God’s Word to us doesn’t always have shiny wrapping and a big red bow attached. God’s Word isn’t always warm and fuzzy. God’s Word sometimes needs to hit us like a ton of bricks. When we open our Bibles we stumble into an old library full of stories of holy confrontations and sacred summons.
One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by the winners. This is true — except in the case of the Bible it’s the opposite!
Many pastors avoid teaching the Book of Revelation either because they themselves are still befuddled, but more often because it’s an exhausting chore confronting all the BS interpretations that have persisted for so long.
The greatest tragedy that has befallen Western Christianity over the past few hundred years is the chopping up of the drama of biblical story into cold and sterile propositional truth claims. If there’s one gift I’d love to give everyone I meet or minister to, it is the gift of grasping the Big Story of the Bible in narrative form and the thrill of discovering their unique place in the unfolding plot.
This week I am teaching on the nature of the Bible — authority, inspiration, infallibility, etc. — in my Christian Theology class at Solid Rock Discipleship School. I dug up this post from 2011 I wanted to share again as we begin a New Year. In the October […]
ASCENSION SUNDAY | Luke 24:44-53 One of the difficulties we have in reading and understanding the Bible is that we often unintentionally plug individual passages and key concepts into a controlling story that is foreign to the Bible. This results in making the Bible answer questions it was […]
These two quotes aptly describe the nature and goal of my doctoral studies in New Testament Context. “The ideal interpreter would be one who has entered into that strange first-century world, has felt its whole strangeness, has sojourned in it until he has lived himself into it, thinking […]
This is a classic piece by N.T. Wright re-examining the meaning of some biblical texts in their Jewish context that have been hijacked by other interpretive schemes over the years. From Bible Review, August 2001, reprinted at NTWrightPage. Little did Paul know how his colorful metaphors for Jesus’ second […]
In this series of posts we’re exploring the different ways the Bible confronts the reader and the appropriate response to each. #8 – READING THE BIBLE AS SIGNPOSTS TO CHRIST & THE GOSPEL I used to read the Bible as a long, strange book of OT stories (e.g., […]
God’s Word to us doesn’t always have shiny wrapping and a big red bow attached. God’s Word isn’t always warm and fuzzy. God’s Word sometimes needs to hit us like a ton of bricks. Sometimes we need a wake up call or a holy confrontation.
I am a huge fan of the YouVersion Bible app for your smart phone. I use mine daily and tell everyone I know to download it. That said, there is a danger and major weakness to using such Bible apps. It tends to foster an individualistic, me-centered devotional […]
