First Thoughts on Ben Witherington's New Book, "The Living Word of God"
I will admit that this is the first book I have (began to) read of Witherington's trilogy on the central ordinances of the Christian faith (baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the Bible), though it is itself the third installment. But I must also admit that my heart is always more drawn to books that discuss the authority of the Bible more so than those concerning baptism or the Eucharist, for reasons I'm not sure I can articulate, but I suspect may be calling-related.
In any event, I'll be posting a lot more about the book in the days to come, at least until I get my pre-U.S.-release copy of N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope that I just ordered from Amazon UK, because I'm just that much of an N.T. Wright nut and simply couldn't wait for the mid-February U.S. release.
But a funny thing happened on my way to Chapter 1. Witherington actually utilizes a snippet, as a pre-introduction to the book, from one of my favorite N.T. Wright essays of all time, How Can the Bible be Authoritative? I think the article in general, and the snippet Witherington utilizes, captures the essential problem about how I, in particular, misread/misunderstood the Bible during the early part of my Christian life.
The snippet that Witherington quotes in the book reads as follows:
The question of biblical authority, the question of how there can be such a thing as an authoritative Bible, is not, then, as simple as it might look...A regular response to these problems is to say that the Bible is a repository of timeless truth. There are some senses in which that is true. But the sense in which it is normally meant is certainly not true. The whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is culturally conditioned. It is all written in the language of particular times, and evokes the cultures in which it came to birth. It seems, when we get close up to it, as though, if we grant for a moment that in some sense or other God has indeed inspired this book, he has not wanted to give us an abstract set of truths unrelated to space and time. He has wanted to give us something rather different, which is not (in our post-enlightenment world) nearly so easy to handle as such a set of truths might seem to be. The problem of the gospels is one particular instance of this question. And at this point in the argument evangelicals often lurch towards Romans as a sort of safe place where they can find a basic systematic theology in the light of which one can read everything else. I have often been assured by evangelical colleagues in theological disciplines other than my own that my perception is indeed true: namely, that the Protestant and evangelical tradition has not been half so good on the gospels as it has been on the epistles. We don’t quite know what to do with them. Because, I think, we have come to them as we have come to the whole Bible, looking for particular answers to particular questions. And we have thereby made the Bible into something which it basically is not. I remember a well-known Preacher saying that he thought a lot of Christians used the Bible as an unsorted edition of Daily Light. It really ought to be arranged into neat little devotional chunks, but it happens to have got all muddled up. The same phenomenon occurs, at a rather different level, when People treat it as an unsorted edition of Calvin’s Institutes, the Westminster Confession, the UCCF Basis of Faith, or the so-called ‘Four Spiritual Laws’. But to treat the Bible like that is, in fact, simply to take your place in a very long tradition of Christians who have tried to make the Bible into a set of abstract truths and rules—abstract devotional doctrinal, or evangelistic snippets here and there.
By the way, you can read the entire article here.
Well, I didn't intend that my first thoughts on Witherington's book would essentially turn into old thoughts on N.T. Wright, but I guess that comes with the territory of being a Wright nut. More to come on Witherington, and only Witherington (again, until I get my copy of the new Wright, that is).
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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