SIMPLY CHRISTIAN - EXCERPTS 6

剛剛讀完N.T. WRIGHT所著SIMPLY CHRISTIAN （why christianity makes sense), 很有收獲。基督徒隻讀聖經可能不夠，要讀一些有名的著作，幫助自己理解。這裏我摘了一部分打出來，和大家分享。

6 The Story and the task 

One of the things Christians regularly say about the Bible is that it’s “authoritative”…If God’s authority is vested in Jesus, and if the Bible derives such authority as it has from that same divine source, what we’re saying by calling the Bible “authoritative” is that the Bible, somehow, becomes an authoritative instrument of what God accomplished through Jesus – particularly through his death and resurrection. 

In other words, for Jesus’s death to have the effect it was intended to have, it must be communicated to the world through the “word” of the gospel. And the Bible, in setting out the roots of the Christian story in the Old Testament and its full flowering in the New, was seen from very early on as encapsulating that powerful word – the word which communicated, and so put into effect, what God accomplished in Jesus. The Bible, in fact, is not simply an authoritative description of a saving plan as though it were just an aerial photograph of a particular piece of landscape. It is part of the saving plan itself. It is more like the guide who takes you around the landscape and shows you how you can enjoy it to the full.  

That is why the Bible’s “authority” works in an altogether different way from that of, say, the rules of a golf club. The Bible does indeed contain lists of rules (the Ten Commandments, for instance), but as it stands, as a whole, it doesn’t consist of a list of dos and don’ts. It’s a story, a grand, epic narrative that runs from the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve look after the animals, to the city which is the Bride of the Lamb, out of which the water of life flows to refresh the world. It is, after all, a love story, albeit with a difference. And the authority of the Bible is the authority of a love story in which we are invited to take part. It is, in that sense, more like the “authority” of a dance in which we are invited to join; or of a novel in which, though the scene is set, the plot well developed, and the ending planned and insight, there is still some way to go, and we are invited to become living, participating, intelligent, and decision-making characters within the story as it moves to its destination. 

This model of “authority” helps us to understand how to read the Bible as Christian scripture.
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This doesn’t mean we are left in a free-for-all situation where it is open to anyone to say, “Well, we’re now at a new moment in God’s plan, so we can throw away anything we don’t like in the old moments.” It’s still the same story; and that story was, and is, the story of how the creator God is rescuing the creation from its rebellion, brokenness, corruption, and death. He has accomplished this through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, in fulfillment of the promises to, and the story of, Israel. All that is non-negotiable. Anything that contradicts or undermines that doesn’t take the novel forward to its intended conclusion. Paul argues like this again and again throughout his letters, and we must be prepared to do the same. 

Living with “the authority of scripture,” then, means living in the world of the story which scripture tells. It means soaking ourselves in that story, as a community and as individuals. In deed, it means that Christian leaders and teachers must themselves become part of the process, part of the way in which God is at work not only in the Bible-reading community but through that community in and for the wider world. That’s the way to become surefooted in our proposal of, or reflection upon, fresh initiatives or suggestions about how the Christian community should respond to new situations – for instance, in spotting that what the world now needs, in fulfillment of some of scripture’s deepest plans, is global economic justice. It means being, as a community, so attentive not just to what our traditions say about scripture, but to scripture itself, that we are able, by means of it, to live by the life of heaven even while on earth. 

All this means we are called to be people who learn to hear God’s voice speaking today within the ancient text, and who becomes vessels of that living word in the world around us.