A New Story? # 7 - Free Fallin'

The story of Genesis is a "compassionate coming-of-age" story. So says Brian McLaren in his book A New Kind of Christianity. It is in this context that the section known as "The Fall" fits.

The Greco-Roman way of viewing this section is of mankind undergoing an ontological shift from perfect to sinful. The perfect state is traded in for a messy story. Paradise is lost.

I've had difficulties with this viewpoint for a while. It's like a chicken and egg scenario: Did Adam sin because he was sinful, or did Adam become sinful because he sinned? Can someone who is perfect do something imperfect? Can someone who only knows one language suddenly utter words in another?

This is usually the point when "free will" is mentioned, but I'm not so sure that solves the problem. Consider where the Biblical story ends: New Creation, with human beings created in the likeness of Jesus. For the sake of argument we'll call this "perfection". If the story of "the fall" is a story of perfection descending to imperfection, who is to say that this won't happen again?

Well, I don't think it will happen again. Therefore I think the beginning of the story was something quite different to the end. Adam was "very good", but he couldn't have been "perfect" in the sense of the absolute finished product. That he wilfully disobeyed God leads me to believe that he wasn't much different to you or me. As I said before, the goal is not for us to recover the life of Adam pre-Fall. The goal is new life in Christ.

Where, then, does this leave "The Fall"? Why the move from unashamedly naked to deep shame? Before there is blessing, now there is curse. Before there is garden, now there is wilderness. Adam's disobedience had major ramifications, but the traditional notion of the Fall seems to put more weight on Adam than a man of dust should have to bear.

Here's another way of framing the opening of the story:

Creation, call, disobedience, decay

I'm running ahead of myself here, but there are two good reasons for tracing the narrative as such. I'll call them "Abraham" and "Jesus".

The call of Abraham was God's first step in his re-creation of a world in decay. The obedience (or faithfulness) of Abraham was the required response, and was a counter move to man's (Adam's) disobedience to God's original call to be his representative on earth. Jesus, as the seed of Abraham, also had a call ("Out of Egypt I called my son"). His obedience unto death was the climax of the old creation and the beginning of the new.

Perhaps a simpler way to frame the story is to list every story's central component: Characters.

God, Adam, Abraham, Jesus, Church

What say you? Does the Fall need to be re-thought in light of the story's ending?

A New Story? # 6 - The Journey So Far

We've been having a conversation with Brian McLaren over the past week. It started with simply opening our eyes and ears to what he has to say. His most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity, generated a lot of heat when it first came out. The general impression I got was that, ironically, the "Brian McLaren is dangerous" camp were happy with it while the "Brian McLaren might be on to something" camp were unhappy. The former thought that with this book McLaren finally came out of the heretic closet, and so they were happy to have some concrete evidence against thier danger man. The latter thought that McLaren may have veered too off course for them to follow his trail, and so reluctantly they pulled up. Of course many are still side by side with McLaren on his spiritual quest, willing to journey with him to the depths of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy in order to emerge with a hidden pearl of great price.

I am none of the above people. I'm new to this environment. A visitor from out of town, seeing some commotion and asking McLaren what it's all about.

The launching pad for McLaren's exploration is his disillusionment with the traditional overarching story of Scripture and discovery of a new narrative. For McLaren, the old story is neither morally believable nor biblical. It is, rather, a story steeped in Greco-Roman thought, which is wholly different to the very Jewish worldview of the Bible - the worldview McLaren seeks to recapture.

He begins this mission by looking at the creation narrative in new light. The result, so far, is more a severely edited version of the old narrative than a brand new one. McLaren's argument is not without deliberate provocation and obvious contradiction (nothing new for the man who is both conservative and liberal, Catholic and Protestant, Calvinist and Armenian), but I find in many of his thoughts a deep resonance with my own when I am most honest.

The conversation has been interesting so far, and will remain so as we discuss what is commonly dubbed "The Fall".

A New Story? #5 - Creating With Clay

What's cooler than being cool?

"Ice cold!", answer Outkast.

What's better than perfect?

"Good", answers Brian McLaren, author of several books that irk Al Mohler.

