Life is Shaped by Story

All of human life is shaped by some story. A. MacIntyre offers an amusing story to show how particular events receive their meaning in the context of a story (cf. After Virtue [Notre Dame Press, 1984] 210). He imagines himself at a bus stop when a young man standing next to him says, “The name of the common wild duck is histrionicus, histrionicus, histrionicus.” One understands the meaning of the sentence. But why on earth is he saying it in the first place? This particular action can only be understood if it is placed in a broader framework of meaning, a story that renders the saying comprehensible. Three stories could make this particular incident meaningful. The young man has mistaken the man standing next to him for another person he saw yesterday in the library who asked, “Do you by any chance know the Latin name of the common duck?” Or he has just come from a session with his psychotherapist who is helping him deal with his painful shyness. The psychotherapist urges him to talk to strangers. The young man asks, “What shall I say?” The psychotherapist says, “Oh, anything at all.” Or again he is a spy who has arranged to meet his contact at this bus stop. The code that will reveal his identity is the statement about the Latin name of the duck. The meaning of the encounter at the bus stop depends on which story shapes it; in fact, each story will give the event a different meaning.

Likewise with our lives, “The way we understand human life depends on what conception we have of the human story. What is the real story of which my life story is a part” (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society [Eerdmans, 1989] 15). What L. Newbigin is referring to here is not a linguistically constructed narrative world that we fabricate to give meaning to our lives, but an interpretation of cosmic history that gives meaning to human life. N. T. Wright says that a story is “the best way of talking about the way the world actually is” (The New Testament and the People of God [SPCK, 1992] 40).

For those of us living in the West, basically two stories are on offer: the biblical and the humanist. As Newbigin points out: “In our contemporary culture . . . two quite different stories are told. One is the story of evolution, of the development of species through the survival of the strong, and the story of the rise of civilization, our type of civilization, and its success in giving humankind mastery of nature. The other story is the one embodied in the Bible, the story of creation and fall, of God’s election of a people to be the bearers of his purpose for humankind, and of the coming of the one in whom that purpose is to be fulfilled. These are two different and incompatible stories” (15-16). Read more.

Michael W. Goheen, Reading the Bible as One Story, Catalyst 33.3 (March 2007).

Video of two conference lectures, "Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story," given by Dr. Goheen, September 2006 (in Real Audio format): Lecture 1, Lecture 2  More on Mike's book The Drama of Scripture is found below.

In lecture 2 Mike refers to "the Contemporary Testimony" from the Christian Reformed Church entitled "Our World Belongs to God" 

The Bible as a Whole is Best Read as a Narrative

"The Bible is fundamentally a story. While is does contain a wide range of other genres, including poems, laws, prophecies, lyrics, proverbs, letters, apocalypses, and more, at base the Bible is a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end."

John Stackhouse, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 181. Amazon

"So I invite you to read the Bible, not for bits and pieces of dry information, but as the story of God’s embrace of the world told in poetic images and types.”

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 128.

"Nothing comes to us apart from the form. The Bible, the entire Bible, is 'relentlessly narratival.' And we cannot change or discard the form without changing or distorting the content... The way the Bible is written is every bit as important as what is written in it: narrative--this huge, capacious story that pulls us into its plot and shows us our place in its development from beginning to ending. It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible."

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 47-48. Amazon. See also Peterson's "Living into God's Story"

“The biblical gospel is not a collection of timeless statements such as God is love. It is a narrative about things God has done."

John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, Volume 1: Israel’s Gospel (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 31. See OT Resources

Consider what it means to get to know a person. One can read an account of his character and career such as might be embodied in an obituary notice. But in order to know the person one must see how she meets situations, relates to other people, acts in time of crisis and in times of peace. It is in narrative that character is revealed, and there is no substitute for this.  

If we follow these suggestions we get a picture of the Christian life as one in which we live in the biblical story as part of the community whose story it is, find in the story the clues to knowing God as his character becomes manifest in the story, and from within that indwelling try to understand and cope with the events of our time and the world about us and so carry the story forward.

Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 99. Amazon

I lived and taught in India for a number of years. On one occasion I was teaching a seminar over a weekend for Christian professionals in Andhra Pradesh, on one of my favorite themes--the ethical teaching of the Old Testament and how it applies to Christian living today.  After the first session a man came to speak to me, his eyes gleaming. ''I'm so glad you are teaching us from the Old Testament," he said, "for I became a Christian through reading the Old Testament." Now you don't often hear that, as an Old Testament teacher, so I asked him to tell me his story.

