children, parents, friends, coworkers and neighbors - but we do not worship, obey, follow, or pray to them. We do not seek to take every thought captive in obedience to them. That is, our standing before all others with whom we have "personal relationships" is qualitatively different from our standing before God. In all other instances where we use that phrase "personal relationship" there is an implied equal footing, an equality of status. (Our relationship with our children is no exception: though they must honor us as we honor our parents and as their children must honor them, our co-equal status as human beings provides the ground upon which the personal relationship is founded.)

I am afraid that the English phrase "personal relationship," is, in normal usage, so laden with the freight of ontological equality that it is difficult to keep that egalitarian inference from seeping into our minds when we use the phrase to connect us and God. I contend that this seepage is a real danger. Witness the alarming tendency even among confessing evangelicals to regard God as a personal friend who is free to make suggestions but is not the Lord of creation whose command is absolute. Jesus, in their view, is not someone to be obeyed but someone to pal around with. Lord willing, I'll write another essay soon with concrete examples that illustrate the ways in which "relationship" has replaced "obedience" for many modern evangelicals.

In the meantime let me tell you of a hope that I cherish. I have a dream that someday I'll turn on WMBI radio and the announcer will not be saying, "God wants to have a personal relationship with you," but rather, "God commands you to repent of your sins." And instead of, "If you would like to talk to someone right now about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," he'll say, "If you would like to follow Jesus Christ, please call this number." I'll rejoice and say, "At last! They are using Jesus' own words. Perhaps revival is near."