"Jewish goodness...is far better than Greco-Roman perfection" asserts McLaren, who appears to be having a go at the Greco-Romans. One of the problems with the Greco-Roman narrative, as McLaren sees it, is that it leaves no room for other narratives. But has McLaren's narrative not just destroyed the Greco-Roman narrative, or at least claimed superiority over it? It surely has, which sounds suspiciously like an imperial, dare I say Roman, maneouver. I don't doubt that it's been pointed out before, but McLaren is merely creating a new "us/them" - the very thing he condemns in the previous chapter.

What the Greco-Roman narrative says to any other narrative that comes its way is "There ain't enough room in this town for the both of us, punk". Is the Greco-Roman narrative right? Is there only room for one sherrif (story) in town? Or can the history and future of the world have multiple overarching narratives? Consider a film like Crash. What is the overarching plot? Is there one, none, or several?

I wonder how McLaren would answer some of these questions, because he seems to say one thing yet do another.

But quibbles aside, his contrast between "perfect" and "good" is an interesting one. Both the six-line narrative and McLaren's lineless narrative begin with creation. The difference, as McLaren would put it, is that one act of creation begins a "state" whereas the other begins a "story". The state is perfect (it was created by a perfect God after all), but the story has room for improvement (and deterioration).

This, I think, is another place where the traditional re-telling of the Biblical story falls down. I'll sum up the myriad things I could say with this: Adam is not the end goal of our existence. Salvation does not consist of getting things back to the way they were before "the fall", because God has more in store for us than what he had for Adam. The creation of humanity was indeed a "very good" thing, but God's story will take humanity beyond Adam. God intended as much from the beginning.

Rather than a static, wound-up creation-product, we must allow for an "open" view of creation; a creation able to grow, able to groan, and able to be renewed by its Creator. Think of her as clay in a potter's hand, being spoiled by sin but being re-shaped by grace. The conventional telling of the Biblical story does not evoke this kind of Creator/creation relationship. Perhaps I'm guilty of a McLaren-esque caricature here, but it is easy to get the impression that God created the world, dusted off his hands after the fall, and then finally intervened through the life of Jesus.

C.S. Lewis says that the Incarnation -- God becoming man -- is the Grand Miracle. It is the event that makes sense out of all other events. But in our popular version of events, it is the event that is a total anomaly; the event that makes no sense whatsoever. We can affirm it, but we can scarcely believe it true; scarcely believe that God was actually pleased to undertake it. This disbelief springs not so much from reverance as from a lack of real, intimate knowledge of God. At root, our story is muddled, therefore our knowledge of God is muddled.

In order to unmuddle, do the existing acts of the six-line narrative simply need to be edited for content; do we need to actually add and cut some acts; or does the whole story need to be thrown on the ol' scrapheap with a fresh one emerging in its place?

McLaren proposed the latter, but so far he has simply edited the first line of the traditional story for content. He does hint at something more radical in one of the endnotes, and it is something I hope to get back to, because it is something that I had been thinking about myself and was very excited to read.

A New Story? #4 - How Should We Now Think?

What do you get when you mix the philosophy of ancient Greece with the power structure of ancient Rome?

(Can anyone think of a way to turn this into a joke?)

You get, according to Brian McLaren, the Greco-Roman narrative- which is the six-line narrative discussed already. McLaren's arguement is that we've read the Bible trough a Greco-Roman lens, though we've scarcely noticed it...just like we scarcely notice a window as we look through it. To sum up a few pages of writing, we've created a Biblical world akin to the world of Plato. It begins in a state of absolute perfection, it falls into the cave of illusion, and its rescue looks like an abondment of this storied world and a return to a state of immaterial bliss. The Roman influence is on our imperialist attitude when it comes to this story - we hold it to be the only story, and those whose lives stand outside of it are enemies to be either assimilated into our masses or destroyed.


Is this fair commentary by McLaren?

The man with the square lenses wants us to see not with Greco-Roman eyes but with the eyes of a Jew. We are not to look "backwards" at Jesus through Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin etc. Instead, we are to look "forwards" at Jesus, through Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah etc. Only in this thoroughly Jewish story does Jesus make sense; not as the Messiah who would re-enforce Israel's national pride, but as the promised, faithful Israelite who would bring blessing to all the nations of the earth, thus fulfilling Israel's call.

