Marginal Christianity

Thomas Torrance on Reading the Bible The esteemed Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance developed a way or path for reading and interpreting the Bible that essentially involves what I calling a "Lifestyle" of Biblical Interpretation. These are not the technical skills we use to better understand scripture but an approach that contextualizes the use of these tools into a living relationship with God. This Lifestyle of Biblical Interpretation according to Torrance involves a fourfold movement of Following, Penetrating, Indwelling, and Listening. It strikes me that, though Torrance does not mention this, this process is almost identical to that of Lectio Divina (Reading, Meditating, Praying, and Contemplating). This encourages me to believe this process has great potential to integrate heads and hearts in a seamless way not possible with other approaches.    Follow -the biblical storyline which establishes and governs its meaning  -allow the text ...

Ch.4: Reading the Bible Redemptively READING THE BIBLE REDEMPTIVELY: ENGAGING TWO HORIZONS Reading the Bible redemptively works from the premise that “movement is meaning.” Even as we read a text as it is on the page to determine its meaning within its lterary context, we must pay attention to its social, historical, and canonical contexts to get a the movement of its meaning that represents the underlying spirit” (103) of the biblical material as a whole. CONCLUSION We must read the Bible both looking backwards and looking forward. If we only read it looking backward from our vantage point in the present we will see only much that seems foreign, primitive, retrograde, and even repulsive to us. And it is! But we also look forward from the text toward its eventual fulfilment in Christ, we may see “ a redemptive side, which often contains partial or incremental movement toward the betterment of human beings.” (103). That these redemptive movements, ...

5. Between D-Day and V-Day Knowing what time it is when reading the Bible is essential. The biblical story unfolds in six chapters: -Creation (Gen.1-2) -Catastrophe (Gen.3-11) -Covenant with Israel (Gen.12-Mal.4) -Christ (Gospels) -Covenant with Church (Acts-Rev.20) -Consummation (Rev.21-22) More accurately, the relation of these six chapters flow like this:                                                                                                         ...

4. What in the Heck are “Principalities and Powers”? A famous and influential New Testament scholar of the 20 th century Rudolf Bultmann wrote: “ We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the  New Testament ” ( The New Testament and Mythology, 4). Perhaps over-intoxicated with the achievements and potential of reason and science, Bultmann took earlier and more primitive views of the world as “mythological” and to be treated as such, that is, non-realistically, in terms of our modern view of the world. We must interpret figures like angels, demons, principalities and powers, and maybe even deities, which ancient peoples believed existed in reality, as symbols to say something we think important about our world. We cannot however take as reality in our rational and scientific understanding. If we agree with Bultmann and his dismissal o...