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What I discovered is that we all pick and choose. I must confess this discovery did not discourage me as much as it disturbed me, and then it made me intensely curious (and it is why I wrote this book). The discoveries and disturbances converged onto one big question: How, then, are we to live out the Bible today?
for James, a pure Christian, the kind God approves of, was one who showed compassion to orphans and widows and avoided being polluted by sin at all costs. Frankly, we emphasized the not being polluted by sin, but we defined “polluted” in ways that had nothing to do with compassion for the marginalized and suffering.
Every one of us adopts the Bible and (at the same time) adapts the Bible to our culture.
we sometimes live out the Bible, rightly or wrongly, by morphing one thing into another, that is, by taking a tithe for temple assistants and also for the poor and turning it into a tithe for the local church.
we look behind the text to grasp a timeless principle and the principle is more important than doing the actual words.
People are afraid of this question once they turn it inside out on themselves and others. Too many of us don’t want to think about this. Too many of us don’t want to admit that we are picking and choosing. Even if we prefer (as I do) to say “adopting and adapting,” we are doing something similar. But I think we need to face this squarely and honestly. I’ve learned that it is time to think about why and how we pick what we pick and why and how we choose what we choose.
Some of us have been taught to read the Bible in such a way that we return to the times of the Bible in order to retrieve biblical ideas and practices for today. There are two kinds of “return and retrieve” readers—some try to retrieve all of it and some admit we can retrieve only what can be salvaged.
we are to live out the Bible today by returning to the early church and retrieving all its ideas no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how politically incorrect, no matter what it costs us. The emphasis here is to practice whatever the Bible teaches—to absorb and live out all of it. There are some problems here. If we sit down and think about it, it is impossible to live a first-century life in a twenty-first-century world. “That was then, but this is now” is not an empty slogan that came my way to dismiss my questions as a college student. “That was then, but this is now” is bedrock reality.
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We aren’t called to live first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first-century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.
Some believe we are to return to the Bible, but we can retrieve only what we can salvage for our day and for our culture. This, of course, means culture dictates what is of value in the Bible. This is a mistake.
The danger in “retrieving the essence” is there can be too little adoption or not enough faithfulness and consistency with the Bible itself.
The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.
What we most need is not a return to the first or fourth or sixteenth or eighteenth century but a fresh blowing of God’s Spirit on our culture, in our day, and in our ways. We need twenty-first-century Christians living out the biblical gospel in twenty-first-century ways. Even more, if we read the Bible properly, we will see that God never asked one generation to step back in time and live the way it had done before. No, God spoke in each generation in that generation’s ways.
The biblical way is the ongoing adoption of the past and adaptation to new conditions and to do this in a way that is consistent with and faithful to the Bible.
The most alarming danger of the “return and retrieve” way of Bible reading is found throughout the Western world: it seems too often that everybody reads the Bible for herself or for himself, and everybody does what’s right in her or his own eyes.
we are now living in a church with a myriad of interpreters. And it has caused a mighty reaction today with many evangelical Christians bolting for more traditional churches. The major current in this stream is the appeal to tradition. There are two senses of tradition here, one that I adhere to strongly (Great Tradition) and one that repels me (traditionalism).
we may learn to read the Bible for ourselves, but we must be responsible to what the church has always believed. We can reduce the Great Tradition to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, and the importance of justification by faith from the Reformation. These creeds point us toward the nonnegotiables of the faith; they point us to what God has led the church to see as its most important doctrines.
The biblical authors and the early fathers didn’t fossilize traditions. Instead—and here we come to a major moment in this book—they went back to the Bible so they could come forward into the present. They did not go back to stay there (the “retrieve-it-all” tendency); they didn’t dismiss the Bible easily (the “retrieve-only-the-essence” approach); and they didn’t fossilize their discernments (traditionalism). Instead, each one went back to the Bible, to God’s Word, so they could come forward into their own day in their own ways.
we need to go back to the Bible so we can move forward through the church and speak God’s Word in our days in our ways. We need to go back without getting stuck (the return problem), and we need to move forward without fossilizing our ideas (traditionalism).
unlike traditionalists, we don’t freeze or fossilize our expressions of the gospel. What we decide is our way for our day. We expect the next generation to do the same. Reading the Bible with the Tradition gives us guidance but it also gives us freedom to differ with Tradition.
We need to have profound respect for our past without giving it the final authority.
Making timeliness timeless is fossilizing. Our task is to take the timely timelessness of the Bible and make it timely timeliness for our world.
Three words tell us how to read the Bible and we will devote a section to each: Story Listening Discerning That’s all we need to know. It’s all in those three words.
We find our Magic Eyes and we are drawn up onto The Dawn Treader only when we learn to read the Bible as a story.
For some, the Bible is massive collection of laws—what to do and what not to do. It is not difficult to understand how the Bible, which contains plenty of commandments and prohibitions—there are 613 in the Old Testament alone—can gradually take on the impression that it is a collection of legal morsels, a law book. Nor is it an uncommon experience, especially for the younger generation, to express the sentiment that “law book” is how they were taught the Bible, and it turned them off to the Bible.
