Despite the title of his article (“Why Pentecostals Read their Bibles Poorly—and Some Suggested Cures,” JEPTA 24 [2004]: 4–15), Gordon D. Fee addresses readers of Scripture from several traditions of Christianity (liturgical, nondenominational, Pentecostal, evangelical, etc.). Focusing on his treatment of the effective reading of Scripture with a renewed mind and heart, make two observations about his recommended interpretive concepts and statements about reading strategies summarized below:
Interpretive Concepts
Statements about Reading Strategies
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Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and
Some Suggested cures
Gordon D. Fee
To cite this article: Gordon D. Fee (2004) Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some
Suggested cures, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, 24:1, 4-15, DOI:
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Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly
– and Some Suggested cures1
Gordon D. Fee
I begin this lecture with an apology for offering something a bit more
popular in this session.’ But I do not apologize for its content. Here I
address a deep concern that has grown on me over many years; indeed, in
some ways it sums up one of the passions of my life, and that is to help the
people in the pew to become more literate biblically than has tended to be
the case since the burgeoning of the technological age in the latter half of
the twentieth century.
I begin with an anecdote. A few years ago, a popular columnist in the
Vancouver Sun wrote a piece bemoaning the fact that her teenage son had
to ask her the meaning of a simple biblical allusion. The allusion was to
the River Jordan in a current popular song. Her complaint was that in
giving up the Christian faith, as she and most of her acquaintances had,
they had also lost something dear regarding their Canadian heritage: a
language full of allusions to biblical people and events. A huge part of
Western culture was in the process of simply disappearing, she bemoaned.
But this’ complaint could also be echoed in the church as well. In the
language of the prophet, there is a dearth of knowledge in the land,
especially knowledge of Scripture. And while there are a lot of inter
–
related causes for this dearth, I will focus on just a few of them in this
lecture. First, and briefly, I want to examine some of the reasons why
Christians of all kinds read their Bibles poorly; second, I will point out
some of the results of this reality, and third, point toward some remedies.
‘ Gordon Fee is Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at Regent College,
Vancouver, Canada. This lecture was given at the 25th annual meeting of the European
Pentecostal Theological Association held at Nantwich, England, July 26-29, 2004.
The substance of this lecture (with “Evangelicals” in the title) was first offered at
Regent College in March, 2002, in conjunction with the appearing of How to Read the
Bible Book by Book As it turned out, it was also a plea for the kind of concerns that
went into How to Read the Bible For AN Its Worth. The lecture was reworked
considerably for presentation at the EP,TA conference, whose theme was “The Use of
the Bible among Pentecostals.” I have deliberately kept the basically oral format of the
lecture, and thus have chosen to avoid too many footnotes.
The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. xxnir, 2004
I. Some Reasons for Poor Reading
1. The first reason why most Christians read their Bibles poorly is endemic
to our present culture. The fact is that even though the computer has
increased the abundance of books by many-fold, we are in danger as a
culture of losing altogether the fine art of sustained reading.
We live in a time when our senses are being bombarded with constant
noise and entertainment. The stimulation from such an overload of our
senses, especially sight and sound, is having the dual effect of creating a
generation who are practically incapable of quiet in any form and who
therefore feel the need for constant external stimulation. Reading is now
accompanied by the blare of music, and the television has become
something of the monster that many predicted for it years ago: where
more sights and sounds bombard the senses in two minutes of commercials
than would have happened in a full half hour just a few decades ago.
Such over-stimulation of the senses is already having its impact on the
ability of people to engage in sustained reading even of a good novel –
how much more so of these ancient religious texts, whose culture is so
foreign to ours and whose narrative art was initially intended not for the
reader at all, but for the hearer, who in hearing these texts read over and
over again not only knew their content, but could repeat them often
verbatim with all the nuances and catchwords intact.
2. But our problems also stem from our varied forms of Christian religious
culture. On the one hand, those who were born and raised in more
liturgical contexts have very often never been taught that they should
actually read the Bible for themselves. So what they know comes from the
reading of the Biblical lections Sunday after Sunday. The result often is
that the Bible has a sense of “oldness” – like the stained glass windows
and often the architecture and liturgy itself – so that the idea of reading,
and understanding, such ancient texts in the contexts of one’s own
culturally modem home would never even occur to them.