Whatever else about McLaren, he is surely right on this. The six-line narrative as it is popularly described leaves no place for Israel. Jesus appears in it like a bolt of lightening rather than as the climax of Israel's (and therefore the world's) story.

(At this point it would be immoral of me not to mention Chris Wright's book Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament.)

Nevertheless, I do wonder - just how "Jewish" are we supposed to think? Paul's address on Mars Hill has been happy hunting ground for emerging/emergent types over the years, but here it seems to work against Mr Emergent's argument. Paul didn't spend his energy trying to get Greeks to see Jesus through Jewish eyes. He created a way for them to see Jesus through Greek eyes.

Some of the questions that arise out of this story are: How paradigmatic are we to view Paul's sermon in Athens? How much was such a way of communicating the Christian story part of his methodology? And if it played a significant part, how should Christian theology look in 21st century Ireland? Greco-Roman? Jewish? Irish!?

The forwards, Jewish way of looking at Jesus is certainly in harmony with Scripture, but is it the only helpful way to look at him? The people of God do not now have to live under Jewish law, but do they have to think like Jews?

I don't know any of the answers to these questions, so I'm going to stop writing now. Please weigh in with any insights.

A New Story? #3 - More Than Belief

Eden, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven and hell - the six-line narrative that Brian McLaren presents as both conventional and dubious Christian theology. He has many questions, two of which stand out: Is this story morally believable, and is it found in the Bible?

McLaren's answer to both is 'No'.

Where McLaren is mistaken is that you can "find" this story in the Bible. Eden is there. There is the first case of disobedience; the "original sin". There is humanity living in emnity with God. There is the salvation found in Jesus Christ. There is a heaven and there is a hell. The six-line narrative can be formed...if you want it. Is it morally believable, however? Is it, in other words, the kind of story we'd expect the God revealed in Jesus to weave?

I agree with McLaren's 'No' on this...kind of. I think the six-line narrative, as it would be expressed by Joe Church, is inherently human-centric and does an injustice to the character of God. Of course every shorthand (or longhand) version of this epic drama will fall short of doing its chief protagonist justice, but if an overarching story of Scripture exists, I think it has to be about God; the six-line narrative, for the most part, isn't.

McLaren and I part ways as he paints a caricature of specific beliefs held within this narrative, creating the god Theos as a foil for the real God Elohim. According to McLaren, six-line-narrativists (trust me, it will catch on) believe that we are saved and perfected so that Theos can love us again. I don't know anyone who actually believes that, so saying things like this is a waste of ink. But what McLaren may be getting at -- though it goes unsaid -- is one of the narrative's symptoms as I see it: The doctrine contained within is good and sound, but it doesn't quite seem to fit with the big picture, and thus our belief and our experience come into conflict (cognitive dissonance?). For example, we assert that we are loved by God even as we live in wilful rejection of him, but the big picture doesn't portray this kind of God from beginning to end (his love seems to happen somewhere toward the end), so assertion struggles to become experience. Many lives, including my own, deeply struggle to dwell in the love of God.

Unlike McLaren, I don't think there is anything necessarily unbiblical about the six-line narrative. I'm just not fully convinced that it is a helpful depiction of the Bible's story. Perhaps it merely needs to be tweaked? McLaren aims not at a tweaking, however, but at a ripping up and rebuilding. If I thought the the six-line narrative compelled me to believe in the Theos McLaren describes then I'd be by his side with a sledge hammer in hand, but McLaren's deliberately provocative argument makes it almost impossible for me to follow his footsteps. I have always held to a version of the six lines, but Theos is not the God it has lead me to believe in.

Nevertheless, story is always about more than belief and teaching. It involves the emotions, the shared experience. The story of creation, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven and hell does not emphasize just what Scripture is: a love story between Creator and creatures. Each of the six words does not evoke all that should be evoked. There is no doubt that instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (never a good idea...trust me), some of the words need to be reclaimed after years of abuse. The Christian language needs to be relearned if our story -- whatever it is -- is to have any impact on us at all.

