The Future Pt. 1 - God's Story

Before I get into what I really want to talk about I want to give some background. I hope you will read this and be patient. I think there is some very helpful stuff here about how we approach the Bible and the Gospel. I strongly encourage you to read the article. I'll get to the point in my next post. See if you don't resonate with this. . .

I've been giving some thought to how I look at the Bible and the Gospel. To be honest, many times when I read the Bible I am asking God to reveal Himself to me. Now, there is not necessarily anything wrong with that, but when I think that the any book of the Bible was written directly to me, for my benefit, I am quite likely to come up with interpretations that are askew. The fact is, the books of the Bible were not written to me, nor was their purpose to be for my benefit. They were written in a time that was much different from mine, to people in a TOTALLY different culture. If I don't take that into account I am likely to come up with some weird interpretations.

Couple this with the fact that the various ways that Modern theologians have used the Bible have not really been helpful. Systematic Theology has serious problems because it is rooted in a "scientific" way of summing up the Bible. Many scholars have their opinions and try to use proof-texts to back up their positions, taking verses totally out of context. Additionally, there are fundamentalists who believe that the Bible in itself has authority which leads to all kinds of abuse... Along comes N.T. Wright with a different way that Bible has authority.

When people in the church talk about authority they are very often talking about controlling people or situations. They want to make sure that everything is regulated properly, that the church does not go off the rails doctrinally or ethically, that correct ideas and practices are upheld and transmitted to the next generation. “Authority” is the place where we go to find out the correct answers to key questions such as these. This notion, however, runs into all kinds of problems when we apply it to the Bible. Is that really what the Bible is for? Is it there to control the church? Is it there simply to look up the correct answers to questions that we, for some reason, already know?

As we read the Bible we discover that the answer to these questions seems in fact to be
“no”.

Wright then asks, "Is the Bible a depository for 'timeless truth' "? That fact is, that the Bible is culturally conditioned. It was written to certain people at a certain time in history. It is not, and was never meant to be somewhere we go to find "particular answers to particular questions". When systematic theology divided the Bible into neat little chunks for easier consumption it is making the Bible into something it was never meant to be.

Wright points out that the more Evangelical churches say they are "Scripturally based", the more divided they become. "It seems to be the case that the more that you insist that you are based on the Bible, the more fissiparous you become; the church splits up into more and more little groups, each thinking that they have got biblical truth right."

To make a long article short, how do we read the Bible then? In what way does it have authority? Wright rightly points out that it is not the Bible that has authority, but God. Hooray! Finally a theologian that gets it!

Beginning, though, with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon
enough – this is obvious but is often ignored – that all authority does indeed belong to God.“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. God says this, God says that, and it is done. Now, if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is. God calls Abraham; hespeaks authoritatively. God exercises authority in great dynamic events (in Exodus, the Exile and Return). In the New Testament, we discover that authority is ultimately invested in Christ: “all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.” Then, perhaps to our
surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole letters in order to make thispoint crystal clear (in a manner of speaking). This authority, we discover, has to do with theHoly Spirit. And the whole church is then, and thereby, given authority to work within
God’s world as his accredited agent(s). From an exceedingly quick survey, we are forced tosay: authority, according to the Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.

And the notion of God’s authority, which we have to understand before we understand what we mean by the authority of the scripture, is based on the fact that this God is the loving, wise, creator, redeemer God. And his authority is his sovereign exercise of those powers; his love and wise creations and redemption. What is he doing? He is not simply organizing the world. He is, as we see and know in Christ and by the Spirit, judging and remaking the world. What he does authoritatively he does with this intent. God is not a celestial information service to whom you can apply for answers on difficult questions. Nor is he a heavenly ticket agency to whom you can go for moral and doctrinal permits or passports to salvation. He does not stand outside the human process and merely comment on it or merely issue you with certain tickets that you might need. Those views would imply either a deist’s God or a legalist’s God, not the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ and the Spirit. And it must be said that a great many views of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives.

But, once we say that God’s authority is like that, we find that there is a challenge issued to the world’s view of authority and to the church’s view of authority. Authority is not the power to control people, and crush them, and keep them in little boxes. The church often tries to do that – to tidy people up. Nor is the Bible, as the vehicle of God’s authority, meant to be information for the legalist. We have to apply some central reformation insights to the concept of authority itself. It seems to me that the Reformation, once more, did not go quite far enough in this respect, and was always in danger of picking up the mediaeval view of authority and simply continuing it with, as was often said, a paper pope instead of a human one. Rather, God’s authority vested in scripture is designed, as all God’s authority is designed, to liberate human beings, to judge and condemn evil and sin in the world in order to set people free to be fully human. That’s what God is in the business of doing. That is what his authority is there for. And when we use a shorthand phrase like “authority of scripture” that is what we ought to be meaning. It is an authority with this shape and character, this purpose and goal.

How, in the Bible, does God exercise his authority?
Then, we have to ask, if we are to get to the authority of scripture – How does God exercise that authority? Again and again, in the biblical story itself we see that he does so through human agents anointed and equipped by the Holy Spirit. And this is itself an expression of love, because he does not will simply to come into the world in a blinding flash of light and obliterate all opposition. He wants to reveal himself meaningfully within the space/time universe, not just passing it by tangentially; to reveal himself in judgment and in mercy in a way which will save people. So, we get the prophets. We get obedient writers in the Old Testament, not only prophets but those who wrote the psalms and so on. At the climax of the story we get Jesus himself as the great prophet, but how much more than a prophet. And, we then get Jesus’ people as the anointed ones.

To simplify Wrights view, the Bible is authoritative in that it is the Story of God. A five act play consisting of Act1: Creation, Act2: The Fall, Act3: Israel, Act:4 Jesus, Act5;Scene1: The New Testament, Act5;Scene2: Missing.

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were, to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Wrights view is that we are actors in this play in which our "script" is missing. We have to improvise our part in this Story in light of what has happened before us, and the clues we have been given in how the Story will end. This frees us from being bogged down in the minutae of Modern exegesis and frees us to interpret the Story in the circumstances we find ourselves in today. Each generation must "implement" the Gospel for themselves, in their context, trying to be faithful to the Story. This view of authority does not seek to manipulate with power and control, or merely give information, but it is consistent with how Jesus used His authority during his time on Earth: telling stories.

That, in fact, is (I believe) one of the reasons why God has given us so much story, so much narrative in scripture. Story authority, as Jesus knew only too well, is the authority that really works. Throw a rule book at people’s heads, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or simply disagree and go away. Tell them a story, though, and you invite them to come into a different world; you invite them to share a world-view, or better still, a “God-view”. That, actually, is what the parables are all about. They offer, as all genuine Christian story-telling does, a world-view which, as someone comes into it and finds how compelling it is, quietly shatters the world-view that they were in already. Stories determine how people see themselves and how they see the world. Stories determine how they experience God and the world and themselves and others. Great revolutionary movements have told stories about the past and present and future. They have invited people to see themselves in that light, and people’s lives have been changed. If that happens at merely a human level, how much more when it is God himself, the creator, breathing through his word.