Going to Catalyst

Posting may be few this week. I get to spend 14 hours in a bus tomorrow as we travel to Catalyst with our state collegiate ministry team. Wife is actually going this year. Hope to make a few connections with some others doing college ministry around the nation.

Blue Parakeet - Chapter 5: Part 2

Covenant Community: The Struggle for Oneness

The temptation then, is to skip from Genesis three to the Gospels or Romans three. We need, however, to see the plot move from creation and fall to redemption. The story of the Bible is creation, fall, and then covenant community – page after page of community – as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place.

If reading the Bible as Story teaches us one think, it teaches us that it is the otherness with others that most concerns God. Because we in the West are obsessed with our individual relationship with God, we like to read the Bible as morsels of blessing and promise. But reading the Bible as Story opens up a need so deep we sometimes aren’t aware we need it: oneness with others.

After the flood, God forms a covenanted community – a community in which they are to find oneness with God, with self, with others and with the world. This covenanted community will shape the rest of the Bible. Oneness cannot be achieved just between God and self. The way God works redemption in this world is through his covenanted community – first Israel, then the church.

Otherness Gets the Last Word

Here’s the massive problem in the Story: God’s people don’t get the job done. Something is terribly wrong with God’s covenanted people. Woven into this story is a deep thread of failure that creates otherness. Deep within the fabric of this story is that Israel won’t get the job done until the job is done for them. That job won’t get done until Jesus, Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, comes. He will bring the oneness.

Christ, the Perfect Eikon: Oneness Restored

The Bible’s story has a plot headed in the direction of a person. And that same story is headed in the direction of a community “in” that person.

Everything God designed for Eikons is actually lived out by Jesus. Everything Eikons are to do comes by being “in Christ” or by becoming “one” with Jesus Christ. God accomplishes four things in Christ, each of which contributes to the restoration of oneness.

Incarnation – this is where he becomes one with us. He is the Oneness Story in one person.

Death – Humans are guilty before God according to Genesis 3; the punishment for that guilt is death. Otherness leads to death (“you must not touch it, or you will die”). The problem is to resolve death. Because God’s intent is to make the Eikons what he designed them to be, God (in the person of Jesus Christ) takes on our death – our punishment for sin – so that we don’t have to die.

Jesus dies with us – he dies our death and we die with him.

Jesus dies instead of us – that final death is taken on board by him and we don’t have to die that final death.

Jesus dies for us – by assuming our death, we are forgiven of our sin.

But forgiveness is only the beginning of restoring us to oneness.

Resurrection – Forgiveness is not enough, the Eikons need life. Jesus is raised for us. By becoming one with the Resurrected One through faith, we are raised to new life. Why? So that we might stand up and walk again as Eikons are designed to live – with God, with self, with others, and with the world.

Pentecost – Here is where the power to create oneness is given, God sends his power in the form of the Holy Spirit. When we read Acts 2 (esp. verses 42-47) we see the gift of the Spirit is not tongues speaking but community formation. As we are reconciled to God through Christ, this leads to oneness (reconciliation) with others in this world (see 2 Cor. 5.18).

Consummation: Oneness Forever

Jesus’ first work stands now as partial redemption. The fullness of that work, complete union and perfect oneness will be consummated only when Christ returns again to establish the new heavens and the new earth. When that happens, Mr. and Mrs. Eikon will bask in the glory of union with God, where they will themselves be so radiant as to draw attention to God’s oneness as the origin of it all.

For Some Reason...

This does not delight me as much as I thought it would.

Blue Parakeet - Chapter 5: The Plot of the Wiki-Stories

This chapter will have to be posted in two parts because it was longer than I expected.

How Does the Bible Work?

Saying the Bible is Story is not saying it is fiction. We say the Bible is Story because if we read it from beginning to end, we discover that it has three features: it has a plot (creation to consummation), it has characters (God – Father, Son and Spirit – and God’s people and the creation around them), and it also has many authors who together tell the story.
Scot imagines that each of the authors of the Bible has a way of telling the Story. But before they are given permission, Jesus gives them some instructions in the form of a plot to which they are to conform their story.
Scot then provides us the basic elements of the plot to which all Bible writers have been asked to conform. He identifies 5 themes which hold the Bible together:
Plot / Theme
Creating Eikons (Gen. 1-2) /Oneness
Cracked Eikons (Gen. 3-11) / Otherness
Covenant Community (Gen. 12-Malachi)/ Otherness expands
Christ, the Perfect Eikon, redeems (Matt. – Rev. 20) / One in Christ
Consummation (Rev. 21-22) /Perfectly One