He was then a lecturer in engineering at the local university. But he had grown up among the despised Dalit (outcaste) community in his vil­lage, and his whole family had suffered greatly at the hands of the high­-caste Hindus in the village—all kinds of harassment, violence and injus­tice. He had a great thirst for revenge, and so he worked very hard at school, to get to university, so that he could get a job with some influence and power, and then turn the tables on his enemies. That, he said, was his deliberate intention.

The day he arrived at the university, he found a Bible on his bed in his room in the student hostel. It was in Telugu (his state language), and it had been left there by some Christian students of the Union of Evangel­ical Students of India. He had never read one before, though he knew that it was the Christians' holy book. He opened it at random and started reading the story of Naboth and Ahab in 1 Kings 21. He was amazed. The story had so many familiar elements. "This was my story," he said. His family had also experienced theft of land, false accusations, murders, the brutality of the powerful against the ordinary people.

But then he read on and was amazed to read about another man called Elijah, who, in the name of some God called Yahweh (or whatever the translation of the personal name of the God of Old Testament Israel is in the Telugu Bible), denounced King Ahab, and said that he would be judged and punished by this God. This was astounding, my friend said. Here was a god who took the side of the suffering ones and condemned the government and the powerful for their wicked deeds. "I never knew such a god existed" were his exact words to me, which I have never forgotten.

My friend had millions of gods within Hinduism to choose from. He knew the names of many gods. But he had never heard of such a god as he was reading about in this Bible. Here was a god quite unlike anything he had met before in his own religion.

So he went back to the beginning of the book and started reading the Bible through from Genesis. He grew even more amazed. "This god thinks of everything!" he said, as he read through the laws of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. He was impressed by the character of the God of Israel, with his concern for the poor and needy, his passion for justice, and so on. Exactly the kind of god he was looking for in his own thirst for justice.

When he reached Isaiah and started to read of the love of God (in Is 43, for example), he was not so pleased, he told me, for he wanted a god who would give him vengeance on his oppressors, not love them! How­ever, just about that time, the Christian students visited him, and like Philip in Acts 8, led him from the text of Isaiah to Jesus, and eventually led him to faith and conversion.

What struck me in this man's testimony was this. It was precisely the story of the Old Testament that demonstrated the identity of the God of the Bible. Furthermore, he found great surprise, but also great reassur­ance, in aspects of the identity and character of the Old Testament God that some Christians find disturbing. But essentially he found salvation not because he found "a god" (for he had plenty of gods already), but be­cause he learned the true identity of the true and living God, through his encounter with the text of the Bible.

Christopher J. H. Wright, Salvation Belongs to Our God: Celebrating the Bible's Central Story (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2007), 47-49.  Amazon

To Play our Role in God’s World We Need to Know the Story...

               ...and Where We Fit In

Making Meaning

To put it another way, if there is no point in the story as a whole, there is no point in my own action. If the story is meaningless, any action of mine is meaningless.  ...so the answer to the question "Who am I?" can only be given if we ask "What is my story?" and that can only be answered if there is an answer to the further question, "What is the whole story of which my story is a part?" To indwell the Bible is to live with an answer to those questions, to know who I am and who is the One to whom I am finally accountable.

Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 100.  Amazon

Finding Our Place on the Map

We cannot determine how God would have us live unless we understand where in the story we find ourselves, or, to switch metaphors, where on the map we stand.

We will understand and live out our ethos best if we understand where we are in the great narrative of the Bible and thus understand our parts in God's plan. In the early days of shopping malls, painted plywood signs were located at each entrance to guide shoppers to their desired destinations. Invariably, however, some unhelpful youngster would soon scrape off a crucial datum on that map: the circular Day-Glo orange sticker that told a shopper, "You are here." Without this crucial orientation, the rest of the map was virtually useless, open to a wide range of misinterpretations and thus misguided shoppers. Fundamental errors in Christian ethics, likewise, have been made by failing to take seriously the narrative shape of the Christian scheme of things, and also by failing to locate oneself properly within that story. We need to comprehend our context as a condition for deciding properly about how to act in this context.

John Stackhouse, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 182. Amazon

Inscribing Ourselves into God's Story

Knowing the story of God in the world is crucial if we are to participate in its ongoing expression in our own day, or, as Joel Green explains, to inscribe ourselves in the story. He writes:

Tales of suspense and mystery often move their readers to a heightened sense of anticipation by withholding what will happen. Even as the last chapter is begun, readers are often able to visualize multiple paths to the resolution of the plot. This is not the case with the narrative of Scripture. In Scripture, what will happen in the end is not hidden. The narrative world cast in Scripture is comprehensive in its grasp of history, holding in one hand creation and in the other new creation. Creation, fall, the covenant with Noah, divine election of Israel, exile and promise, the advent of Jesus Christ, the outpouring of the Spirit, the ongoing formation and mission of God’s people—all of these are central features of this narrative, and all are oriented toward the final resolution of God’s purpose in the eschaton, the End. In the narrative of Scripture, we know what will happen in the End ("We have read the last chapter"), but this does not neuter this narrative of any sense of drama or suspense. Questions remain. In particular, still being written is the narrative of how God’s purpose will come to fruition; the question remains, Who will serve this purpose, and who will oppose it?