Related to this is the very “ancient” feel there is to the way the Bible
comes to us. When people are told they should read their Bibles, their
instincts, correctly, are to begin with Genesis. But one does not get very
far into the narrative, chapter 4 to be exact, when the reader is confronted
by the very strange story about Cain and Abel. With absolutely no
explanation we are told that God looked approvingly on Abel’s sacrifice
and not Cain’s, and so Cain murdered him; and then, as if that were not
enough, the episode concludes with another strange thing – a genealogy
that focuses on the arrogance of an otherwise unknown man named
Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly –
and Some Suggested Cures
Lamech, and then returns to Adam and Eve having yet another son, since
their first son has been rejected by God and the second son -is dead. And
that is followed by another, much longer genealogy. This is not easy
reading, in the sense of normal, everyday stuff; and in many such cases
some help is needed for the modem person to navigate their way through
this tricky terrain.
Take, for example, the Book of Exodus. I will not ask how many of you
have sat down and read Exodus all the way through; but this absolutely
marvelous book has a way of turning off the modem reader, who is used to
something considerably different in a story line. One can usually get
through the first nineteen chapters easily enough, and then the Ten
Commandments; but after that you encounter the first considerable
collection of laws – and these especially have an ancient ring to them,
even more so when they are followed by seven chapters of detailed
instruction on constructing a tent for worship and sacrifice, which after a
brief respite of narrative (chs. 32-34), is followed by six final chapters in
which the whole thing is gone over once more in detail as they create the
tent and its hrnishings. I am prepared to argue with any Christian that this
is absolutely must stuff, which the Christian must know like the back of
hislher hand – but not for the reasons that are sometimes given, but
precisely because of how crucial this book is to the story of the Bible as a
whole. And with a little help one can learn how to read it well.
3. But the ancient feel of these texts is an obstacle for only some
Christians. On the other side is the more non-liturgical evangelical culture,
represented by such diverse groups as Pentecostals, Baptists, Holiness
groups, and endless non-aligned Independents, all of whom actually put a
great deal of emphasis on personal Bible reading. But this, too,
commendable as it is, often unwittingly promotes a kind of reading that is
absolutely foreign to the way people read almost anything else except the
newspaper, and is mostly foreign to the way the Bible itself is given to us.
Two practices, wonderful and commendable practices, tend to militate
against a truly knowledgeable reading of Scripture, so that most
evangelical Christians, including especially Pentecostals, the very people
who tend to read their Bibles the most, tend also to read them poorly. And
by that I mean, that even though they read them often, at the same time
Scripture is seldom read on its own terms, from the perspective of the
divinely inspired authors themselves.
Unfortunately, most of our poor reading stems from what is also the
Pentecostal’s great strength – the conviction that Scripture is God’s very
The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXIV, 2004
word, a word for the church for all times and climes, inspired by the Holy
Spirit for the church’s growth and life in the world. But our very habits
based on this conviction often militate against our reading the Bible with
minds renewed by the Holy Spirit so that we have a better sense of what
the Bible is, how it “works,” as it were, and how it should inform
everythmg about us: our theology, our worship, and our lives in their
totality – at home, in the world, at work and at leisure. Our habits,
therefore, which again I emphasize are commendable and should not
necessarily be abandoned by a more informed reading of Scripture, have
led us to two kinds of reading that tend to work against our reading with
understanding.
a. The first of these, what I call the non-contextual individualization of
verses – is exemplified for me by a phenomenon that I grew up with
known as the “promise box” – a collection of individual texts printed on
small cards that dutihlly found its way on our kitchen tables. The point of
the “promise box” was for us each to hear God speak a word to us for the
day, as a kind of constant reminder through the day of God’s constant
presence by his “promises.” This “promise box7′ view of the Bible was
greatly aided by the accidents of history, when a sixteenth century bishop
decided to divide the text into chapters and verses for easy and ready
access, and then in English the King James Version was actually published
so that every verse became a paragraph on its own! It is hard to imagine
anything more totally destructive to informed reading of Scripture than the
beloved KJV, which by the very way it was printed helped us to memorize
“verses” – as though God had given us the Bible that way – but at the
same time caused us to have little or no feeling for the actual sense units
with the biblical text itself.
