Reading the Bible Missionally by Goheen Michael;

Author:Goheen, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

A Missional Reading of the New Testament

CHAPTER 9

Reading the New Testament Missionally

N. T. Wright

When I was a young scholar, the big books in my discipline were New Testament theologies. They were being written in Germany by Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Conzelmann, and others, and in America by people like George Eldon Ladd. I went to Jerusalem on sabbatical in 1989 with the aim of writing what eventually turned into the Christian Origins and the Question of God series. At the time, I thought I was going to write a book on Jesus and a book on Paul and that these would form the heart of a “New Testament theology.” But as I began writing about Jesus, twenty-six years ago, I quickly became aware that what people had done in New Testament theology did not align with what I was finding in the New Testament itself. New Testament theologies were basically arranging and rearranging the various theological ideas that the New Testament writers had expressed, argued out, and so on. It was as though the whole task of a New Testament scholar was to produce a beautiful synthesis of these theological ideas and to see the coherence in their relationships to one another, either for enjoyment or as a resource for our preaching. Now, some years on, I do not believe the New Testament was written in order to give people a coherent set of ideas. It does that, but not as its main purpose. Rather, the New Testament was written in order to sustain and direct the missional life of the early church.

The early church was conscious of being (and the writers of the New Testament wanted them to be conscious of being) a people through whom the love and power and new creational energy of the one God of Jewish monotheism had been let loose on the world. These writings were meant to guide and sustain, to direct and energize—to shape the early church, and to warn it about possible wrong paths. To put it basically: the purpose of the New Testament emerges from the entire missional agenda of the early church.

In Scripture and the Authority of God I sought to understand the great narrative of Scripture and to show that, after that narrative has reached its wonderful and shocking climax in Jesus by the Spirit, the very people reading the New Testament are supposed to be the ones who carry this story forward. The great story, reading at a run from Genesis to Revelation, can be told in terms of the vocation of Abraham’s family to be “the light to the nations,” the people through whom the creator God would bless the whole world. Certainly this is how the early Christians understood their place in God’s plan: now that Jesus had summed up Israel’s vocation in himself and had poured out his own Spirit on his people, it was not only time for the world to be brought under God’s wise, loving rule, but there was also the fresh, healing energy by which to do it.

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