Some of what I’ve gleaned from N.T. Wright’s article “How Can the Bible be Authoritative?”
We have often muted Jesus’ stark challenge, remaking him in our own image and then wondering why our personal spiritualities have become less than exciting and life changing
A resonse to the point of view, “We already know everything about the Bible that we need to—knowing Jesus in a historical way is useless…”
Many devout Christians…content themselves with an effortless superiority: we know the truth, these silly liberals have got it all wrong, and we have nothing new to learn.”
On how to approach the Bible…
For me, the dynamic of a commitment to scripture is not “We believe the Bible, so there is nothing more to be learned,” but rather, “We believe the Bible, so we had better discover all the things in it to which our traditions have made us blind.”
Wright perceptively notes that the heresy of Gnosticism is alive and well—perhaps even more than ever. How many times have you been encouraged to “find yourself?” How many people do you know who believe that if they can only find one key piece of knowledge that is currently hidden to them, they will have fulfilled their purpose? That’s what the Gnostics mentioned in the New Testament were all about—salvation through secret knowledge.
On the importance of knowing who Jesus was…
…whenever the church forgets its call to engage in the task of understanding more and more fully who Jesus was, idolatry and ideology lie close at hand.
On the importance of understanding the Bible as a whole, embracing all of its hard edges and messiness.
I remember a well-known preacher saying that he thought a lot of Christians used the Bible as an unsorted edition of Daily Light. It really ought to be arranged into neat little devotional chunks, but it happens to have gotten all muddled up.
…sensitivity to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections…did we ever imagine that the applications of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well programmed computer?
Are we, as followers of Christ sometimes guilty of actually belittling the Bible when we attempt to apply it to our lives?
The world is always trying to lure the church into playing the game by its rules…And the church is all too often eager to do this, not least by using the idea of the authority of scripture as a means to control people, to force them into little boxes. These little boxes often owe far more…to cultural conditions of this or that sort than to scripture itself as the revelation of the loving, creator and redeemer God.
This one is a mega ouch for just about every church I’ve ever been to.
God forgive us that we have taken the Bible and have made it ordinary, that we have cut it down to our size, so that whatever text we preach on it will say basically the same things.
This last illustration almost brought tears to my eyes it’s so right.
“Sit at a piano, hold down the loud pedal, strike a low note loudly, and listen. You will hear all kinds of higher notes, harmonics, shimmering above the note originally struck. In te same way, the retelling of the story that the Bible actually contains is to function as the striking of the low note, the basic fundamental note of God’s story with his world. As we retell this story there will be harmonics audible, for those, at least, with ears to hear. The problem, of course, is that historical criticism of the Bible has insisted on striking the fundamental notes with the soft pedal on, as though by thus screening out the harmonics it might ensure that the fundamental really made its own point—and then Christians have grumbled that such criticism makes the Bible irrelevant. The equal and opposite danger is that pious Christians have only been interested in the harmonics themselves, and then by actually striking them instead of the fundamentals have produced a narrower range of tone, making up in shrillness what it lacks in historical depth and basic substance.”
I think I’ll let that statement be the final word.