One of the most exciting features of those who learn to read the Bible as Story is to see how each book or author shapes the various elements of this plot.
This is the important point of this chapter: The unity of the Bible is this Story. It is this Story that puts the Bible together.
Creating Eikons: Designed for Oneness
We begin at Genesis 1-2. The pinnacle of God’s speaking things into existence was creating human beings. I understood where he was going. He refers to Gen. 1.26-27 and allows some of the words here to be defined with alternate understandings. Let us make The Adam [human beings] in our own Eikon [image, likeness of God]. Then the Bible informs us (in the next chapter) that God chose to “split the Adam” into two, into an Ish (man) and into an Ishah (woman). (The odd part to me is that he uses the literal Hebrew term for human (Adam) here, refers to the literal Hebrew terms for male and female (Ish and Ishah) but refers to the Greek term for image (Eikon). I think I know where he is going with this, but it is a little confusing. Plus, it is further confused by the fact that the story in Genesis continues to refer to the male as Adam.)
The brief point is this: God wanted The Adam to enjoy what the Trinity had eternally enjoyed and continues to enjoy: perfect communion and mutuality with an equal. To make the need for communion and love abundantly clear, God openly reveals that this aloneness is not what God wants for The Adam. God wants The Adam to be two in order to experience the glories of communion of love and mutuality.
The creation story is a story of what we were made to be and do: God is a Trinity, three equal persons in one(ness).
God designs Eikons for oneness in love.
God makes The Adam, who isn’t one with an equal. So,
God splits The Adam, into two so Adam and Eve can enjoy oneness.
That is why the Bible says that they are one flesh. As God is One (see Deut. 6.4), so Adam and Eve are one. Scot tells us that if we get anything out of Genesis 1-2 this is it:
The loving oneness of God finds earthly expression in the loving oneness of Adam and Eve. When Eikons are at one with God, self, others and the world, the glory oof the One God illuminates all of life.
The Bible begins, then as a life of oneness – human beings in union with God and in communion with the self, with one another, and with the world around them.

Cracked Eikons: Distorting Oneness, Creating Otherness
Because the man and woman choose to do what God said not to do, they “crack the Eikon” and jeopardize oneness. The first impact of rebelling against God is their self-consciousness. Then continue to distort oneness by acting as if nothing happened. This is followed the evidence of how sin impacts their oneness further, they begin to blame each other. Instead of experiencing one another in oneness, they begin to experience on e another as “others.” The entire rest of the Bible, aiming as it will toward Jesus Christ, is about turning Eikons bent on otherness to Eikons basking in oneness with God, with self, with others, and with the world. This otherness problem is what the gospel “fixes,” and the story of the Bible is the story of God’s people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.

Evolutionary Optimism?

I’ve been reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I would love to blog a complete review like I am doing for The Blue Parakeet, but I checked the book out from the library, so I can’t mark it up. From time to time, a few thoughts leap out at me and I will post them.

In one chapter, Wright is examining two options for one’s outlook for the future and they boil down to progress or despair. He first examines Evolutionary Optimism. He does not discuss evolution as it pertains to creationism, but to the philosophical/political worldview of evolution. Those who hold to this world view have a belief in a myth of progress. Our political discourse in this season is evidence of this. Each candidate and/or party is espousing that their way is the way of progress and they will usher in a new dawn for a great America. We see this in social gospel circles, in that if we all just work for the Kingdom of God, here and now (without mentioning the cross or the need for repentance), then we will inherit a great society and banish the ills of our world.
Wright says that the real problem with the myth of progress is that it cannot deal with evil. Not just intellectually, but in practice.

“The myth of progress cannot develop a strategy that actually addresses the severe problems of evil in the world. This is why all of the evolutionary optimism of the last two hundred years remains helpless before world war, drug crime, Auschwitz, apartheid, child pornography, and the other interesting sidelines that evolution has thrown up for our entertainment in the twentieth century. We can’t explain them, given the myth of progress, and neither can we eradicate them…The world is in fact still a sad and wicked place, not a happy upward progress toward the light (85-86).

”

Blue Parakeet - Chapter 4: It's a Story with Power!

How, Then, Shall We Read?

