Yesterday I introduced a paper by NT Wright called “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” (By the way, this lecture was delivered in 1989 at Dallas Theological Seminary). Today, I want to summarize his conclusions.
After showing that the commonly taught methods of Bible study actually undermined the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Wright argues that since the Bible is a narrative, we must read it as a narrative. And as we read, we must see ourselves as part of the ongoing narrative as well. In other words, our part in the story is to continue the narrative. Our purpose in reading Scripture is to learn what has happened before, so we can continue the story in a similar way, with similar themes.
He likens it to a five-act Shakespearean play in which we are the actors, but we only have scripts for the first four acts. After reading, studying, and acting out the first four acts, learning the themes, plot struture, and knowing what has gone before, we we are to improvise the fifth act.
People who try to go back and do what was done before (like churches to try to return to the “early church days”), are like actors who, when they get to the end of act 4 in they play, rather than start in on improvising act 5, decide that the best thing to do is just repeat act 4.
Wright puts it this way:
…The five acts [are] as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus. [The book of Acts and the Epistles] would then form the first scene of the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Cor 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. …[This] would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.
Reading the Bible this way does not require extensive training or knowledge of hermeneutical rules or Bible study methods so that the “timeless truths” can be extracted and sytemmatized. Reading the Bible as a story is available for anybody and everybody, and as a way to see what part in the ongoing narrative they can perform.
In this way, Bible reading becomes thrilling, rather than scary and confining, because you are afraid of making a wrong step.
The little boxes in which you put people and keep them under control are called coffins. We read Scripture not in order to avoid life and growth. God forgive us that we have done that in some of our traditions. Nor do we read Scripture in order to avoid thought and action, or to be crushed, or squeezed, or confined into a de-humanizing shape, but in order to die and rise again in our own minds.
So try it! Pick up your Bible, and for now, put away your study notes and guides. Pick it up and read it as a story. Forget that you have read it before and know all the timeless truths that have been extracted from the text. Read it as a story – a story that is ongoing, and in which you play a part. Here is what Wright says in conclusion:
So what am I saying? I am saying that we mustn’t belittle Scripture by bringing the world’s models of authority into it. We must let Scripture be itself, and that is a hard task. Scripture contains many things that I don’t know, and that you don’t know; many things that we are waiting to discover; passages that are lying dormant waiting for us to dig them out. Awaken them.
…We must determine – corporately as well as individually – to become in a true sense, people of the book. …People who are being remade, judged and remolded by the Spirit through Scripture. It seems to me that evangelical tradition has often become a bondage to a sort of lip-service Scripture principle even while debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Instead, I suggest that our task is to seize this privilege with both hands, and use it to the glory of God and the redemption of the world.
Jeremy,
Interesting post. I’m going to have to read the over a couple of times, but at first blush, I’m very uneasy about the way Wright phrases this.
That said, I agree entirely that the problem he’s trying to correct *is* a hellacious problem desperately in need of correction, and I *love* the notion of fitting oneself into the ongoing biblical story. I recently taught a 10-week course in Bible study at two local churches here in CA, and used the Bible as the primary textbook (funny thought, huh?). My premise was that like one’s doctrine, one’s hermeneutic either comes from Scripture, or some joker made it up on a rainy day, and why should we listen to him? So we spent a lot of time on how the biblical authors themselves used pre-existing Scriptures.
To bring some biblical examples to Wright’s point, Hebrews 11 and 2 Peter/Jude employ the strategy of fitting the readers and their circumstances into the ongoing story — complete with a future ending. Paul’s Mars’ Hill speech and Stephen’s defense before the Sanhedrin do the same thing with unbelieving audiences. Since the biblical authors tend to make reference to the ending, if I were going to steal Wright’s metaphor, I’d prefer to characterize it as “living in the fourth act,” where you’ve read the first three acts and the fifth, and you have to continue where the third act leaves off, mindful that what you do must fit in with the ending specified in the fifth act.
Tim,
Hmmm. That is an excellent point about living in the fourth act while knowing the fifth. That assumes, of course, that you have a premillennial dispensational interpretation of Revelation. I am not sure where Wright is on that subject.
After you read the , let me know what you think!
Jeremy,
I’m not sure a pretrib/premil outlook is necessary in order to be “living in the fourth act” — although it certainly would make things clearer in some ways.
But even hard-core idealists would say that the point of Revelation is that God wins in the end, and His saints are vindicated. That’s enough of an ending to get you started. The references in Acts 17, 2 Peter and Jude are pretty rudimentary, after all — elements melting with a fervent heat, all that now is beign destroyed to make way for a new creation, and a final accounting for our lives — almost all of us believe in that.
I suppose if someone’s so fully preterist he thinks that we are even now living in the New heavens and the new earth, and the resurrection is already past, then he’d have a bit of a problem. But I would think ‘fourth act’ would hold for the rest of us.
His,
Tim
People who try to go back and do what was done before (like churches to try to return to the “early church days”), are like actors who, when they get to the end of act 4 in they play, rather than start in on improvising act 5, decide that the best thing to do is just repeat act 4.
Islam has something similar that contributes to their present-day embrace of madness. There it’s called “Salafi”, a movement to go back to the Pure Islam of the Days of the Prophet. This means rejecting anything that came afterwards. Anything and Everything. The Wahabi who run Saudi, the uber-Wahabi who formed the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and (to a lesser extent) the Khomeinists who now run Iran all share this idea: Turn back the clock to Our Founding Days (by any means necessary) and Everything Will Be Perfect.
“Londo, this is insane.”
“Insanity is part of these times. You must learn to EMBRACE THE MADNESS!”
— J Michael Strazynski, Babylon-5
I just read reJesus by Frost and Hirsch, and they made some similar points along the lines of this post, and so wanted to include them here (for my own sake).
p. 144, quoting Ellul: “The Hebrew Bible (even the wisdom books) is not a philosophical construction or a system of knowledge. It is a series of stories that are not myths indended to veil or unveil objective and abstract truths. These stories are one history, the history of the people of God, the history of God’s agreements and disagreements with this people, the history of loyalty and disobedience.”
They go on to say that when we treat the Bible as a collection of stories from which we are to draw universal, abstract truths, we are effectively treating the Bible as little more than myth (p. 145).
p. 146: “The Bible functions something like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series–it is a gateway to another world; one goes through it in order to get into the knowledge, the love, and the wonder of God.”
p. 147: “We suggest that alongside the task of exegesis (which we must do), we need to learn the spiritual art of reading ourselves into the text, participating in it, normally forbidden to the academic approach. We think that we have much to unlearn in regard to our modern approach to Scripture, and therefore the God of the Scriptures, and much to relearn as we seek to reJesus our lives and churches.”
p. 161, speaking of NT Wright: “Wright says we need to recognize that the Hebrew worldview–with its innate sense of the importance of history that gave rise to the Bible and the Gospels–provide us with the best tools for examining them.”