That being said, a fresh look at the acts in the narrative may lead to more than semantics. It's been a little while since I read the next chapter in McLaren's book, so I'm interested to see what story he proposes. If my memory serves me correct, however, it's not actually that different to the six-line narrative as it is fleshed out by some Christians. We shall see.

A New Story? #2 - Questions

The line begins on the left-hand side of the page and works its way across. It drops straight down until eventually heading right again. Then comes a fork in the road. One prong goes directly up to the level where the line began, and then continues to the right indefinitely. The other way goes down - not straight down, but veering downwards, again indefinitely.

It looks like this (with explanatory words attached):


How did we get to this diagram?

McLaren begins his journey towards A New Kind of Christianity by tackling what he calls "The Narrative Question". "What is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?" is the foundational question posed by McLaren. This question assumes the Bible to be telling a story, which is an assumption I share. At its heart, Scripture is not an instruction manual, though it does instruct. It's not a repository of doctrine, though it does teach. It's not a book of divine wisdom dropped out of the sky for our enlightenment, though it does contain wisdom and it can enlighten. Scripture is story -- God's story about...well...we'll get there in due course. But McLaren notes that,

To be a Christian...has required us to believe that the Bible presents one very specific storyline...

This storyline, which McLaren seeks to dismantle, is the one diagrammed above. It begins with perfection in Eden, it descends into a fallen world of sin, and then comes the divide - salvation which leads to eternity in heaven, or damnation which leads to eternity in hell.

Does that sound like the story of the Bible in a nutshell?

It does to me. Or at least it sounds like the story that I've been taught, which is a story that seems to be created by Scripture itself. But is this really the story Scripture tells? In the midst of some caricatures, McLaren makes a simple observation and asks a profound question:

Few of us acknowledge that this master-narrative starts with one category of things, good and blessed, and then ends up with two categories of things, good and blessed on the top line and evil and tormented on the bottom....Can we dare to wonder, given an ending that has more evil and suffering than the beginning, if it would have been better for this story never to have begun?

This is a heartfelt question that musn't be swept under the rug. A story depends on perspective. Ask Hitler to tell you about World War II and you might get a sob story about how he failed in his mission and now lives in permanent disgrace. Ask Eisenhower or Churchill the same question and you'll get a very different answer, though they are all talking about the same event(s). Can it be that most people's story -- if we take the above outline to be more or less true -- will turn out for the worst, with the few living to tell a tale with a happy ending? If the story the Bible weaves will largely end up with individual stories of anguish and defeat, why even begin to tell it?

Or perhaps we don't quite have our story straight. Maybe we have misread the Bible; misunderstood what the Storyteller was saying, about both himself and his purposes. Our lines might be going the right direction, but our insight into what they entail might be too narrow in some places and not narrow enough in others. Or, if McLaren is on to something, our lines may be missing the point entirely.

The following questions, asked by Daniel Kirk, are the reason why I am interested in what McLaren has to write, even if he is wrong:

Again the question comes to us how the gospel is actually good news for someone who has experienced nothing but injustice, whose life is defined quintessentially by her status as a victim. Is the gospel good news if it means that such a victim, upon death, will meet a judgment that makes her life of perpetual rape seem like paradise in comparison.

I am not about to abandon everything I once knew, but I do want to be open to a re-shaping of the biblical narrative as it springs from the character of the God who is over, above, and even in, the story: the God revealed to the world not primarily in words on a page, but in the person of Jesus.

A New Story? #1

Brian McLaren is not a heretic. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a heretic, but he's not a porn star.

Honestly, I don't know much about Brian McLaren. Back in my "Catholic" days of being a Christian -- when I used to let various authorities decide what was and wasn't true without any investigation or thought on my own part -- Brian McLaren was a known danger. He was even a step up from the dreaded Rob Bell, which is really saying something.

During the course of my journey towards enlightened bliss, however, I grew tired of the spoon feeding, the policing, the defending and protecting. The same people going after Brian McLaren were going after Tom Wright, and that's just not on! If Wright is a threat to the church then he is a much-needed threat, and his voice demands urgent hearing. But the powers that be would like a safe church, and so voices that attempt to shake her out of her comfort zone are to be screened, steralised, or just silenced. They're banned, 'cause the Regime don't like it, man.

