The Scarlet Letter
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
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N.T Wright is surely the leading NT scholar around today. He's brilliant and will keep us Bible students wrestling with his work for many years to come, even if we don't always understand him or know enough to agree with him. His breadth and depth leave a lot of us shaking our heads. But he can write easily understood and "practical" stuff (I sometimes hate that word "practical") that isn't hard to follow; but it's never froth so there's no point going for a "casual" read—you won't find it.
THE LAST WORD is a small book on "the authority of the Bible". As Wright tells it, it really turns out to be a little book on the authority of God as he exercises it through the Bible. He reminds us that the Bible isn't simply the place where God—who has the right to tell us what to do and believe—calls the shots and hands down dogmas. The Bible isn't simply a record of what God has done. It isn't simply a record of how people perceived what God has done or is doing. However true any of that might be, the Scriptures themselves are what God is using to gain what he is doing. And that, in fact, is the "authority of God," namely, his getting done what he has in mind to do. Since he uses the Scriptures to gain his purposes, the authority of God is imbedded in them, they're God's voice and we're to place ourselves under them.
To place ourselves under the Scriptures does not mean that we comb through them looking for texts, commands and the like that call for obedience. Essentially, to receive the authority of Scripture—in part—means we are to allow the Bible to be what it is. We are to see how it develops the Story in a series of God initiated and sustained "acts" and as the people of God we're to find our place in the development and "play our part" (my words, not his). We're not to place ourselves on the stage as though we were the patriarchs or part of the elect nation of Israel. We're to follow the biblical witness and see ourselves in the "act" that follows the earthly ministry of Jesus. All the various "acts" (the stages in salvation history) make one Story, all interdependent but each with its own contribution to make. What that means to us as "the people" of God is discovered by a sustained, prayerful and obedient engagement with the Bible as a whole and, in particular, with our place in that overarching Story. To narrow the Bible down to any single aspect of it is to undercut the authority of Scripture. To narrow the Bible down to all the aspects of it (as if they could be isolated) is to distort the nature of biblical authority.
As the Bible tells it, says Wright, the central issue is that a Sovereign Lord has committed himself to his creation and in and through Jesus Christ and means to bring that commitment to a righteous, glorious and final completion. It's all about the kingdom of God. The authority of scripture, then, is what God is doing with scripture to gain that end. Our response to that authority is to discover how we are to live for God and his purposes for creation as the New Covenant people of God.
This is a good little book even if the ideas aren't especially new. But Wright has the floor right now and people are listening to him. A major weakness in the book at the reading level is the huge number of unwieldy sentences. Many have fifty, sixty, seventy plus and a few have over a hundred words in them. It reads as though Wright spoke it and someone wrote it down verbatim.
British title: Scripture and the Authority of God
