In a provocative article called “How Can the Bible be Authoritative?,” New Testament Scholar and Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, discusses a problem that many of us have wondered about. In short, the question he raises sounds like this: If the Bible is a God-breathed story written to people living in another time and culture, how do we know what timeless principles to bring forward into our own lives, and what sacrifices, rituals, and time-specific behaviors to leave behind?
If you’re on the run right now and don’t have time to read an excerpt of Wright, or better yet, his whole article, I’ll try to quickly net out here what follows:
In summary, it’s about the missing script of application.Wright shows us what to look for in a story written to someone else, for us. The authority of the Bible, he suggests, lies in its whole story with all of its plots, themes and characters, rather than in its individual parts. (Wright is careful to affirm that the individual parts of Scripture are inspired, even if some of them are not binding on us.)
Other writers have made the same point when they remind us that most of us do not read the Bible with the assumption that it requires us to: (1) “Stop drinking water and instead take a little wine for our stomachs” (1Tim 5:23)? (2) Greet one another with a holy kiss (Romans 16:16). (3) “Sell our possessions and give to the poor” (Luke 12:33). (4) If we are not married, “to not look for a wife” (1Corintians 7:27). Or, (5) whenever we are sick, “call the elders of the church to pray over us and anoint us with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14).
So to avoid the problem of knowing what to do with individual parts of the Bible, Wright suggests that we need to thoroughly immerse ourselves in the plot, themes, and characters of the Scriptures until we see how its timeless principles move forward into practical life-changing applications.
Well that’s the way I’d summarize it. Here’s a brief excerpt that shows how NT Wright, in his own words, illustrates this process:
Wright suggests, and I quote,
“Let me offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration, but actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given to his people as the means of his exercising his authority. (End of Quote) From Vox Evangelica 21 1991
Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.
Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were, to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.
Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.
Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted “authority” for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated (i.e. sketchily summarized) earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.
This “authority” of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier parts of the play over and over again. It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering into the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.”
Wright goes on to suggest that the first four existing Acts would be 1) Creation; 2) Fall; 3) Israel; 4) Jesus, and adds: “The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well… of how the play is supposed to end. The church would then live under the “authority” of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act. Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.”
Yes, this requires some thought. But how can we begin to work through some of the issues that we’ve been thinking about lately without thinking carefully about what it takes to live out a wholly inspired Story written to someone else living in another time– for us?
NT Wright’s full article can be found at: http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm
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