In Scripture
and the Authority of God, N. T. Wright attempts to make sense of the claim
that The Bible (scripture) is authoritative. Wright’s argument is that the authority of scripture is more complex than saying that scripture
provides correct information. Instead,
it means that the Christian God exercises his authority through scripture and has
a plan to redeem all of creation. Scripture
spurs the completion of this plan through people. The best way to understand this is to read
the Bible as a five-act story. The first
four acts – creation, the fall, Israel, and Jesus – are already complete. The fifth act – the church – began at Easter/Pentecost. Scripture includes accounts and writings from
early in this act and Christians today continue to live in this act.
Telling readers to look at scripture
like a five-act story raises a question, namely How can God exercise authority through story? Stories are authoritative in their
ability to change how a person thinks and acts.
Stories do this in a couple of ways.
First, unexpected twists in stories surprise people into a better
understanding of an event (as in, I expect, the story told to David about the
man with the lone sheep). Second,
well-told stories allow a hearer to envision her- or himself as a part of the
story, including imagined reactions.
How does the story of Scripture play out? The third act, Israel, addresses events in the
first two acts – namely, there is a good creation with evil in it. Israel is God’s promise to respond to evil and
the explanation that his plan to do so is his Kingdom. In the Old Testament, God addresses Israel
directly to remind them of their role in this plan. The fourth act, Jesus, follows directly out
of the third. This is the “climax” of
scripture. For God’s Kingdom to address
evil, obedience is required. Jesus gave
God this obedience. Jesus was thus the
fulfillment of the words recorded in Israel’s sacred texts, or, “The Word made
flesh.”
Wright gives the most attention to the
fifth act, dividing it into three subsections.
Subsection One is the Apostolic Church.
It is shown in scripture itself.
The Apostles taught that Jesus fulfilled the promises made to and about
Israel. This teaching created the church,
a body of people transforming itself to Jesus’ likeness – transformed by the
writings of the Old Testament, the incarnation of Jesus, and the teaching of
the church. The apostolic writings
became part of the transformation process.
This did not happen at the expense of the Old Testament because the Old
Testament is a completed stage of the continuity of God’s Kingdom
development. The New Testament is then a
“charter document” that defines how the church fits into this continuity.
Subsection Two concerns the changes that
occurred in how people read scripture in the 1600 years between apostolic
writing and the Enlightenment. The
church began to define itself as a “scripture-reading community.” The church began to look to what traditional
understandings suggested about scripture, while comparing these ideas to
contemporary opinion. During this
process, the church began to see a tension that existed between authority and tradition. At the Reformation,
the role of tradition was challenged.
The Reformers taught that scripture was able to provide everything
necessary for salvation. With the
Reformation came the idea of reason,
which dictated that theologians must have a warranted basis for scriptural
interpretation.
Subsection Three shows how scriptural
interpretation changed with the Enlightenment.
Wright sees three ways culture, and with it scriptural interpretation,
changed during this period. First, the
idea of progress – or the notion that society will inevitably reach a
completely reason-based worldview – suggested an alternative to Christian
eschatological teaching. Second, evil
became synonymous with the inability to think rationally. The solution to evil therefore became giving
people an opportunity to be rational.
Third, more credence was given to the subjective experiences that people
have when interpreting scripture. This
acknowledged that our sinful nature could negatively affect our interpretation
and that experiences with God could positively affect it.
Like any book worth reading, Scripture and the Authority of God
leaves me with questions, which I expect Wright answers elsewhere[1]. My primary question – and the one I will
focus on now – is one of belief. Wright
notes that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura states that scripture provides
a full explanation of salvation, but does not claim that a person must believe
every bit of scripture to receive salvation.
Wright neither endorses nor chastises this idea, but I am still curious about
what to do with it. Essentially, if the
idea is correct, how do we make mature decisions about what is non-essential,
rather than simply push aside the bits of scripture we find distasteful?
The subtitle of Scripture and the Authority of God is “How to Read the Bible
Today”. In my mind, Wright’s is successful
in teaching people how to read the Bible today in two ways.
The first is his idea of reading the
Bible as a five-act play. Several years
ago, I became frustrated with the idea of scripture – not with what it did (or
did not) say, but with its very existence.
I wondered why some writings were “scripture” and others were not and I
then heard about looking at scripture as a “charter document” from a friend. While this response initially seemed
obnoxious at best, or absolutely useless at worst, I have grown to appreciate
it. I like having a founding document[2]
and reading scripture as a five-act play helps me better appreciate the
authority that comes with one. Seeing
scripture as a large narrative lets me better understand where I come from as a
disciple of Jesus.
Wright’s second major success comes in
the last two chapters of the book. In
these chapters, Wright demonstrates – rather than only explaining – how to read
the Bible. He provides detailed case
studies on the Sabbath and on monogamy.
The case studies serve as useful demonstrations. The Sabbath, for example, is not something
Christians should adopt entirely from the Old Testament, but it also is not something
from which to turn away. Instead, it is
something that creates the Christian responsibility to demonstrate God’s
creativity, justice, mercy, healing, and hope.
Wright notes that his purpose in these two chapters is to encourage
Christians to think more fully about the complexities of reading
scripture. Speaking for myself, they did
so.
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