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Posted by on Aug 29, 2011 in Biblical Studies | 2 comments

Biblical Story versus Biblical Stories

I recently assigned a short assignment to my Bible students. They were to write out a brief summary of the story of Scripture. I intentionally gave them very little help, only telling them that they had 2-3 paragraphs to write out the summary, and they needed to include the important details, features, and events of the story.

The results are intriguing. On the one hand, they clearly knew a lot of the stories of Scripture. And my guess is that their familiarity with Scripture is quite similar to that of the American church in general. We who have grown up in church know a lot of the stories. We can talk about Abraham, about Adam and Eve, about David, about Ruth and Esther, and so on. And that’s certainly commendable.

But one of interesting facets of American evangelicalism is that while there is a significant knowledge of individual stories in Scripture, oftentimes, we in the American church fail to see the overarching storyline, as well as the theological categories into which those stories fit. Our knowledge of Scripture seems to be quite fragmented at times.

Now certainly not everyone at every age will have the same level of understanding. That is only natural. I am quite happy that students in churches are getting to know the wonderful stories of Scripture. But ideally, the unfolding story of Scripture leading to Christ is manifest from the very beginning. Hopefully the more that we study Scripture, the more we will see that the stories of Scripture are not fragments, but rather part of the tapestry that makes the wonderful story of creation and redemption.

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Posted by on Jun 29, 2011 in Biblical Studies, Covenant Theology |

Framing the Biblical Story 2: Two Covenants

Chart of Covenant Theology from A Puritan's Mind

In my first post in this brief series, I looked at how the biblical story has been structured differently. The traditional schema has four parts (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration), Sam Wells (as well as N.T. Wright) sees 5 parts (Creation, Israel, Jesus, Church, Eschaton), while Bartholomew and Goheen see 6 parts (Creation, Fall, Redemption Initiated, Redemption Accomplished, The Mission of the Church, Mission Completed). In this post, I’m going to briefly explain the two-covenant schema of covenant theology. In the last post, I’ll provide some simple reflections on how this two-covenant structure fits with each of the previously-mentioned accounts of the biblical story.

The Two Covenants

As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, “The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto Him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which He has been pleased to express by way of covenant” (VII.1). In other words, for there to be a relationship between God and man, there must be a condescension on God’s part. And in Scripture, we find that condescension taking the form of a covenant.

With that in mind, our minds are naturally drawn to Genesis 1-3. While the word for covenant (berith) is not present in those chapters, the elements of a covenant are present. About the covenant, the Confession says:

God gave to Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it. (XIX.1)

Of course, as Genesis 3 tells us, man failed to keep the conditions of the covenant. Accordingly, Adam and all mankind are under God’s wrath and curse. Man did not merit eternal life but instead merited eternal death because of his breaking of the covenant in the Garden.

But, as Westminster Shorter Catechism Q2o tells us, God did not choose to leave mankind in this state of “sin and misery.” Instead, he entered into another covenant with man, a covenant of grace. In this covenant, God would provide a Redeemer–his only Son–who would fulfill the conditions of the covenant of works that Adam had failed to keep and take the punishment that God’s people deserved for their rebellion against him. This covenant of grace begins in Genesis 3 with the promise of the Seed of the woman and ends in Revelation with its complete fulfillment in the new heavens and new earth.

What, then, of the other biblical covenants? Each of the covenants in Scripture (Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, New) are administrations, or outworkings of the one covenant of grace. Each builds on the one before until the final expression of the new covenant, in which Jesus comes to fulfill all the promises of the covenant of grace. Believers in Christ thus do not merit their own salvation by their works. Rather, they have a place in the new heavens and new earth only because they are united to Christ.

In the next post, I will examine how each of the schemas I discussed before fits with this two-covenant understanding of Scripture.

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Posted by on May 30, 2011 in Covenant Theology | 4 comments

Framing the Biblical Story

In a lot of the reading that I’ve done in recent years, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the biblical story, the way in which the Bible reveals God’s plan for the world. In this post, I would like to look at just a few ways in which this has sometimes been described. In a later post, I will explore how (and if) they fit with the scheme presented in traditional covenant theology.

The Traditional 4-Part Scheme

The Reformation tradition has generally explained the story of the Bible in a four-part scheme: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. The strength of this way of laying out the biblical story is that it seems to cover the main movements of the story. Obviously, creation is essential, for that not only explains the origins of human history, but it also provides the basis for our understanding of God, man, life, and culture. The Fall, while not the original design for humanity, is certainly the next main stage in the story of Scripture, for it explains what has happened in the human heart and world since that time. The time from the Fall forward, including the present time before Jesus returns, is all about God’s redemption which is accomplished in Jesus and applied by the Spirit. But the reality is that while the victory is won, its effects are not yet complete. We wait for a final restoration in which sin’s very presence will be eradicated.

