Five Things We Must Understand (But Often Don’t) about the New Testament (2)

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. God’s purpose or endgame in creation is NOT some “saved” individuals spending forever in some place other than earth (that is, heaven) and in some other kind of existence than bodily (that is, immaterial, quasi-angelic). It’s just NOT.

As I have said elsewhere: What God is up to is not about us though what it is about God has graciously included us. God’s purpose is larger than our individual destinies though those destinies are secured within it. To make our individual destinies primary and central is to distort God’s plan from its genuine center – for God to have a world full of humans to live with in intimate communication, communion, and community on a planet created to host such a fellowship in beauty, abundance, and full flourishing.

A God who intends and works toward such a purpose and yet achieves only the rescue of some of us or part of us (soul or heart) to some place other than earth to live forever is, as I like to put it, a “defeated deity.” He has not, or cannot, or does not want to fulfill his original purposes. Any way we put it, this God has failed to achieve his heart’s desire and promise to us creatures. Unwittingly, we have often promoted a “gospel” of this defeated deity in our versions that center or solely focus on individual or “personal” (read “private”) salvation and assurance of life with God in heaven forever after death.

Read Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22. They give us pictures of God’s eternal intent in embryonic form (Genesis) and fully and finally achieved (Revelation). Sin colors and stains neither of these pictures. It complicates and endangers this divine intent but in no way a feature or factor in its conception or consummation. God’s purposes, then, are larger than even our fall into sin and all the terror and tragedy that unleashed on the creation. Once it is dealt with, God still has work to do, goals to achieve, promises to fulfill. We might say that post-fall God’s work in Christ is to reclaim us from the slavery to sin into which we have fallen AND restore us to his original intention and vocation for us of working with him toward the fulfilling of his final intent in Christ for us.

Unless we read the Bible with this “big picture” in mind we misread it and are vulnerable to unwittingly promoting the “gospel” of a defeated deity sketched above. And accepting a calling and vocation ostensibly from God (being good, saving “souls,” and waiting for Christ to return and take us away from earth to “home” (heaven) which is far less than what God actually calls us to be and do! (More on that in #3.)