Indeed, I remember well the difficulty I had even as a lad with picking out
Joshua 1:9, which (not surprisingly) did not start at the beginning, “Have I
not commanded thee?” but with what came next: “Be strong and of good
courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is
with thee whithersoever thou goest.” I remember when I later encountered
that text in its context in Joshua how strange it seemed that these words to
Israel’s military commander on the eve of the conquest of the Promised
Land should be applied personally and individually to my own life as a
boy at school. True, I needed all the courage I could muster as a
Pentecostal preacher’s kid in a secular school; but how, I wondered, did
these words in a very case specific point in history miraculously become a
word for me as I trundled off to school.
Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly –
and Some Suggested Cures
Now don’t get me wrong; it is not that I don’t believe that God can take
these words out of their original context and by the Holy Spirit cause us in
our circumstances to hear them as words for us.’ I do indeed believe that
that happens constantly for those who look to God’s Word to hear directly
from Him. But this practice, as much good as it may have engendered,
also fostered a view of Bible “reading,” which was not true reading. That
is, because we were reading the Bible for personal devotion, we read it in a
very fragmented way – a paragraph or chapter at a time, often without
connectedness, and therefore without trying to understand what is going
on, because we were basically looking for our “verse for the day.”
Thus our first problem was the failure to read the Bible wholistically, as
the grand narrative of God’s dealings with humankind, in order to recreate
human beings back into the divine image that was so besmirched by the
Fall.
b. And this leads to my second basic reason as to why, by and large,
Pentecostals – and most evangelicals – read their Bibles poorly, which
comes directly out of this first one. Because we tended to be looking for a
“word for the day,” we unwittingly did two things to the sacred text that
stand rather directly in opposition to the way God chose to give us his
word.
On the one hand, we fragmented it and atomized it, with hardly any sense
at all of its wholistic grandeur as God’s Story in which by grace he is
including us. At the same time, on the other hand, we thus also tended to
flatten everything. Because all Scripture is inspired of God, and because
Scripture came to us not the way it came to God’s people originally, as
organic wholes, but rather in small doses called “verses,” we tended to
read it all the same way: narrative, prophecy, epistle, gospel, the Law,
psalm, proverb, other poetry all functioned in basically the same way. And
only a good dose of common sense ever saved us from making the whole
Bible look foolish.
To put it bluntly, how odd of God to give us the Bible the way he did,
when he could much more conveniently – for our way of reading it –
have given it to us in the form of some 7000 propositions to be believed
and 700 imperatives to be obeyed, with a few anecdotes brought in at the
end so as to illustrate some of the propositions and imperatives. Why did
–
‘ It thus becomes for us a prophetic word, in which the Spirit uses the language of
Scripture to speak directly into our lives. But the help and power in this case comes
ffom the Spirit speaking prophetically, not from the meaning of Scripture itself.
The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXW, 2004
he not do it this way, if our way of reading it was the way the texts
themselves were intended to be read?
Why not simply shorten the process and be done forever with all those
genealogies, or sometimes puzzling stories, or prophetic oracles that are so
hard to read under any circumstances? Why not give us the Bible the way
we would prefer it, so that we can get on with reading it our way, and do
so much more conveniently? Fortunately, our view of Scripture as sacred
and divinely inspired kept us for the most part from actually repackaging it
to suit our own habits and preferences – with one outstanding negative
exception.
Unfortunately, several generations of Pentecostals grew up with one
scheme that tried to help them read the Bible wholistically, but which in
the end was an unmitigated disaster, namely Dispensationalism. The
problem in this case was with the scheme itself, which was driven by an
outside agenda that is not explicitly taught anywhere in the Bible itself.
Indeed, it is fair to say that without the scheme in hand, not one reader in
three million could ever possibly come to Dispensationalist conclusions.
The driving agenda, of course, was a (commendable) concern for the
Jewish people. The scheme was to divide biblical revelation into seven
dispensations – itself an unbiblical formula that no reader of the Bible
could ever have seen for oneself! The fonts was ultimately eschatological
– that is, that God would do at the end of time what failed to happen
within history. The invention had two parts to it. First, Darby discounted
New Testament revelation that made it clear that the promise to Abraham
was now being fulfilled,’ as Paul vehemently argues in Romans and
Galatians, that Jew and Gentile together form the one eschatological
people of ~ o d . ‘
That led, second, to the theory that God had two separate programs: one
for the Jew and the other for the church. And one was taught “the gap
theory,” that is, to read “gaps” into texts that clearly suggested otherwise,
‘ All one has to do is to read the literature and see how much of it is devoted to “getting
around” the plain meaning of NT texts that play the lie to the whole Dispensational
scheme.
