Tag Archives: Scripture

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NT Wright on Scripture, the Last Word, and publishers (Lambeth)

I finally got around to reading NT Wright’s lecture at Lambeth on the Bible and God’s Word (30 July 2008). He begins by drawing attention to his book on Scripture and the Authority of God and says:

It was published in America under the strange title The Last Word – strange, because it certainly wasn’t the last word on the subject, and also because if I was going to write a book called The Last Word I think it ought to be about Jesus Christ, not about the Bible. But such are the ways of publishers.

More seriously, for those of us who have read Wright before, there’s nothing entirely new, but I found it to be refreshingly enjoyable and helpful read.

Here is an outline:

1. Scripture and the Authority of God

a. Scripture as the vehicle of God’s authority

b. God’s Authority and God’s Kingdom

c. Scripture and the Story of God’s Mission

2. Scripture and the Task of the Church

a. Foundation: Bible and Culture

b. The Bible and Gnosticism

c. The Bible and Empire

d. Postmodernity

I liked this early quote

Debates about the authority of scripture have tended to get off on the wrong foot and to turn into an unproductive shouting-match. This is partly because here, as in matters of political theology, in the words of Jim Wallis ‘the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it’. And sometimes the other way round as well. We have allowed our debates to be polarized within the false either/or of post-enlightenment categories, so that we either see the Bible as a holy book, almost a magic book, in which we can simply look up detached answers to troubling questions, or see it within its historical context and therefore claim the right to relativize anything and everything we don’t immediately like about it. These categories are themselves mistaken; the Bible itself helps us to challenge them; and when we probe deeper into the question, ‘what does it mean to say that the Bible is authoritative’, we discover a new and richer framework which simultaneously enables us to be deeply faithful to scripture and energizes and shapes us, corporately and individually, for our urgent mission into tomorrow’s world.

Some more of my favorite quotes:

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The glory of God in Scripture’s humanity

On his website, Peter Enns has posted the first distillation of a 38 page paper for the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary clarifying some of his thinking in Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (I&I). The long title of the post is The Authority of Scripture is a Function of Its Divine Origin, not Its Cultural Expression, Although the Bible that the Spirit Has Given the Church is a Thoroughly Encultured Product

Here is a quote:

. . .And we see the glory of Scripture precisely not by relegating Scripture’s humanity to the sidelines, but by learning more and more how the Wise God spoke and meant to be understood. A relentless and energetic study of the “humanity” of Scripture will not speak to the question of the Bible’s authority (a common mistake among “liberalism” and of which I seem to be accused), but how that authority is to be properly understood. It is not to relativize biblical authority by making the Bible out to be purely a product of human culture or giving humanity some sort of “priority,” but to declare that God, by his will, love, and wisdom, has broken into human cultures (which are his own creation), to act and speak in such a way as to rescue his people. (Explicating this further is the heart of my recently published article available on this website, “Preliminary Observations on an Incarnational Model of Scripture: Its Viability and Usefulness.”)

Ironically, perhaps, when we focus on the humanity of Scripture, we are not somehow showing disrespect for Scripture’s divine origin, nor are we in danger of running our faith aground. The truth, I feel, is precisely the opposite. By focusing on Scripture’s humanity, which is unfortunately often misunderstood as the purview of critical scholarship alone, we begin to see more clearly who this God is who has walked and talked with his people, and still does. Scripture’s humiliation is not an affront or an obstacle to be overcome in order to highlight its authority. Like Christ, it is the very means by which we behold God’s glory. . .

There’s a lot to unpack here. Read the full post here; follow the Enns’s series of posts here.