Five Things We Must Understand (But Often Don’t) about the New Testament (1)

1.       No one reads the Bible without blinders; blinders make us need each other.

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart in their fine book God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives make the following crucial claims about the Bible:

The Bible is a collection of very different types of writings written over a very long period by a large number of authors and editors. So, in the nature of the case we cannot expect it to provide us with ready-made summaries of its own teaching in all its component parts.

-this for Bauckham and Hart is how the Bible is as it comes inspired from God.

For the most part the task of discerning the general thrust and major components of the Bible’s treatment of a topic is a difficult task of creative interpretation. Without discounting any part of the scriptural witness, the interpreter will have to make judgments about what is central and what is peripheral, what is relative and what is absolute, or what is provisional and what is enduring, not only to report the actual positions reached by particular biblical writings (e.g., Deuteronomy texts), but to also discern the direction in which biblical thinking is moving.

-this “creative interpretation” is done through our blinders in conversation with others and their different blinders.

For the Bible contains the records of a dynamic, developing tradition of thought, and the *aim of interpretation should be to let Scripture involve its reader in its own process of thought, so that the reader’s own thinking may continue in the direction it sets.  

-this readerly creative interpretation, then, this co-interpretation of scripture by differently-blindered readers, is God’s purpose though this means no one person or tradition will have or preserve the whole truth of the Bible, its interpretation is always a living process involving the church and its varied circumstances in every time and place. Propositional certainty is ruled out for the most part but tracing the fidelity of God through the church’s history to discern concrete and contextually appropriate missional directions is the payoff we can ill-afford to do without.

(#2 to follow)