In fact the whole of Romans is not primarily about “justification by faith,” but about
how Jew and Gentile together form the one eschatological people of God – and
justification by faith is way God chose to make this happen. After all, the whole
argument of Romans concludes in 155-13, where the promise that Gentiles would be
brought into the people of God has been fulfilled and thus with “one voice” Jew and
Gentile glorify God together.
— — -.
Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly –
and Some Suggested Cures
because only by this strategem could the theory be maintained. And this in
turn led to the invention of a “secret rapture” of the church, so that God
could rehun to his first program of gathering national Israel. And since
none of this is explicitly taught in Scripture itself, how could a reader come
by it without the outside grid?
But the damage had been done; and now the only “wholistic” reading of
the Bible that most Pentecostals ever did was on the basis of a scheme that
is not found in the texts themselves; and in the end it was .not truly
wholistic, since the texts were still read atomistically – taking texts out of
contexts to prove the pretext.
11. The (Negative) Results
That leads me, then, to say a few brief words about the negative results of
, these non-wholistic hnds of “reading” of the Bible, since I have already,
and will do so again, affirmed the positive side of things. But the negative
results are serious, so serious in fact that I have spent almost all my adult
life trying to help Christians read and study their Bibles in a way that is
much more in keeping with the way God gave these inspired texts in the
first place.
a. The first, and most obvious, result of reading the Bible poorly is our
tendency to have a tembly fragmented understanding of what it is all
about. We know some texts very well, and even where some of our
favorite passages can be found: Psalm 23, 1 Corinthians 13, for example.
Moreover, if we have been in church much of our lives we also have a
generally good sense that there are two parts, the first dealing with God’s
ancient people, Israel, and the second dealing with Christ and the church.
And we also have a good sense that these two parts are connected in some
very important way(s).
But if we were asked to tell how the basic story works out, or how any
given book – Hosea or Philippians, say – fits into the whole, we might
feel just a bit more intimidated. “Hosea? Let’s see, that’s a part of the Old
Testament isn’t it? Yeah, he’s one of the prophets. But I tried reading it
once, and I simply couldn’t follow the story line! When I finished I didn’t
have a clue where I had been or how I got there. So why read it that way,
since it simply turns out to be a waste of time?” And “Philippians? Oh
that’s all about ‘joy,’ and Paul’s saying ‘for me to live is Christ and to die
is gain’.” But “fit into the whole? What possibly do you mean by that?”
The result is that most Christians have some fairly good idea of the New
Testament, but except for the Psalms, a few scattered proverbs, and some
, . .
The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXIV, 2004
of the more memorable stories, the Old Testament remains a singular
mystery.
b. And this leads to the second unfortunate result: that we miss a great
deal of the New Testament itself because we are so poorly informed about
the Old. And the point to make here is that the first readers of these New
Testament documents, those whose heirs we have become, had a much
greater awareness of what was going on not simply because they were
written to them, in their language and culture, but because they were
biblically literate in ways that most contemporary Christians are not. The
result is that not only do we often not hear God’s word in the way they did,
but we miss very many significant aspects of the New Testament as a
result.
Most Christians have some sense that the New is related to the Old. How
could one not see that, given how often the Old is cited in the New, and
often in the language of “fulfillment.” But the New Testament writers do
far more than that. Just note the following realities:
(1). Most of the New Testament was written not to Jews who had
followed Jesus, but to Gentile converts, in a culture that was basically
illiterate, in the sense that only about seventeen or eighteen per cent of
the people could read or write.
(2). The only Bible these early Christians had was the Old Testament,
which of course was never called that, because they didn’t have a
New Testament. So what we have come to call the Old Testament
was simply referred to as “the Scriptures.”
(3). I remind you again that the culture did not have the same form of
media and literary blitzing that has become so common in the Western
world.
(4). The net result of these realities is that these people knew their Bibles
infinitely better than most of us do. Because most of them didn’t read,
they were read to; and also because they couldn’t read but were read
to, they had far better, sharper retention than we tend to have. And
that also means that they heard not only the Old Testament texts when
they were cited, but also when they were referred to more indirectly,
and sometimes when only the language was echoed.
Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly –
and Some Suggested Cures
And it is precisely at this point where all the reasons for and the results of
our poor reading of the Bible merge to make us far less knowledgeable
about the Bible than these earliest Gentile Christians were.
At this point, let me borrow an illustration from my former student and
now Regent colleague and friend, Rikk Watts. When he was a student at
Gordon-Conwell seminary, he was listening to a lecture in which the
phrase “fourscore and seven years ago” was used. Since Rikk was from
Australia, he hadn’t a clue as to either the what or the why of that “ancient
English” in a modem lecture in America. So he asked some classmates
afterward, “What happened 87 years ago?” to which they all drew blanks,
because they had not heard anything about 87 years ago. So when Rikk
reminded them of the lecturer’s actual language, “four score and seven
years ago,” the light dawned. “Oh,” they said, “those are the opening
words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and the lecturer was not talking
about something that happened 87 years ago, but was alluding to Lincoln’s
address and its significance for the point he wanted to make.”
My point is that there is hardly an American of my generation who would
not recognize those words and their source, and instinctively be able to fill
in all kinds of blanks both as to the historical setting and many of the
stirring words of the rest of that great speech as well; and one could do the
same in England with some of the (many) memorable words from Winston
Churchill’s wartime speeches; and even though, just as with Scripture,
such phrases can often have a life of their own, the fact remains that people
“schooled” on such great oratory will both recognize the language and
remember its original setting. And that, friends, is precisely how the early
Christians heard the Old Testament as it was alluded to and echoed in
hundreds of ways throughout the New Testament writings. So if we are
going to be better readers of the New Testament, we simply must become
better readers of the Old – and all of this because we believe that the
Biblical story is the single most important reality in our modem world.
III. Some Illustrations Toward Remedy
So let me conclude this lecture with some illustrations of this latter
concern, which hopefully will inspire even you who teach Bible and
theology in Pentecostal Bible colleges to set your own minds to the need to
become still better readers of Scripture – and to have a passion to teach a
newer generation, which tends to read both little and poorly, to read
Scripture as the matter of first importance, and as the proper entry point to
good study of Scripture and good preaching and teaching.
The first is taken from the well-known account in John 10, where Jesus,
speaking to the Pharisees (a point often unfortunately missed because of a
– .
The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXIV, 2004
disastrous chapter break at this point), refers to himself as the good
shepherd. Evidence that he is the true shepherd is found in three ways:
that his sheep know him and listen to his voice; that he lays down his life
for his sheep; and that he has other sheep to bring into the fold.
But this is not simply an illustration drawn from a pastoral analogy of a
shepherd with his sheep. With these words Jesus is offering himself to
Israel as the fulfillment of the promised great Davidic shepherd that is
found in Ezekiel 34. So first let’s take a brief look at Ezekiel, since this
prophetic book is so poorly known by Christians.
Ezekiel belonged to a priestly family who were among the first large wave
of exiles taken to Babylon by Nebachudnezzar in 598, some ten years
before the final siege in 588 that led to the total destruction of Jerusalem in
586 BC. Among that first wave were most of Jerusalem’s prominent
people, including King Jehoiachin and Ezekiel’s family. Five years later
and seven years before the actual fall of Jerusalem, when Ezekiel turned
thirty, the year that he would have entered the priesthood in Jerusalem,
Yahweh appears to him among the exiles in Babylon and commands him
to prophesy words of warning and hope to the exiles regarding the future
of Jerusalem and the greater final future of God’s people. And this
prophetic activity continued for a twenty-two year period both before and
after the fall of Jerusalem.
His book stands in sharp contrast to Isaiah and Jeremiah, in two significant
ways: (1) his oracles are all dated and all but one of them are in
chronological order; (2) his oracles are full of images of a most unusual
kind, that serve as the forerunner for later Jewish apocalyptic visions. The
collection is thus presented in three clear parts. Part 1 (chs. 1-24) is a
collection of the oracles that announce the coming destruction of
Jerusalem, a word that the exiles would not believe because they had come
to believe that Jerusalem was inviolable. Part 2 (chs. 25-32) presupposes
the fall of Jerusalem, and announces God’s judgments on the surrounding
nations as well, as a word of comfort to Israel that their God is the
sovereign God over the nations – despite the Fall of Jerusalem and the
present exile. Part 3 is where our text fits in. After an oracle in chapter 33
about Ezekiel’s own role in things, he receives a series of oracles which in
turn promise the restoration of all that had come to an end with the fall of
Jerusalem: the Davidic kingship (ch. 34), the land (35: 1-36: l5), Yahweh’s
honor by way of a new covenant (36:16-38), his people (ch. 37), his
sovereignty over the nations (chs. 38-39), and hls renewed presence among
the people through a restored.temple (chs. 40-48) – note especially how
the book ends, regarding Jerusalem, “The Lord is there!”
