Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today

the Christian claim that in Jesus of Nazareth the creator of the world—the whole world, not a Christian subset of the world!—is being rescued and renewed. Of course, non-Christians will say they don’t believe this. But Christians do, or at least should—and are therefore committed to believing that the new creation launched in Jesus is good news for

Paul expressed what the apostles all discovered: that this retelling of the ancient story, climaxing now in Jesus, carried power—power to change minds, hearts, and lives. “The gospel is God’s power to salvation” (Romans 1:16; compare 1 Thessalonians 1:5; 2:13). The “word” did not “offer itself” in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, any more than Caesar

The Enlightenment thus offered to the world a new analysis of, and solution to, the problem of evil, standing in radical tension to those offered in classical Judaism and Christianity. The real problem of evil, it proposed, is that people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how and create the

This is the nemesis, at another stage of the argument, of the idea that the main point of the New Testament at least is to chronicle “early Christian experience,” as though such “experience” is the main thing that matters and anything which will enable people to approximate to it, to recover the initial enthusiasm of Jesus’s first followers, is to

without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an “alternative source,” independent of scripture itself. When they speak with one voice, we should listen very carefully. They may be wrong. They sometimes are. But we ignore them at our peril. The study of church history is not, ultimately, a different “subject” from the careful

The widespread habit of private reading and study of scripture, once a more particularly Protestant phenomenon but now widely encouraged among Roman Catholics as well, has a long track record as a central part of Christian devotion.

Taken as a whole, the church clearly can’t live without the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have much idea of how to live with it. Almost all Christian churches say something in their formularies about how important the Bible is. Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible an

It has everything to do with understanding human renewal as the beginning, the pointer toward, and even the means of, God’s eventual eradication of evil from the world and the bringing to birth of the new creation itself. Thus, so the early Christians believed, God’s word was at work by the Spirit within the community, to put Jesus’s achievement in

The challenge of living with tradition is not so much, as in official Roman Catholic understandings, that one should let tradition and scripture flow together straightforwardly into a single stream, but that tradition should be allowed to be itself; that is, the living voice of the very human church as it struggles with scripture, sometimes misunde