To put this somewhat differently, we find in narrative the possibility and power of participation. The narrative of Scripture projects itself beyond the pages of the New Testament, with the expectation of its continuing to be written as the ongoing history of God’s people, “until kingdom come.” On the one hand, this helps to locate the importance of the church, its life and mission, within the work of God, which is prior to the Scriptures but which is articulated and exhibited in its pages, and which is served among the people of God in the world beyond the apostolic period sketched in the New Testament.

The story of God is still being written. Our present is given meaning by the past work of God, and God’s future casts its beacon backward so as to remind us how our present life and witness have consequences into eternity.  On the other hand, this perspective presses the importance of the church’s coherence with the biblical drama, its mandate to continue this particular narrative in particular ways. It is, after all, the story of God, not our story. With so many chapters having already been written, and with the final chapter already firmly in place, the options for intervening material are limited, if we are to continue this story. Accordingly, our task is to align ourselves with these landmarks on the biblical terrain—or, better, to write ourselves, to inscribe ourselves, into the biblical narrative, so that our sense of past, present, and future is congruous with the story of the universe found in Scripture. Christian faith is lived at the confluence of personal, ecclesial, and biblical narrative.

Joel Green in Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching: Reuniting New Testament Interpretation and Proclamation, editors Joel B. Green and Michael Pasquarello III (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 32-33. Amazon

Living within the Unfolding Drama

We need to know where the story has been and where it is going if we are properly to play out our roles. An analogy from British New Testament scholar Tom Wright is helpful here. The story is likened to a grand Drama. It moves from creation’s harmony (Act 1), to the disruption wrought by the fall (Act 2), through the dynamics of restoration including Abraham and ancient Israel (Act 3), and Jesus' life, death, and resurrection (Act 4), to the era of the Spirit and the church (Act 5), and on finally to the Consummation (Act 6), when all will be set right in the new heavens and the new earth. I have added a couple comments in brackets to distinguish Act 5, this era "between the Advents" in which we live, and Act 6, when the Lord "makes everything new." 

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost.  The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.  Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.  Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result.  The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand.  That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.  This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.  It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

This model could and perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities.  Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus.  The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end [perhaps as Act 6].  The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act [or the fifth of six acts].  Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.  Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.  Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required.

Excerpted from N. T. Wright, “How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?”Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7–32; italics original.

Improvising in Harmony with the Ongoing Musical Performance

The notion of "improvising" is important, but sometimes misunderstood. As all musicians know, improvisation does not at all mean a free-for-all where "anything goes," but precisely a disciplined and careful listening to all the other voices around us, and a constant attention to the themes, rhythms and harmonies of the complete performance so far, the performance which we are now called to continue. At the same time, of course, it invites us, while being fully obedient to the music so far, and fully attentive to the voices around us, to explore fresh expressions, provided they will eventually lead to that ultimate resolution which appears in the New Testament as the goal, the full and complete new creation which was gloriously anticipated in Jesus' resurrection. The music so far, the voices around us, and the ultimate multi-part harmony of God's new world: these, taken together, form the parameters for appropriate improvisation in the reading of scripture and the announcement and living out of the gospel it contains. All Christians, all churches, are free to improvise their own variations designed to take the music forward. No Christian, no church, is free to play out of tune.

N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005),126-127. Amazon. 

Tracing the Contours of the Bible's Unfolding Story

Below are examples of how several thoughtful authors sketch out the main contours of the Bible when read as Story--God's, our world's, and ours.

Mars Hills Church (Grandville, MI)

Here's the opening of their articulation of the story of God and his world:

In the beginning God created all things good. He was and always will be in a communal relationship with himself – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God created us to be relational as well and marked us with an identity as his image bearers and a missional calling to serve, care for, and cultivate the earth. God created humans in his image to live in fellowship with him, one another, our inner self, and creation. The enemy tempted the first humans, and darkness and evil entered the story through human sin and are now a part of the world. This devastating event resulted in our relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation being fractured and in desperate need of redeeming.

