The Drama of Scripture Quotes

“From the beginning God’s people are to be “missionary.” They are chosen to be a channel of blessing to others. But in order to be a missionary people they have to be formed to be like the promise they carry.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“The Muslim, the modernist, and the Christian each believes that his or her story alone is the true story of the world, that the Enlightenment story of human progress, or the Koran, or the Bible will ultimately be acknowledged by all to be true. But note that these stories cannot coexist as uniquely true. We must choose.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“If our lives are to be shaped by the story of Scripture, we need to understand two things well: the biblical story is a compelling unity on which we may depend, and each of us has a place within that story.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“In the ancient Near East, circumcision was practiced by most of the nations. Here God radically changes, for his own people, the meaning of this common cultural practice.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“John’s vision in Revelation, indeed, in the whole New Testament, does not depict salvation as an escape from earth into a spiritualized heaven where human souls dwell forever.5 Instead, John is shown (and shows us in turn) that salvation is the restoration of God’s creation on a new earth. In this restored world, the redeemed of God will live in resurrected bodies within a renewed creation, from which sin and its effects have been expunged. This is the kingdom that Christ’s followers have already begun to enjoy in foretaste.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“When God set out to redeem his creation from sin and sin’s effects on it, his ultimate purpose was that what he had once created good should be utterly restored, that the whole cosmos should once again live and thrive under his beneficent rule.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“Story 2: A Faithful Witness in Creation Care Is there a place in God’s kingdom for the gifts of a passionate bird-watcher? Peter and Miranda Harris have found that there is. A curate in a church in England, Peter was exploring possible mission work in Tanzania when God showed him and Miranda a quite different plan for their family. Driven by their love for God’s creation, and especially for birds, Peter and Miranda, their three small children, and another English couple moved to Portugal in 1983 to establish A Rocha (“The Rock”), a Christian conservation organization.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“Kingdom Professionals do not define success in terms of money, job or status. They do not seek to maximize their income or their security or their status, or to advance their careers. Instead they seek to maximize their impact on the people and places to which God has called them. They measure success by their contribution to what God is up to in their neck of His woods. They see themselves as successful to the extent they are doing what God has called them to do, in the place to which He has led them, in such a manner that their giftedness can be well utilized. Nothing less will suffice; not the shallowness of status, not the ephemeral illusions of wealth, not the corrosive effects of power. What matters to Kingdom Professionals is that there is congruence between their daily lives and the further in-breaking of God’s Kingdom where they live and work.64”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“As we have seen, Jesus’s mission centered in the coming of God’s kingdom, the restoration of God’s rule over all creation and all of human life, the day of God’s salvation. Though today some Christians believe that Jesus came to enable us to escape this creation and live eternally in an otherworldly and heavenly dwelling, such an understanding of salvation would have been entirely foreign to Old Testament prophets, to first-century Jews—and to Jesus himself. Salvation is not an escape from creational life into “spiritual” existence: it is the restoration of God’s rule over all of creation and all of human life.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“The world of the Bible is our world, and its story of redemption is also our story. This story is waiting for an ending—in part because we ourselves have a role to play before all is concluded. We must therefore pay attention to the continuing biblical story of redemption.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“This last journey itself teaches the disciples that to follow Jesus means to walk the way of the cross. Jesus speaks sharply to halting, halfhearted followers. The way of discipleship is costly: it demands total commitment, complete devotion and allegiance to Jesus and the kingdom of God (Luke 9:57–62). “Whoever wants to be my disciple,” Jesus says, “must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:23; cf. 14:27).”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“For the disciple community, to be in communion with Jesus means to take active part in his mission. This is explicit in Mark’s Gospel”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“Israel is not free to exploit the land at will. Israel always lives in the land with the Lord, and his laws contain many instructions about how to manage the land properly. In particular, the law of the Sabbath is a powerful reminder that the Lord is the one who sustains the creation and”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“The way we understand human life depends on what conception we have of the human story.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“Hence, the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshipers!”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

“the biblical story does not encourage anyone to feel detached from, or somehow superior to, this world of space and time and matter.”
― Craig G. Bartholomew, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story