Through the Lens of Christ
Written by Ben Bock | Bible Study, Hermeneutics
About Ben Bock
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Note to the Reader: This is the first in what will hopefully become a series of guest posts designed to introduce people to the kinds of presuppositions we bring to the Bible when we interpret it. Identifying some of our key commitments and influences when studying the Bible is not a weakness. Instead, it is a critical step in ensuring we study the Bible well. It can actually help prevent misinterpretation. Many thanks to Ben for offering the first of these guest posts.)
A few years ago, I was back in Madrid, walking down the Paseo del Prado on a Sunday morning. The city closes the boulevard to cars on Sunday mornings, so it fills with cyclists, joggers, and families all out for a slow walk. My son was going through a phase where he was fascinated by police officers, so when we passed one walking nearby, I let him say hello, and we ended up talking for a while.
When faith came up, the way it sometimes does in small talk, I mentioned I was part of the Spanish Protestant church. Most of the time when I say this to someone in Spain, I get a blank stare. Protestants are a tiny minority there, a footnote most people have never had reason to notice.
This time was different, though. The officer's face lit up. "Ah," he said, "you're the ones who help get drug addicts off the streets."
He was right. The Spanish Protestant church has a long, quiet history of running rehabilitation centers, walking alongside people the rest of society has given up on. This man saw the effects of addiction on the street every day. He knew the church not by its politics or its ambitions, but by its fruit. His first association with the church wasn't power. It was service to the vulnerable.
I've carried that moment with me for years, because I think it says something about how I read scripture too. What face does God have in the passage in front of me? Is it a face that serves the vulnerable, or a face reaching for control?
The Lens of Christ
My primary hermeneutical lens is Jesus. All of Scripture points to and is fulfilled through Jesus. When I think of God, I’m reminded of A. M. Ramsey’s words: “God is Christlike; in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.” Paul calls Jesus the image of the invisible God. He writes that in Christ the fullness of God dwells bodily. The writer of Hebrews calls him the exact representation of God's nature. Jesus himself tells Philip, plainly, that whoever has seen him has seen the Father.
It’s important not to let the idea of "Jesus is my lens" become a slippery slope. We must be cautious not to read our own preferences into the text and call them Christ's. The Jesus I’m referring to is the one Scripture itself paints for us: the Gospels' witness to what he said and did, read alongside the whole of the biblical story that points to him and that he fulfills. Scripture holds the authority. Christ is the lens Scripture itself gives for reading Scripture faithfully.
This hermeneutic is not new and has been around since the beginning of the church. But I came to see it for myself slowly, through years of reading Scripture and sitting with theologians who kept pointing me back to it. The heart of it is simple to state but hard to live. The cross is the clearest revelation of who God is, and every other portrait of God in Scripture has to be read in its light.
What this means practically is that when I come across a passage where God doesn't look like Jesus, I don't throw the passage out, and I don't pretend the tension isn't there. I assume I'm missing something. Maybe it is context I don't have. A genre I'm misreading. A voice in the text that isn't actually God's own verdict but a human cry, preserved honestly. Sometimes I find that missing piece. Sometimes I don't, at least not fully. I've made peace with that. This lens is a compass, and a compass tells you which direction to walk. It doesn't draw you the whole map. There's still Scripture I don't yet fully understand, still passages I see through a glass darkly. But I trust I'll understand more one day than I do now.
A Lens Shaped by Biography
The other lens I read through is less theological and more biographical. I grew up in Spain, in the Protestant minority, the same tradition that the policeman recognized. Being part of a faith community that was small, largely unnoticed, and mostly fine with staying that way shaped how I see the church's proper posture in the world. We weren't fighting for cultural influence. We weren't positioned near any levers of power. We just did the work in front of us and let that be enough.
Moving to the United States as a young adult, I was confronted with something very different: a mainline evangelicalism that has held real influence over government and culture, and that has often worked very hard to protect that influence, sometimes at a cost to its own faithfulness. I read Scripture differently because I've now seen both postures up close: a church on the margins, and a church near the center. That contrast keeps me asking what kind of posture toward power the God revealed in Jesus actually models.
It also keeps me humble about my own tradition's blind spots. I try to remember that the specific expression of Christianity I hold today is, in the long view, a twentieth-century one. There are convictions my own fellowship treats as settled that would have been unrecognizable five hundred years ago, or a thousand, or fifteen hundred. The Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Anabaptists, the early Protestant reformers: all of them had vibrant, serious, faithful expressions of Christianity that would make plenty of Christians in 2026 uncomfortable. That doesn't make those traditions wrong. Yet, it does make me suspicious of my own certainty. I try to read Scripture with an awareness that my hemisphere, my century, and my particular church tradition have all handed me a set of lenses I didn't choose and mostly can't see past on my own. Knowing that doesn't remove the lenses through which I read Scripture, but it keeps me from mistaking my perspective for dogma.
Reading in Community
I don’t interpret Scripture by myself, and I don't think it's supposed to. When I'm wrestling with a difficult passage, my first move is almost never to sit alone with a commentary. It's to call a friend. I look for people whose upbringing, education, and worldview are different enough from mine that they'll see something I can't. Community discernment has always been important to me. A single reader, however careful, is still reading through a limited set of lenses. A community, especially one that actually lives out its faith together, can hold a text up to more light than any of us can alone.
Wrestling Without Resolution
One more conviction shapes how I hold scripture: it's all right to wrestle without resolution. I don't think every hard question demands a tidy answer, and I've grown suspicious of dogmatism that reaches for one too quickly.
I have a friend, a Ukrainian pastor, who shepherded a congregation in a city occupied by Russian forces in the opening weeks of the full-scale invasion. He's told me about walking through the aftermath with people who saw the same devastation, the same mass graves, and who split into two very different responses. Some wanted nothing more to do with God. How could a good God allow this? Others, having lived through the identical horror, found themselves searching for God for the first time.
There's no clean answer to that question. What my friend offered his congregation wasn't an explanation; it was presence. He stayed in the suffering with them, the way Jesus stayed present with humanity in his own death and suffering rather than explaining it away from a distance. I think that's often what faithful interpretation asks of us too, especially when a passage refuses easy interpretation. Not a better argument. Presence with the text and with each other inside the parts that don't yet make sense.
This hermeneutic isn't just an academic exercise. I live it out daily, in conversations with my kids as they bump into the hardness of the world and start asking their own questions about God.
One day on our way to school, a high schooler jumped in front of the train as my family was entering the station. He ended his life. The following week, I was riding my bike with my son on the back when, out of nowhere, he asked, "Dad, is it true that the kid who jumped in front of the train went to hell?" A friend at school had told him that's what happens to anyone who takes their own life. You go straight to hell.
My son has never been satisfied with simple answers, so what followed was a long, honest conversation on the back of a bicycle about pain, hopelessness, suffering, and the love God has for people in the middle of it. I didn't offer him a tidy verse. I had the same Jesus I keep coming back to everywhere else: the one who wept at a grave, who was moved with compassion for crowds who felt harassed and helpless, who never once turned away from someone in pain.
My kids ask me about doubt, about who belongs and who doesn't, about identity and nationality, about the things they hear from their friends at school. Every one of those conversations reminds me that my theology is not for a classroom but for real life. My reading of scripture needs to survive being explained honestly to my own children, on the back of a bike.
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