We believe God did not abandon his creation to destruction and decay; rather he promised to restore this broken world. As part of this purpose, God chose a people, Abraham and his descendants to represent him in the world. God promised to bless them as a nation so that through them all nations would be blessed...

 

Read the full essay

Gordon D. Fee & Douglas Stuart

How to Read the Bible Book by Book: A Guided Tour (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), pp. 14-20. Amazon.

Fee (PhD, University of Southern California), Professor Emeritus of New Testament (NT) Studies at Regent College, Vancouver, BC, is the author of numerous commentaries on Paul’s letters as well as works on biblical interpretation. Stuart (PhD, Harvard University), is professor of Old Testament (OT) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and senior pastor of First Church Congregational of Boxford, Massachusetts.

“Like an experienced tour guide, [this book] takes you by the hand and walks you through the Scriptures. For each book of the Bible, the authors start with a quick snapshot, then expand the view to help you better understand its key elements and how it fits into the grand narrative of the Bible. Written by two top evangelical scholars, this survey is designed to get you actually reading the Bible knowledgeably and understanding it accurately.”

Here's how they open their introduction:

When the authors were boys growing up in Christian homes, one of the ways we—and our friends—were exposed to the Bible was through the daily reading of a biblical text from the Promise Box, which dutifully found its way onto our kitchen tables. Furthermore, most believers of our generation—and of several preceding ones—had learned a kind of devotional reading of the Bible that emphasized reading it only in parts and pieces, looking for a “word for the day."

While the thought behind these approaches to Scripture was salutary enough (constant exposure to the sure promises of God’s Word), they also had their downside, teaching people to read texts in a way that disconnected them from the grand story of the Bible.

The concern of this book is to help you read the Bible as a whole, and even when the “whole” is narrowed to “whole books,” it is important for you always to be aware of how each book fits into the larger story. But in order to do this, you need first to have a sense of what the grand story is all about. That is what this introduction proposes to do.

First, let’s be clear: The Bible is not merely some divine guidebook, nor is it a mine of propositions to be believed or a long list of commands to be obeyed. True, one does receive plenty of guidance from it, and it does indeed contain plenty of true propositions and divine directives. But the Bible is infinitely more than that.

It is no accident that the Bible comes to us primarily by way of narrative—but not just any narrative. Here we have the grandest narrative of all—God’s own story. That is, it does not purport to be just one more story of humankind’s search for God. No, this is God’s story, the account of his search for us, a story essentially told in four chapters: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. In this story, God is the divine protagonist, Satan the antagonist, God’s people the agonists (although too often also the antagonists), with redemption and reconciliation as the plot resolution... Read more.

Brian D. McLaren

The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 198 pages. Amazon.com

McLaren is an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative 'emerging' Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists. He is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs. He has appeared on many broadcasts including Larry King Live, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and Nightline. His work has also been covered in Time (where he was listed as one of American's 25 most influential evangelicals), Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, and many other print media. His web page.

In this book McLaren tells the story of Scripture in the midst of a contemporary fiction of a pastor’s challenging engagement with postmodern culture and strands of postconservative evangelical theology. Read more.

Brian structures his retelling of the biblical drama using these principal headings: Creation, Crisis, Calling, Conversation, Christ, Community, Consummation. One community of faith in Southern California has taken Brian's outline and built a 5-part teaching series around it, looking at what God has really been doing on the earth and our part in it. They call it, appropriately, God's Story. 

Scot McKnight

The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008). Zondervan   Amazon

McKnight (PhD, University of Nottingham) is a widely-recognized authority on the New Testament, early Christianity, and the historical Jesus. Scot currently teaches Religious Studies to undergraduates at North Park University in Chicago, and maintains an award-winning weblog. He is known for his gifted writing for both academic and popular audiences. Here are fuller biosketches from his blog and from wikipedia.

The Blue Parakeet is Scot's deeply reasoned, compelling statement of how to read the Bible in a new evangelical generation. What does it mean to speak of reading the Bible as Story, of learning to “listen” to the Bible, and of how to discern a pattern for living today?

In addition to exposing less helpful ways of reading the Bible, Scot will explore the main movements of the biblical plot that he has sketched out briefly in prior publications, like Embracing Grace: A Gospel for All of Us (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2005). Our "small group" discussion notes of this paperback are posted here. The story begins with the creation of humanity in God's image (what Scot calls 'Eikons'), then quickly recounts the 'cracking' of Eikons, followed by their partial recovery in covenant community, a recovery which advances significantly with their re-creation in Christ, the perfect Eikon. Our place in the plot is found here, between the coming of Christ and the final consummation that awaits us in the new creation. 

 

Review: Brandon O'Brien, assistant editor of Leadership magazine, posts his reviews on their blog: Part 1 and Part 2.

