The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

by Craig G. Bartholomew

I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion—and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.5

Australian sociologist John Carroll, who does not profess to be a Christian, believes that the reason that the church in the West is in trouble is because it has forgotten its story. In his view the “waning of Christianity as practised in the West is easy to explain. The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task—to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to the times.”

“This concern for a material, physical promise gives credibility to Christianity as a religion of materialism. When Christianity went spiritual and denied its proper focus on land it rightly earned the strictures of Marxism.”

I don’t understand anything about this quote.

I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound; decay crept into my bones, and my legs trembled. Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us. Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. (Hab. 3:16–18)

Because the journey narrative is punctuated with these reminders of what awaits Jesus in Jerusalem, the journey itself is cast in the dark hues of the passion. It becomes difficult, then, to read the demands of discipleship or of the hostility Jesus encounters without reference to the significance attached to them by their location on the journey toward death. The journey thus . . . has a pedagogical side, for it urges Jesus’ followers to come to terms with the nexus of rejection and divine mission.

There is a new verdict: we have already been declared righteous—on the basis of the death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:21–31; Gal. 2:15–16; 3:6–14).39 As far as the Christian is concerned, God’s final judgment has already taken place!40 With our guilt removed, we stand in a right relationship to God.

By being visible and involved in the life of the surrounding culture while avoiding the pollution of that culture’s pervasive idolatry, Christians will shine “like stars” “in the midst of a warped and crooked generation”