Scot reminds us of the number one rule of exegesis: context is everything. He gives us an example of whether we pay interest or not. If so, we are breaking the commands of the Bible about “usury” found in Lev. 25.35-38. (Although, Scot I think bends this example. The context is charging usury to your brothers and sisters, not paying it to institutions.)

The idea is, though, that the way we read such prohibitions is: that was then, and this is now. Reading the Bible like this is reading the Bible as Story. It unfolds and propels us to live out the bible in our day in our way. But how do we know when this principle applies?

In Scot’s eyes, until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living. God spoke in Moses’ days in Moses’ ways (here about interest), and he spoke in Jesus’ days in Jesus’ ways, and he spoke in Paul’s days in Paul’s ways. And he speaks in our days in our ways.

It’s a Story!

Going back to the Bible teaches us to read the Bible as God’s story. Read, for example, Acts 7. Stephen puts the whole Bible together for us. In his defense before the Jewish supreme court, he gives us an example of how to read the Bible. He didn’t do anything other than tell the story of Israel that had opened a new chapter – a chapter called Jesus the Messiah. With Jesus, everything changed.

Scot quotes former Wheaton professor Robert Webber: “So I invite you to read the Bible, not for bits and pieces of dry information [pieces in a puzzle], but as the story of God’s embrace of the world told in poetic images and types.”

Scot discusses something next that is so simple and so obvious, but is something at the same time is so profound. God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time and through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. The Gospel story is so deep and wide that God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story. No single story, not even Jesus’ story, can tell the whole Story. We need them all.

(Note: I am very encouraged by this last note, because there seems to be a movement among some evangelicals to hold the words of Jesus on one level and the rest of Scriptural revelation on a lower level. This can be seen in the "Red-Letter Christians" movement espoused by such evangelicals like Tony Campolo).

Why Wiki-Story?

Scot begins to look at the Bible as a “Wiki-Story,” a Spirit inspired Wiki-Story. This may cause you to shift uncomfortably in your seats a little. Most of us are familiar with Wikipedia. It is a collaborative, democratic, interactive, developing encyclopedia to which anyone in the world can make a contribution. Here is where Scot sees the connection between the Bible as Story and “wiki” type of applications, it is the ongoing reworking of the biblical Story by new authors so they can speak the old story in new ways for their day.

When we look at the major human authors in the Bible, each of these authors tells his version of the Story. They tell wiki-stories of the Story; they give interpretive retellings of the Story. Scot gives a great example of this. He looks at Matthew 4.1-11, his version of the temptations of Jesus. Far too often this story is read as a method for responding to temptations to sin, that is to quote the Bible at Satan. This makes sense and can be helpful, but it has nothing to with the text itself.

Scot sees this story as Jesus’ temptation by Satan the reliving of Israel’s wilderness testings. (Jesus is then recast as the second Moses leading his people to a new Promised Land, which fits perfectly into the theme of Matthew’s gospel). Matthew casts the story of Jesus’ temptations as an updated version, a wiki-story, of an older story – the wilderness story (although Scot does see the possibility that it could be Jesus reliving the Adam and Eve temptation in the Garden). Many NT specialists will tell you that nearly every page is a wiki-story on an Old Testament wiki-story.

Here is where Scot is up to this point:

• The Bible is a Story
• The Story is made up of a series of wiki-stories.
• The wiki-stories are held together by the Story.
• The only way to make sense of the blue parakeets in the Bible is to set each in the context of the Bible’s story.

None of the wiki-stories is comprehensive or exhaustive. Each of them tells a true story of that Story.

Thoughts on Cubes

I loved living in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The sports scene was fantastic (three Cowboys' Super Bowl victories while I was there). Another was Mark Cuban. If you are and outsider, you probably hate him, but as a Maverick fan, I thought he was great. You would have to research and see where the Mavs were in the early 90s (they won 14 games one year). Anyway, he had some financial advice for the current crisis:

If you have less than $100,000 in your bank, you’re safe. If you have “investment money”, put it in a low-risk Money Market Fund with a guaranteed return.

“Take your two percent and sleep well,” he said. “This is the time to be safe and wait it out.”

Dallas Observer columnist Richie Whitt notes: Just shows you how surreal Cuban’s life is. While the rest of us are ransacking seat cushions and ash trays for enough coins to pay our light bill, he’s got $1 billion burning a hole in his pocket to spend on a baseball team.

Joked Cuban of the slow-moving sale of the Cubs, “I always thought if I wanted to spend $1 billion I’d be able to.