If it sounds like I've simply replaced one group of popes with another (Wright), rest assured that I have not. But what I like in Wright and others (such as Daniel Kirk) is their approach - wrestling with the text of Scripture honestly, and letting it speak for itself to a community eager to hear. This is not to ignore tradition. But as Scot McKnight writes in The Blue Parakeet, we are best reading the Bible when we read it not through tradition but with it. There is a difference.

What's all this got to do with Brian McLaren? Well, I guess I felt it was time to read Brian McLaren for myself rather than letting the opinion of others also be my opinion. And why am I even writing about this? Well, I want to examine a couple of chapters at the beginning of McLaren's latest work, A New Kind of Christianity. These chapters have to do with the Christian story, the story of the Bible.

To sum up, McLaren says we have gotten it wrong.

Expect a conversation between McLaren and I (and perhaps even you?) over the next week or two.

More Foundational

But what if God’s commitment to the cosmos he created is more foundational than God’s desire to see the Law maintained?

This is a question posed and answered over at Storied Theology. Dr Kirk talks about the magic deeper still that the witch did not know, and which we can so easily remain oblivious to despite its revelation in Christ.

If you read nothing else this week, read this post.

Missio Dei - #4: It Includes Multiple Contexts

So where were we on this rip-roaring adventure through The Mission of God by Chris Wright that has everybody talking? Well, last time out we were searching for a "missional hermeneutic", and decided that lumping a whole load of texts that speak of "missions" together was not the best approach to interpreting the Bible with mission in mind. This is a dangerous approach to Scripture reading in general, and should be avoided at all costs. We must let the Author of the Bible speak to us holistically, rather than simply listening to the bits we like and screaming "la la la" over the bits we don't like and that don't fit into our purposes.

There is another pitfall to be avoided, which may be called contextual or cultural snobbery. Wright informs us that the landscape of mission has changed dramatically - "The whole centre of gravity of world Christianity has moved south". As such, much of Christian mission is carried out by people from India, Latin America and so forth. The upshot of this shift is that these people from outside of the Western world have a different context in which they read the Bible. They are bringing different traditions, different lifestyles to the table, and so they don't read the Bible with the same eyes as those of us who have been reared in the West. Wright says that,

...a missional hermeneutic must include at least this recognition - the multiplicity of perspectives and contexts from which and within which people read the biblical texts.

This variety is to be embraced, because these different readers can open our Western eyes to things that have gone previously unseen. The Bible was not written for one specific group of people. We in the West do not possess the best context in which to read and interpret Scripture, meaning everyone else has to fall in line with us. Of course we can't change our context, but we can certainly be open to the insights of readers from different cultures. This again is part of what it means to read the Bible holistically.

Of course we do not go to the extreme where one postmodern thinker has gone, claiming that there is no such thing as texts, only readers. Ultimately, it should not be the reader who shapes the text of Scripture, but the text which shapes the reader. The Bible was written by various people in different ages and situations, it is read by a myriad of people all over the world, but there is coherency in the midst of this diversity. James Brownson says that the gospel is the framework where all of this diversity takes place. From Genesis to Revelation, God is unveiling the gospel message. This again goes back to the words Jesus in Luke 24, where He taught us all how to read and interpret the Word of God - in the light of who Jesus is, what He has done, and what He wants to do through us.

The Bible is about God, and God is One. He is a big One, however. You or I don't have all the answers. We only know in part. But we can sharpen one another's knowledge as we allow those from all the nations of the earth to share with us their understanding of the One True God in light of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah. The Church should be a place of diversity, where Jew, Greek, Irish, Indian are accepted and heard. Therefore when we read the Bible with missio Dei as a framework, we must remember that this is a cosmic mission. It is a mission that includes cultures far removed from our own. Therein lies the challenge, but there also lies the excitement - to be part of something much bigger than yourself.

