Divine Scripture in Human Understanding by Joseph K. Gordon;

Author:Joseph K. Gordon; [Gordon;, Joseph K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780268105198
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2019-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Christian scriptures find their center in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and serve as prophetic and apostolic testimony to the work that he has done in history in his incarnation, teaching, death, resurrection, ascension, and continued presence in the church through the Holy Spirit. The actual work of articulating precisely how the Christian scriptures generally, in all their historical variegation and internal diversity, both have mediated and can continue to mediate the entry of the divine meaning of the Triune God into history in the incarnation of the Son of God remains beyond the scope of the present work.148 In a sense, the absolutely transcendent object of Scripture makes its comprehensive understanding infinitely beyond the scope of any work. It is a matter of faith and existential commitment to adopt the position of the current work. As Frederick Crowe puts it succinctly, “The Scriptures, even when they are badly translated, even when they are read with ignorance of the biblical mentality, may still mediate to us the Lord Jesus and the saving facts of his life, death, and resurrection.”149 The judgment that Scripture is authored by the Spirit of God and is useful for instructing us concerning Christ’s work, precisely in the diversity of its material instantiations and the diversity of its internal witness, is a judgment of Christian faith that is not justifiable under any secular criteria of rationality. Still, though, as Joseph Lienhard has written, “there are some sorts of knowledge that can only follow commitment, love, and risk.”150

Because the meaning that Scripture mediates is the fullness of God’s self-revelation in the Son of God, our understanding of it, because its object is the Triune God, will never be complete this side of the eschatological consummation of God’s recapitulation of all things in Jesus Christ. The entire task of understanding remains ever before us, and all attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and ultimately loving engagement with Scripture will bear fruit in us. But for now we will continue to “see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” To paraphrase the apostle Paul, in this life we know only in part; then we will know fully, even as we have been fully known (1 Cor 13.12). While I have already addressed the purpose or telos of Scripture in brief a number of times above, it is finally necessary to write more about the specific functions of Christian Scripture in the economic work of the Triune God on the way towards seeing God face-to-face.

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