Philip Greenslade

A Passion for God’s Story: Discovering Your Place in God’s Strategic Plan (Cumbria, UK: Paternoster Press, 2002), 267 pages. Amazon.com  For an excerpt on "Flexible Sovereignty," see our OT Staring Points

Greenslade has been working with Crusade for World Religion (CWR) since 1991. As well as being a full-time lecturer and tutor, he is also the Consultant Editor of ‘Bread for the Journey’ pastor’s journal, and, with Selwyn Hughes, a teacher on the Institute of Christian Ministry.

This book presents a vision of God's big story. This accessible survey introduces the Bible as a whole and shows how the important pieces of the biblical narrative fit together in their right context and perspective. The Bible tells the story in the broadest way, implementing Gods kingdom rule in history through a series of covenantal arrangements all in pursuit of a coherent redemptive plan the ultimate goal of which is new creation.

When asked, “Why read the Bible at all?” Greenslade replies: 

Because as you read you discover God’s Story. Jesus proved with His parables that there’s no better way to communicate God than through stories. This is what the Bible essentially is – a thrilling, action-packed adventure with God, one in which we can play a part. It is not a pick-and-mix catalogue of religious goodies or spiritual recipes. It is not an occult code to be deciphered by 'experts'. And the Bible is most definitely not a compendium of texts which we can use to buttress our own theological position.

Under pressure to 'make the Bible relevant”, too often we trivialize or water down its message, reducing its impact to slogans and soundbites. We can end up draining the Bible of its colour. We squeeze the life out of it and render it a “flat” book, a bland moral mandate with passionless principles. But this is not the way the Bible came to us.

It came as a story – a vast, sprawling, untidy, story, but a story nonetheless. It’s not always the easiest book to read, but it is the most rewarding and enriching. For the rest of the essay.

Craig Bartholomew & Michael Goheen

The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 252 pages. Amazon.com

The authors, both Professors at Redeemer University College, Ontario, provide an engaging overview of the story line and theology of the Bible. As the authors suggest in their introduction, it is only as we read and appropriate the Bible ‘as our story’ that we fully understand it and allow it to have authority over us. As we enter into the story of the Bible, we find God revealed there and are called to participate in his continuing activity. The biblical story, then, is foundational to Christian thinking and living.

Working from this perspective, the authors survey the story in Scripture. Their work is part introduction, part commentary, part theology, and thoroughly engaging. They suggest two over-arching themes running throughout the story--"covenant" in the Old Testament and "the kingdom of God" in the New Testament. These two themes effectively summarize the activity of God throughout human history. They are ways of looking at the story in order to gain an understanding of God's purposes and to let them claim us.

Bartholomew and Goheen work their way through the Bible as a drama with six acts--creation, sin, Israel, Jesus, mission, and new creation. Their study provides an introduction to the Bible and a commentary on important passages, but it is more than that. It is also a theological reflection on the ongoing story and a call for participation in God's grand narrative. It will be a useful work for students who study Scripture and a helpful resource for pastors and teachers looking for assistance in developing a compelling presentation of the biblical story.

Here's the preface. For more info on this book, check out the authors' webpage here.

Here's a brief summary of the story line they develop in the book.

Video of two conference lectures given by Dr. Goheen, September 2006 (in Real Audio format): Lecture 1, Lecture 2

In lecture 2 Mike refers to "the Contemporary Testimony" from the Christian Reformed Church entitled "Our World Belongs to God" 

Christopher J. H. Wright

The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative(Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 582 pages. Amazon.com

Wright (PhD, Cambridge), former professor and dean of All Nations Christian College (England), is the Director of Langham Partnership’s International. More on Chris.

The Mission of God was the winner of the 2007 Christianity Today Missions/Global Affairs Book of the Year.

Most Christians would agree that the Bible provides a basis for mission. But Christopher Wright boldly maintains that mission is bigger than that there is in fact a missional basis for the Bible! The entire Bible is generated by and is all about God's mission.

Beginning with the Old Testament and the groundwork it lays for understanding who God is, what he has called his people to be and do, and how the nations fit into God's mission, Wright gives us a new hermeneutical perspective on Scripture. This new perspective provides a solid and expansive basis for holistic mission. Wright emphasizes throughout a holistic mission as the proper shape of Christian mission. God's mission is to reclaim the world and that includes the created order and God's people have a designated role to play in that mission.

For the Table of Contents and Endorsements, see the publisher's site IVP. For an excerpt from the book on the holistic nature of our mission with God, see this pdf:  Wright, Chris. Holistic Mission. 2006.pdf