Missio Dei - #3: It's Holistic

So far in the series, a missional hermeneutic -- a way of interpreting the Bible with the mission of God as a framework -- has been argued for, but without a solid argument in place. Thus the first step in Wright's book is to search for a missional hermeneutic. Such a hermeneutic goes beyond simply finding biblical justification for "missions". It is of course important to know that what we are doing falls in line with Biblical teaching, but the purpose in question here is much grander and knitting together all of the passages perceived as relevant to missionary work.

Wright even points to a danger in such an approach to Scripture. Instead of letting it speak as it wants to speak, we come to it with something we want to prove, and we collect the texts that confirm our preconceptions. Thus, "the Bible is turned into a mine from which we extract our gems - "missionary texts". We only have to look at an extreme case study such as Westboro Baptist Church to see that this way of reading and interpreting the Bible is fraught with danger. As a Church we are not charged with taking one or multiple texts and running with them, forgetting the rest of the biblical revelation of who God is and what He is about. As Dave Bosch writes,

What is decisive for the Church today is not some formal agreement between what she is doing and what some isolated biblical texts seem to be saying but rather her relationship with the essence of the message of Scripture.

The hypothesis of Chris Wright is that missio Dei is the essence of the message of Scripture. Now of course the mission of God is not just one thing. It is a multi-faceted framework, which encorporates God's past, present, and future action. "Essence" may suggest something narrow, but the truth is that the mission of God as the essence of Scripture is a framework as broad as God Himself. If the Bible is about God -- and I strongly contend that it is -- then our reading of it needs to take into account as much of the revelation of God as we can know. We must understand the Bible in the light of a God who is a whole being, lest we end up with a pseudo-god who simply "hates fags", or a god who knows nothing of holiness.

So the first step to finding a missional hermeneutic is treating the Bible -- and ultimately, God -- as one. After all, this view of God is the primary creed of our ancestors of the faith, expressed in the Shema:

Hear O Isreal, the LORD our God, the LORD is One.

Proof-texting -- using individual texts to support a doctrinal position or behavioural pattern -- is not enough. Mission goes much deeper than that, and it is far broader than something we do in repsonse to what the Bible says. Far broader.

Missio Dei - #2: It's About Jesus

Wright says that "mission is what the Bible is all about". Like I said previously, I can agree with this for the most part. The Bible is about God, His character and His deeds, with the two being intimately connected (as all our characters and deeds are). We may denote God's deeds -- past, present, and future -- as His mission, so yes, mission is what the Bible is all about. However, where does Jesus of Nazareth fit into this? As Christians we were taught by Jesus Himself to read Scripture christocentrically, so how do a missional reading of the Bible and a christological reading of the Bible relate to one another?

Luke 24 has the answers.

Then He (Jesus) said to them, "These are My words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. - Lk. 24:44-48

The call to a messianic or christocentric reading of Scripture is obvious here - "...everything written about Me..." However, there is a second and equally important lens through which to read the Bible, and that is the work of Christ as it fits definitively into the mission of God. Jesus is saying that if you read Scripture in light of Me, you will find that it is about Me and what I have done, and you will also see that it is about taking the message about Me to all the nations.

In other words, a christocentric reading of Scripture and a missional reading of Scripture are basically two sides of the same coin. There is also a sort of paradox, whereby the death and resurrection of Jesus is the fulfillment of the mission of God, but also the catalyst. Most Christians get the fulfilment part, but fail to grasp the catalyst part, which is actually the part we are useful for - the proclamation of repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations. Wright says that,

The full meaning of recognising Jesus as Messiah...lies in recognising also His role in relation to God's mission for Israel for the blessing of the nations.

And so the Bible is not just full of proof-texts about Jesus, but full of God's intentions to bless all the nations and thus bring glory to His name. Thus when we read the Bible we ask:

What is it saying about 1) the person of God and 2) the purposes of God?

Our answers should be found in Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, and God's chosen Servant through whom He would bring blessing to all the nations of the earth. This, in a nutshell, is missio Dei.

Does it make good sense to read the Bible from this missional perspective? Does this hermeneutic do justice to Scripture? These are the questions answered in the next couple of chapters.

