Re: Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough

Well, I am certainly arguing for a bit of a paradigm shift from an understanding that takes such concepts as gospel, salvation, justification, and mission as being directly and personally relevant to the modern believer to an understanding that takes them to be narratively located. This has to do, in my mind, basically with how we interpret scripture. Most of us (I include myself) have absorbed the former paradigm from the practical teaching ministry of the church, which in recent decades has been mostly interested in the spiritual well-being and final hope of the individual and which reads the Bible from that perspective. It seems to me, however, that the Bible actually asks to be read historically and from a corporate perspective: it is the story of a people which makes sense not only of those general concepts but also of such a central event as the death of Jesus within that narrative framework.

The question that interests me is whether the church as a whole, and not merely biblical scholarship, can define its identity and purpose without short-circuiting the narrative or allegorizing it or collapsing it into a set of universal principles or propositions that are simply there to be preached and believed. I agree that scripture still affects us now, but I think that to a large degree the modern evangelical mind has become captive to a severely reductionist reading of the Bible, for which a price is paid not merely in terms of exegesis but also in terms of self-understanding.

What happens when we relocate the diminished evangelical ‘gospel’ in the whole narrative of scripture? Well, I think it brings into focus for us the calling of a people to be God’s new creation and the manner in which that vocation was transformed through the critical events described in the New Testament. It is, however, not the gospel but the life of that people that is central to the missional purpose of God.

To give an analogy. A person may go through a traumatic experience - a life-threatening illness, for example, the loss of a loved one, or an encounter with extreme poverty. He is dramatically changed by the event - psychologically, spiritually; but his future life moves on from the experience itself; he remembers it, perhaps still has nightmares about it, but he does not have to stay in that experience in order to be a new person. Because of what happened, he feels that he has discovered his true identity and purpose in life, but the life-changing experience remains in the past and only really makes sense in that historical context. It does not have to be somehow universalized or mythologized in order to remain meaningful.

It is the same for the people of God. The family of Abraham was forced to go through a massive crisis of judgment and restoration that lasted centuries - arguably it ran from the exile, through the Maccabean revolt, the events of Jesus’ life, the destruction of Jerusalem and the conflict with Greek-Roman paganism. They survived only because Jesus faithfully and obediently opened an alternative path through his death and resurrection. That painful process changed them dramatically, but as a people they are more than Gospel story - they are the sum of the whole narrative

Feel free to complain if you don’t like the book.