Continued from Section II

 

If the Scriptures are to serve in some fundamental sense as the norm of the church’s life, as they did for the first 18 centuries of her life, then the simple insight into the "drama-like" character of the Scriptures may be important.    God's revelation was not given at one time, nor in the form of a theological dictionary. The Bible, as Geerhardus Vos reminds , is not a dogmatic treatise. It is a book full of dramatic interest and comes complete with major and minor plots. It not only reveals God's redemptive purposes but is a means of enacting those purposes as well. John Murray writes, “Without [Scripture] we should have no encounter with redemptive revelation and therefore no experience of redemption”.

 

While it is true that God reveals Himself through the Scriptures – it would be more accurate to say that God’s redemptive activity is manifest through the Scriptures. In this sense, the Bible is not a disclosure of the divine being in some abstract sense. Nor is the Bible fundamentally a set of statements about eternal truths. It is more appropriate to say that the disclosure of God in Scripture is deeply imbedded in his “speaking” and the “acting out” of the drama of redemption in human history. Undoubtedly, God's activity in this history of redemption recorded in Scripture is itself revealing of the very character of God. The process of redemption is not only concomitant with Biblical history, but it becomes incarnate in that history. 

 

The Scriptures were written over the course of many centuries and its "drama" develops progressively. Its form has the characteristic parts of a drama, features such as tension and vision, pain and hope, movement and consummation. It is a drama with real characters that develop and a God who actually discloses himself on the pages of history and who occasionally “speaks” as one of the actors on the stage. The Scriptures have a primary plot which runs through them and the Bible weaves many different strands of literature together to form a coherent story line. 

 

The “drama-like” quality of the Canon suggest that each book of the Scriptures has some distinct sense of being party to the actual historical and covenantal relationship between Yahweh and his people Israel (in the OT) and to the fulfillment of that relationship in the life, death and resurrection story of Jesus (in the NT).   This is to say, that the books of the Bible are self-conscious in relating events, themes and characters that expound the nature and character of God’s dealing with his people and his people’s dealing with God. So we ought to “interpret” the books of the Bible as integrally connected to the whole of the drama of redemption. 

 

Biblical books do not stand in isolation, only later to find their correlation and concatenation in a theological framework of the church. The Bible is not simply a source from which data is provided for the later construction of our theological convictions. The exposition and enactment of the redemptive plan of God is found unfolded across the entirety of the canon. In this sense, the Scriptures contain their own principles of organization as they narrate the past, present and future of this history and meaning of redemption. This is the glue which binds all of the Biblical books together.

The drama of redemption emerges in the first instance from the fact that God creates all that is and intends, as a being of personal character, to engage his human creatures personally. The condition into which humans fall (and by extension the whole of creation) serves as the backdrop for God’s reconciling work. The course of this reconciling work finds its genuine fulfillment in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. These are climactic acts by which we are reconciled to God and on the basis of which we eagerly anticipate the full consummation of that reconciliation in the new heavens and the new earth.

 

The overall design of this redemptive history becomes apparent only when one is looking for it. Eyes not looking for a forest, might only see trees. The patterns of a design are often complex and hidden to the eye which is not looking for them. It is also true that patterns will not be seen by the eye which has been trained to think the landscape is void of them.

 

If God is the Lord of redemption and the Lord of history, then one would expect to find patterns and themes in His redemptive activity interspersed throughout that history. So for example there is recurring pattern of God acting contrary-to-human-expectations in the Bible. The youngest son and not the oldest one receives the covenant benefits in the patriarchal period. One gains their soul by giving it up Jesus tells the disciples. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. The foolishness of the world is the wisdom of God in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Eternal life is granted through the death of one man as we find in the early preaching of the gospel.  

 

Would it not be odd in this contrary-to-human-expectations pattern if God declared explicitly, as in lecture form, exactly how and in what direction his redemptive "tree" grew from its "seed"? It would seem natural to expect that redemptive patterns are largely implicit in the text, interwoven in and through the "natural" history of the narrative. Is this not the reason for the often repeated refrain in Scripture, "Let those who have eyes to see, see and let those who have ears to hear, hear." If we “see” the Bible on our own terms, we will miss much of its own terms.

 

One is not free to find any pattern in the text which suits one's fancy. Significance does not lie in any chance element in the text which a particular reader happens to see because of their context or bias. Nor does the significance and larger meaning of a biblical text lie merely in the changes which it occasions in the life of the reader. The far greater significance is the actual redemptive activity of God enacted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Put baldly, it is God’s story into which we fit, rather than fitting God into our story. Better that we try to let the Bible read us than for us to read the Bible. We turn in the next section to the actual practice of this principle. 

 

Continue to Section IV: Reinterpreting the Pluralist Impulse

© 2010 The Center for Gospel Culture