Missio Dei - #1: It's About God

Anyone who has followed this blog for the past couple of months will be aware of my interest in the narrative that is found in the Bible, or perhaps the narrative that the Bible finds itself in. Well, as a cultivation of that interest I decided to add The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's grand narrative to my books-to-get list. I planned to order it off Amazon, but as I performed my almost weekly peruse of the Aisling bookshop here in Galway I saw Christopher J.H. Wright's hefty book sitting snug on the top shelf. The price tag was irrelevant: I was buying this book right now, and economical sense was not going to stop me.

Anyway, now that I have this book, I'm going to do something different with it. Yes, I'm still going to read it, but I'm also going to write about it as I read it. Not so much a book review, but more reflections on what I'm reading. It's a big book so this could take a while, but I have a good feeling that this will be both interesting for you the reader of this blog and beneficial for me the reader of this book. I'll keep the posts as short as possible, and only dwell on areas that demand prolonged dwelling.

Now, to set the stage...

What is this book? Is it a biblical theology of mission, or a missional reading of the Bible? Wright says that it is both, but probably more the latter. The fact that is more the latter excites me.

You see once again the question, "What is the Bible?" or "What is the Bible all about?" comes into play. Often we as Christians see it as some kind of independent authority, the world's instruction manual. The Bible tells us how things are supposed to work; how should human beings interact with one another?; what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?; what is the correct code of behaviour? We have our various questions, and the Bible provides authoritative answers to those questions.

Relating this to mission, the Bible is also used as a basis for why mission exists. We derive our theology of mission from words of Scripture such as "Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations..." In short, it is clear that the Bible tells us to do mission work, therefore we should do mission work. End of story.

However, I think such an approach to Scripture misses the crucial point that the Bible is caught up in something bigger than itself. The Bible is an indispensable book for many reasons, but the main reason is that it is a signpost to a greater authority, a greater reality. It is a book that is part of a big story - a story about its Author's character and deeds - and Wright argues that it should be read and interpreted with this story (the mission of God) as a framework.

We all have our different frameworks for interpreting the Bible - we can have a 'how does this benefit me?' framework, a feminist framework, an informational framework where we just want to know as much as possible about the Bible. Wright argues for a missional framework (or hermeneutic).

At first this sounds very people-centred. "Mission is what we do" is the assumption. This assumption is true to a certain degree. Mission is indeed something we do, but it is only something we do as participants in God's grand mission of which the Bible speaks. Wright says that "the whole Bible is itself a "missional" phenomenon" and that it is "the product of a witness to the ultimate mission of God". He goes on to write that

Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, "what it's all about."

I wrote in a previous post that the Bible is about God. It's about who God is, and what He has done, is doing, and will do. It's about His person and His purposes, with the two being absolutely inseparable. The mission of God has to do with the purposes of God which flow from His person, and so to say that mission is what it's all about is not a stretch in my view provided we know whose mission we are talking about.

"The Bible presents to us a portrait of God that is unquestionably purposeful." So often we get caught up in our own purposes to the point where we will even hurt others in order to achieve them. Our individual purposes, our own little kingdoms that we rule over, are the highest authority. We answer to our desires, be they good or bad. The Bible portrays a God who is purposeful, and whose purposes are good and right and true. Wright's book aims to seek out those purposes, and to help us read the Bible with missio Dei -- the mission of God -- as the controlling narrative.

I'm excited about what lies ahead.

The Grand Story

I'm, like, really "into" Richard Hays at the moment. I've quoted him on the blog already here, here, here and here. His book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul is one of the richest, most eye-opening books I've yet to read, and I'm very much looking forward to tucking into The Conversion of the Imagination as soon as I can. I of course don't agree with everything he writes -- heck, I probably don't even agree with everything I write -- but he writes so well and so persuasively that it's hard not to get caught up in the whirlwind he conjures up.

I mention him again because he has fed my new-found fascination with the grand narrative of the Bible. I mean when all is said and done, what's it all about?