L d L , , , –
– .
Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly –
and Some Suggested Cures
This final series thus begins with our text (ch. 34), which promises the
restoration of the Davidic kingship under the figure of the king as shepherd
(for good reason, given who David himself was). So Yahweh promises
that he will again shepherd his people through another David, who will
stand in stark contrast to the former kings who caused the sheep to be
scattered. “I will save my flock,” say Yahweh, “and they will no longer be
plundered. . . . I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and
he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd.” It is not
possible that when Jesus spoke the words of John 10 to the Pharisees in
Jerusalem that they could have missed what he was saying. In direct
contrast to the “false shepherds” of 9:41, whom Jesus accuses of being
blind, who by claiming to see when they do not are thus guilty of sin, Jesus
announces that the true shepherd is not like them, a thief or robber, but is
the one whose voice the true sheep know. And so he goes on to claim to
be the messianic shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep and gathers
other sheep (thus fulfilling the promise to include the Gentiles). So clear is
this to the Pharisees and others that it leads to a head-on encounter some
time later at the Feast of Dedication.
And so it goes everywhere in the New Testament. Thus an informed
reading of the Bible will cause people to begin to look for the many ways
the whole is held together, that it is One Story, God’s Story, and that one
can make perfectly good sense of the whole in its present canonical
arrangement.
Look, for example at the well-known stories that begin Luke’s birth
narrative in Luke.
1. The story begins with a pious, barren women, Elizabeth, whose story is
told with echoes of the barren Hannah at the beginning of the story of
David, who gives birth to Samuel who will eventually anoint David; just as
the barren Elizabeth’s son John will anoint by baptism Mary’s greater
David, Jesus. Note especially how the story of John’s birth ends with
these words, “And the child grew and became strong in spirit,” and how
these words echo what is said of the young Samuel (1 Sam 2:26), that “the
boy Samuel continued to grow in stature and in favor with the Lord and
with people,” which is then echoed again of the boy Jesus in Luke 2:52.
And then as the story proceeds to Mary, she is told by the angel, that her
child “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord
God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the
house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.” Here you can
scarcely miss the echoes of the Davidic covenant from 2 Samuel 7:14 and
– – –
The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. X X N , 2004
16, about David’s son, that “I will be his father, and he will be my
son … and your house and kingdom shall endure for ever before me; your
throne will be established forever.” And then both Mary and Zechariah
break forth in songs that are simply full of messianic hopes that come
directly out of the Psalter. It is hard to miss any of this; yet ever so many
people do, and in so doing fail to catch the import of the story that Luke
himself intends it to carry.
And so I could go on and on. But interestingly, the most frequently asked
question I receive is this: Do you really think that these Gentiles would
have caught all these echoes? And my answer always is, “yes, of course,
because they knew their Bibles infinitely better than you and I do.”‘ And
this was the primary reasons for the two “How to” books. So that people
will learn to read their Bibles well and understand them better than they
do, and in so doing will begin to grasp how the biblical story holds
together from beginning to end, so that in knowing their Bibles better they
will also know better where they – and all of us – fit into God’s story.
‘ In the question time that followed, I was asked – legitimately so – whether what I
am suggesting would really have been true of early Gentile believers. My “of course”
answer to the question has to do with how I read Acts, where it is quite clear that, apart
from Athens, Paul’s strategy in the Gentile mission was to go the Jewish synagogues
and proclaim Christ as the fulfillment of prophetic hopes. Luke makes a considerable
point that two kinds of “less desirables” as far as Jewish culture was concerned –
Gentiles and women – simply flocked to the good news of Christ and the Spirit.
Hence, the original converts would all have come from a very biblically literate culture.
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