The Bible Tells Me So: Reflections on Jesus Loves Me: 14

A student asked Karl Barth - author of six million words of Christian theology - what the most important discovery of his life had been. He answered with eight words.Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.The theologian and the child meet in the same sentence. The most sophisticated systematic theology in the twentieth century and the first song a three-year-old learns at her mother's knee arrive at exactly the same place: a declaration of personal love from the specific Jesus of the Gospels, grounded not in feeling or tradition or the church's authority, but in the word of the God who cannot lie.The Bible Tells Me So is the fourteenth volume in the Songs of the Redeemed series. Moving phrase by phrase through Anna Bartlett Warner's beloved hymn - written for a dying boy in a Victorian novel, set to music by William Bradbury, sung on every continent in hundreds of languages - Elias Hartwell opens each line into the full depth of the gospel it contains. Here is the love that is known, not merely hoped for. Here is the Bible's authority as the ground of the soul's assurance. Here is the weakness that Jesus welcomes rather than refuses. Here is the death He died and the gate He opened and the sin He washes and the child He takes in His arms and blesses.For the child who is only beginning to understand what she is singing. For the theologian who has never stopped needing what the child already knows. For every believer who has ever sung this hymn and wondered whether something so simple could possibly be enough -It is. The Bible says so.

Pagina's: 77, Paperback, Independently published