Well, in a lecture entitled The Art of Reading Scripture Faithfully, Hays tells the grand story of the Bible in three sentences. Here they are:

The God of Israel, the Creator of the world, has acted astoundingly to rescue a lost and broken world through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The full extent of that rescue is something we don't yet see, but God has created a community of witnesses to this good news - the Church. While we wait for the final conclusion of the story, the Church, in the power of the Spirit, is called to reenact the pattern of the loving obedience of Jesus, and to be a sign to the world of God's redeeming purpose.

We're Missing Something

The story of Christianity in four words:

Creation, Fall, Jesus, Salvation.

Right?

Wrong! At least according to N.T. Wright. He says we're missing something in that industry-standard list that will actually shape how we read the entire Bible, and thus to ignore it is to miss one of the keys to unlocking who Jesus is and therefore who God is. Wright's list looks like this:

Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Salvation.

Scot McKnight's is something very similar (though aided by its alliteration):

Creation, Cracked Eikons, Covenant Community, Christ, Consummation

This is starting to look like a page from one of Rob Bell's books what with all the gaps, but I just thought it was interesting how quick we as Christians are to ignore Israel when it comes to the gospel of God.

Perhaps we need to introduce the song "Father Abraham" into our corporate worship times. I'll let you know how that goes...

The Big Ideas

Confession time: If there has has ever been anything on this blog that you thought to be spiritually insightful, then there is a good chance I learned it from my Scripture School teacher, Dr Arden C. Autry. The following is a piece of his that was written in response to a question which went something along the lines of, "So Arden, what's the 'big idea' of the Bible?"

In short, everything that I've written about in this blog concerning Christianity -- with the possible exception of the Todd Bentley and Joel Osteen posts -- falls somewhere into what Dr Autry calls The "Big Ideas" of the Bible. I find that sometimes it helps to just stand back from the nitty gritty details of Christianity -- as a snooker player would stand back from the table -- in order to soak in the big picture, so you can see where it has all come from and where it is going.

So without further delay, here is your chance to do so. By the way, there will be some form of prize (most likely a congratulatory comment) for the person who can come up with a fitting synonym for 'reclaiming' that begins with the letter 'c'.

The “Big Ideas” of the Bible

Creation
-- Monotheism (one will as Source of all)
-- spiritual significance of material world; God’s will to bless creation
-- humanity in God’s image; capacity for relationships of love and will
-- orderly, “lawful” world (e.g. sowing & reaping) [purposeful narrative]

Corruption
-- The Fall; brokenness
-- created wills choosing against the Creator’s will [narrative of loss]

Reclaiming
-- redemption; atonement; healing of broken relationships
-- remnant saved to reach the rest [evangelistic imperative]
-- promise of Creator’s purpose being realised [narrative of promise]
(God’s promise elicits faith, hope, and love.)

Covenant
-- ordered relationship between sovereign God and responsible humanity
-- God’s initiative in election; human response of faith and obedience
-- redeeming relationships, provided by grace, dependent on faithfulness
-- revealed and lived out in history of Israel and the Church
-- life of purpose; Creator/Redeemer’s intention revealed (revelation)
-- context of promise/fulfilment
-- context of love/grace and commitment/faithfulness [journey narrative]

Christ
-- God’s Word made flesh; ultimate, definitive revelation; covenant embodied
-- fully God, fully human (Emmanuel, God and humanity reconciled)
-- He makes our story His story, so that He can make His story our story
-- fulfilment of creation/redemption narrative assured
What Adam was created to be,
What Abraham/Israel was called to be,
That’s what Christ incarnate is.
That’s what we are in Christ (the body of Christ).

Communion Community
-- It takes the whole covenant people of God to inherit and exhibit the promises and fulfilment of God focused in Christ. [His narrative becomes ours.]
-- love within the church
-- love for the world (from God)
-- belonging to God and one another in the Holy Spirit, who makes Jesus known
(The one, true Holy Spirit is known [1] by whom He makes known and
[2] by the connections He creates.)

Consummation
-- Kingdom of God (God’s purposes by His power), already and not yet
-- hope energising the present faith/faithfulness (future shaping the present)
-- resurrection life now and future
-- judgment, ultimate resolution of justice
-- glory of God manifested
-- creation healed
-- One will realised and glorified by all [creation/redemption narrative complete]

Arden C. Autry, PhD, October 2005