Dividing the Bible up into verses turns the Bible into morsels and leads us to read the Bible as a collection of divine morsels, sanctified morsels of truth. We pause for each one to see if we can get something from it.
Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots. They see what is in their head. In more sophisticated language, they project onto the Bible what they want to see. If you show them enough passages and you get them to talk about them, you will hear what is important to them, whether it is in the Bible or not!
point—reading the Bible as an inkblot is projecting onto the Bible our ideas and our desires.
Instead of being swept into the Bible’s story, Rorschach thinkers sweep the Bible up into their own story. Instead of being an opportunity for redemption, the Bible becomes an opportunity for narcissism.
Eugene Peterson: The most frequent way we have of getting rid of the puzzling or unpleasant difficulties in the Bible is to systematize it, organizing it according to some scheme or other that summarizes “what the Bible teaches.” If we know what the Bible teaches, we don’t have to read it anymore, don’t have to enter the story and immerse ourselves in the odd and unflattering and uncongenial way in which this story develops, including so many people and circumstances that have nothing to do, we think, with us.5
God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it.
You probably read this prohibition of interest the way I do: that was then, and this is now. Reading the Bible like this is reading the Bible as Story. It unfolds and propels us to live out the Bible in our day in our way. But how do we know when the principle of “that was then and this is now” applies? It’s easy when everyone agrees, and we all seem to have concluded without much conscious effort—though we’d all be surprised how debated interest was in Europe in centuries past—that charging and paying interest is how the system works. But what happens when some disagree with the status quo?
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I believe those seven words are the secret to reading the Bible: “that was then and this is now.” They reveal that we have learned to read the Bible as Story, even though most of us never give this a minute’s thought. We need to.
Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.
Bible—God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. Furthermore, I believe that because the gospel story is so deep and wide, God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story.
the ongoing reworking of the biblical Story by new authors so they can speak the old story in new ways for their day.
the Bible contains an ongoing series of midrashes, or interpretive retellings, of the one Story God wants us to know and hear. Each biblical author, whether we talk of Moses and the Pentateuch, or the so-called Deuteronomic histories, or the Chronicler, Job, or Ecclesiastes, or the various prophets, or Jesus or Paul or John or James or the author of Hebrews or Peter—each of these authors tells his version of the Story. They tell wiki-stories of the Story; they give midrashes on the previous stories.
Is Jesus’ temptation the reliving of Adam and Eve’s experience in Eden? (Jesus is then cast as the Second Adam, only this time perfectly obedient, and thereby the pioneer of a new Adamic line.) Or, which is more probable, is Jesus’ temptation by Satan the reliving of Israel’s wilderness testings? (Jesus is then recast as the second Moses leading his people to a new Promised Land.) In either case, Matthew casts the story of Jesus’ temptations as an updated version, a wiki-story, of an older story—either the Eden story or the wilderness story.
We say the Bible is Story because if we read it from beginning to end, we discover that it has three features: it has a plot (creation to consummation), it has characters (God—Father, Son, and Spirit—and God’s people and the world and creation around them), and it also has many authors who together tell the story.
The unity of the Bible is this Story. It is this Story that puts the Bible together. Our grand systems do not form the unity of the Bible; the Story that God tells forms and frames that unity.
The choice to make The Adam as an Eikon and to split The Adam into two, male and female, is profoundly important for understanding the story of the Bible.
In brief, the point of Genesis 1–2 is this: God wanted The Adam to enjoy what the Trinity had eternally enjoyed and what the Trinity continues to enjoy: perfect communion and mutuality with an equal. The Adam was in union with God and itself and Eden. But in another sense, The Adam stood alone in Genesis 2.
God wants The Adam to be two in order to experience the glories of communion of love and mutuality.
The entire rest of the Bible, aiming as it will toward Jesus Christ, is about turning Eikons bent on otherness to Eikons basking in oneness with God, with self, with others, and with the world.
If reading the Bible as Story teaches us one thing, it teaches us that it is the otherness with others that most concerns God. Otherness of the self and God is the assumption, but otherness with others is the focus of the Story.
Everything God designed for Eikons is actually lived out by Jesus. Everything Eikons are to do comes by being “in Christ” or by becoming “one” with Jesus Christ.
The good gospel things of becoming one with God, self, others, and the world happen to us only when we are united to Christ, when we become “one” in Christ. Let me now say this succinctly: The story of the Bible then aims at Galatians 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
In his incarnate life, when he becomes one with us, Jesus recapitulates, or relives, Israel’s (our) history. He becomes one of us. In fact, he becomes all of us in one divine-human being. Jesus is all Adam and Eve were designed to be, and more; he loves the Father absolutely and he loves himself absolutely and he loves others absolutely and he loves the world absolutely. He is the Oneness Story in one person.
Otherness leads to death; the problem to resolve is death. Thus, because God’s intent is to make the Eikons what he designed them to be, God takes on our death—our punishment for sin—so that we don’t have to die.
God sends the promised Spirit of the new covenant so that the covenant community can be empowered to be glowing Eikons, people who are restored to oneness with God, self, others, and the world. The most decisive impact of Pentecost, where the gift of the Spirit is made clear, is not tongue-speaking but community-formation (oneness).
