It is on my bucket list to write a book on biblical theology, starting with the notes from when I taught it as a graduate class. However, the church could probably use a popular version of my notes. I've thought about writing on it on Fridays. Here's a possible start.
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Introduction
It is natural for Christians to read the Bible as a single book from God to them. It is the word of God. It is good news for everyone in the world. The Holy Spirit speaks daily to believers as they read these words.
In the pages that follow I want to take you on a journey in your reading of the Bible. The goal is not to interfere with those direct words from God to you every day as you read the word. I call it God "zapping" us. I am reading the biblical text and, bam, God makes some passage come alive. In older language, he "quickens" it.
Keep chewing on the text daily. If you know what lectio divina is, keep doing it -- reading small portions of text over and over again asking God to speak to you. Keep hearing that overarching story of salvation from creation to fall to redeption to final consummation in the text.
Yet, I want to sharpen your hearing of another story in the Bible. This is the story of God walking with humanity toward a more and more precise understanding of him. The pages of Scripture give witness to this journey. The New Testament has a fuller understanding of God than the Old Testament because of the fuller understanding of Christ, who is the key to unlock everything. Yes, we and the New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, but it is the Spirit and the New Testament that has opened our eyes.
You don't have to take my word for it. We are about to see this developing understanding, this "flow of revelation," in the pages of the Bible itself. We will look at passages you may not have noticed. We will learn how to read the books of the Bible in context -- how those who first received it might have understood it. The goal is not to take away your direct zappings but to add what the biblical texts might have meant when God first revealed them.
The result will be a transformation of your reading of the Bible from a flat, two-dimensional story to a deep, three-dimensional chorus. We hope to hear how God spoke to a host of different individuals on different occasions in different times and places. I welcome you to treat me as a hostile witness if you want. Feel free to suspend your judgment on what is being said until you are fully convinced. If I am wrong, I don't want you to believe me.
I expect to learn on this journey as well. Who knows, maybe the text will talk me out of what I think this book is going to say. But it is the biblical text itself I want us to listen to. Some say that, but I wonder if they truly mean it. In practice, is it more the case that they listen to the Bible until it hits an electric fence their tradition has put up? In other words, I wonder if they listen to the text as long as it doesn't break their "rules."
We'll see what you think. We're going to start with what the Bible has to say about God. Then we'll follow a fairly conventional path. What does the Bible say about creation? About a Fall? What is the arc of Israel in the biblical texts? What about Christ and salvation? What about ethics? What about the return of Christ?
What I think you will find is that the earliest texts of the Old Testament have a very broad understanding of these things. I think you will find that the flow of revelation gets more and more precise as we go along. The details get filled in. The earlier revelation is more anthropomorphic in relation to God (portraying God using human illustrations we can relate to), the later texts more theologically detailed.
We will argue that Jesus is the "final Word" of Scripture. I want to be careful not to put a rule on the Bible that it doesn't want -- after all, that is what I am saying others do. But our working hypothesis will be that the flow of revelation after Christ is an unpacking of Christ's significance rather than "extra" revelation. One rule we will try to maintain is that the New Testament is the definitive unpacking of Christ's significance.
Yet, if we are honest, the unpacking of Christ did not end there. I write this introduction during the months of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in AD325. The Nicene Creed that would eventually develop out of that meeting is a much more precise presentation of the Trinity than anything found in the Bible. Indeed, the contours of the Bible itself -- called the "canon" or measuring rod -- are not found in the Bible. The Bible never says, "Here are the books of the Bible." That was a decision that bubbled up hundreds of years later in the church.
So, Jesus was the "last Word" and the New Testament is the authoritative presentation of God's Word. But the unpacking of that revelation continued in fundamental ways for several hundred years. And there are issues like predestination that we continue to wrestle with today.
We want things to be crystal clear, and Christians often act as if the Bible serves that purpose. Yet, over 20,000 Protestant church groups later, it is simply not the case that the Bible has removed all ambiguity on questions of theology. It is quite curious to make such a claim in the light of history. Words by their very nature can typically be read in multiple ways. For good or ill, the community of faith almost always ends up playing a role in our understanding of Scripture. [1]
You can decide for yourself. Let's set sail on the river of revelation in Scripture. Orthodoxy will be our guiding star on the voyage -- the commonly held beliefs of Christians over the centuries. Yet we will also keep in mind that it is a "rule." Hopefully, the rivers of Scripture lead us there, but we also want to be honest if at some point we have to get out of the river of Scripture and finish the journey by land.
We'll see. Let's get in the boat and start sailing in Genesis.
Key Concepts
lectio divina -- "divine reading." It's a practice of reading Scripture is small bites. Mulling it over. Meditating on it. Praying over it. Chewing on it.
anthropomorphism -- portraying something that isn't human in human terms
canon -- the collection of authoritative books found in the Bible, the "measuring rod" for our belief and practice
orthodoxy -- "right belief"
hermeneutics -- the study of how we interpret things, especially the Bible
[1] Several years ago, I tried to set out a "hermeneutic" -- an approach to reading the Bible -- that takes all these factors into account. The ebook of Who Decides What the Bible Means? is here, and the paperback on Amazon.
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