Sam Wells’ 5-Act Drama

While maintaining similarities to the traditional 4-part narrative structure, Sam Wells’ 5-act dramatic structure (influenced by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory and N.T. Wright, and similar to Kevin Vanhoozer’s structure in The Drama of Doctrine) views the storyline slightly differently. Here are the five acts as he sees them: Act One: Creation, Act Two: Israel, Act Three: Jesus, Act Four: The Church, and Act Five: The Eschaton. While I don’t have time to explain how he integrates his categories of drama and improvisation (though you can read my paper on Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics), suffice it to say that he sees this structure as maintaining the central theo-dramatic elements of the story. It explains God’s desire for relationship with his people, leading to the very entrance of God into his creation and the establishment of his people who wait for the final restoration of all things. Needless to say, he leaves out the Fall as an act in and of itself, which will obviously raise interesting questions about the validity of his structure.

Goheen and Bartholomew’s 6-Act Structure

Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew (in The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story) lay out a structure that goes beyond the Shakespearean 5-Act drama:

Act 1–God Establishes His Kingdom: Creation
Act 2–Rebellion in the Kingdom: Fall
Act 3: The King Chooses Israel: Redemption Initiated
Act 4: The Coming of the King: Redemption Accomplished
Act 5: Spreading the News of the King: The Mission of the Church
Act 6: The Return of the King: The Mission Completed

Clearly, they have through the biblical portrayal of the story in some detail. Unlike the traditional Reformed structure, they have expanded the category of redemption to include its various parts: the initiation of it through God’s choosing of a specific people (though it is interesting that they speak of Israel, since that might lead to the misunderstanding that the plan of redemption started with Israel, rather than with Adam in Genesis 3:15), the coming of Jesus, and the current period of the church in which redemption has been accomplished, but in which not all of the world knows it yet. Unlike Wells’ structure, the Fall is included as a central element in the biblical drama.

So What?

While this may seem like an unnecessarily dramatic way of thinking about what the Scriptures are about, here are a few reasons why I think this is worth pondering. First, the way in which we conceive of the biblical story will, to a large degree, shape how we understand the mission of God’s people today. Secondly, the clarity with which we understand God’s story will determine how clearly we are able to communicate it to others. Thirdly, while certainly Scripture nowhere lays out any of these “systems” in so many words, it is important to make sure that we are thinking about what God has revealed to us in a way that is faithful to what he has revealed to us. Later, I hope to compare these three with covenant theology and with what Scripture seems to emphasize in terms of its main movements.

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Posted by on Jan 12, 2011 in Biblical Studies, Missiology |

The Message of the Bible in One Sentence

Dane Ortlund has asked many scholars and pastors to answer one question in one sentence: What is the message of the Bible?  You can read the answers here: What’s the message of the Bible in one sentence? While certainly it is impossible to fully answer that question in such a small space, it is a helpful exercise, for it causes us to consider carefully what the essence of God’s plan for history is.  One particularly insightful answer is from Greg Beale, though he definitely stretches the limits of a “sentence”:

The OT storyline appears best to be summarized as: the historical story of God who progressively reestablishes his new creational kingdom out of chaos over a sinful people by his word and Spirit through promise, covenant, and redemption, resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to extend that new creation rule and resulting in judgment for the unfaithful (defeat and exile), all of which issues into his glory; the NT storyline can be summarized as: Jesus’ life of covenantal obedience, trials, judgmental death for sinners, and especially resurrection by the Spirit has launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-and-not-yet promised new creation reign, bestowed by grace through faith and resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to extend this new creation rule and resulting in judgment for the unfaithful, unto God’s glory.

This reminds of an exercise I had to do in college, which was writing the story of the Bible in 200 words or less.  The professor that assigned that exercise wrote up the story of Scripture a few years ago in 100 words or less, and I it accomplishes something similar to what Dane Ortlund’s question does.  Here’s what he wrote:

From the Triune God comes a narrative centering on Christ, God’s incarnate Son, and supernaturally recorded in Scripture. This story begins with creation, reports humanity’s fall, Israel’s history, and God’s redemption in Jesus, the Messiah. People, who by the Spirit’s power repent and believe this good news, experience salvation: deliverance from sin, Satan, and death. United with the crucified and resurrected Lord, believers participate in Christ’s Body, the eschatological community that worships God, serves a needy world, and provisionally embodies God’s coming Kingdom. This blessing is for the whole creation, which will soon be judged and renewed for God’s glory. [The Trinitarian Story in 100 Words or Less]

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