Excerpt from Pages 42-43: “Jesus thus does, climactically and decisively, what Scripture had in a sense been trying to do: bring God’s fresh Kingdom-order to God’s people and thence to the world. He is, in that sense as well as others, the Word made flesh. Who he was and is, and what he accomplished, are to be understood in the light of what scripture had said. He was, in himself, the ‘true Israel,’ formed by scripture, bringing the kingdom to birth. When he spoke of the scripture needing to be fulfilled (e.g. Mark 14:49), he was not simply envisaging himself doing a few scattered and random acts which corresponded to various distant and detached prophetic sayings; he was thinking of the entire storyline at last coming to fruition, and of an entire world of hints and shadows now coming to plain statement and full light. This, I take it, is the deep meaning of sayings like Matthew 5:17-18, where Jesus insists that he has come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”
N.T. Wright concisely sums up what the phrase “authority of scripture” (or God’s authority exercised through scripture, an aside which he notes more than a few times) means and how that is to be lived out by the church today. The subtitle to the book is “how to read the bible today” and his answer to this is that the scriptures are not to be read as simply timeless truths or irrelevant out-of-date material but is best understood when read precisely as story. He sets out what he dubs the “five act model” for understanding the narrative of scripture proclaiming that we, in the fifth act, are directly associated and shaped by the previous four acts which bear upon the church’s kingdom centered mission today as God’s vessel for instituting his kingdom here on earth in this very moment.
“The shorthand phrase ‘the authority of scripture,’ when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community.”
“Scripture and the Authority of God” – Is the breaking in of God’s kingdom” it is just that , by reading the scriptures as an end time story with Jesus being the Beginning and the end of a New Age where by Creation recognizes Him as the Temple, Jubilee and Sabbath Rest. Christian keeping with the continuity of a renewal of a “new covenant.” Jesus the new Temple where Heaven and earth meet. He mentions in the last chapter of the book the renewal and restoration of a monogamous marriage (the lifelong marriage between one man and one woman “) within the renewal of creation through Jesus Christ. I thought this part was pretty cool.
“Monogamy is a pointer to one of today’s urgently needed cosmic truths: the Creator’s purpose is not to split heaven and earth apart, but rather to bring them together in a costly but wonderfully enriching unity Eph. 1:10 that purpose, already realized in Jesus Christ, is signaled, embodied, and advanced in the monogamous marriage.
Wow! Loved it…there is oh so much more in this book that you would love.
I will read this one again!!
As a fan of Dr. Wright, it is difficult to not simply gush out fountains of praise for yet another masterful work, so brevity will be necessary.
This book is an update on Wright’s work entitled “The Last Word,” with revisions and additional material. Having read “The Last Word,” this re-reading was equally beneficial, serving up the reminder, above all, that the Scriptures reveal God’s authority, and receive their authority from God. Though the Scriptures reveal a measure of God to us, we must not allow ourselves to bracket God by those Scriptures that reveal Him. Doing so runs the risk of placing Scripture above God, and giving the Bible itself authority above the God from whence its authoritative pronouncements concerning Him and His purposes are derived.
This is the fourth volume in a line of works that began with Simply Christian, was followed by Surprised By Hope and After You Believe. It fits quite well and serves something of an underlining purpose when it comes to those books.
As usual, this is a highly recommended book, as is the case with most anything that falls from the pen of this gifted scholar and devoted man of God.
The book “Scripture and the Authority of God” is a book describing on how to read the bible, also the book explains how the scriptures in the bible, is basically the written authority of God. The author N. T. Wright goes through an eight step process explaining on how we should read and understand the bible, with the last two chapters being a case study on sabbath and monogamy. Bishop Wright does this to apply his technique to show us how the process works. N. T. Wright’s purpose of this book is to renew confidence in the bible so that we may no longer have doubts and confusions.