{"id":343,"date":"2008-06-05T11:22:23","date_gmt":"2008-06-05T16:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redeeminggod.com\/?p=343"},"modified":"2011-03-31T16:09:18","modified_gmt":"2011-03-31T20:09:18","slug":"reading-the-nt-wright-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redeeminggod.com\/reading-the-nt-wright-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading the NT Wright (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday<\/a> I introduced a paper by NT Wright called “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?<\/a>” (By the way, this lecture was delivered in 1989 at Dallas Theological Seminary). Today, I want to summarize his conclusions.<\/p>\n

After showing that the commonly taught methods of Bible study actually undermined the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Wright\u00a0argues that since the Bible is a narrative, we must read it as\u00a0a 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Wright puts it this way:<\/p>\n

…The\u00a0five 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In this way, Bible reading becomes thrilling, rather than scary and confining, because you are afraid of making a wrong step.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 –\u00a0a story that is ongoing, and in which you play a part. Here is what Wright says in conclusion:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

…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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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