Thiese posts have had to do with the evangelical treatment of Scripture. Largely from my perspective and with the obvious help of NT Wright’s Last Word, we as individuals and as a community have not only regulated the Bible to something less than it is, but even then left it on the shelf with the diet plan and finance management books. We may have a faulty pre-supposition that the Bible is the “ultimate self-help” book or the “greatest how-to” manual. It isn’t. Believing such a thing ridicules the beauty of grace and of course, reduces the person of God as a guru-helper, or a even a product offering enhancement, and Christianity as a spiritual pyramid scheme as opposed to the process of transformation being brought on the Holy Spirit.

When we reduce the Scriptures and our understanding of God to the sentiments aforementioned, we actually destroy our belief in Him and make a mockery of the Scriptures whether we realize it or not. Even worse, we elevate our human experience as divine and which in sort becomes our attempt to be the gods. As it turns out, the Bible is not just about us.

However, the Bible is not exclusively about God either. This is among the points that Wright is saying in The Last Word. It’s about us being led by the Spirit to bring glory to the Father because of he work of Jesus. And the Bible is a crucial piece for the Church:

“…the authority of ‘scripture’ is most truly put into operation as the church goes to work in the world on behalf of the gospel, the good news that in Jesus Christ the living God has defeated the powers of evil and begun the work of new creation. It is with the bible in its hand, its head and its heart—not merely with the newspaper and the latest political fashion or scheme— that the church can go to work in the world, confident that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not.”

God is the Giver, Redeemer, Sustainer of life. The Bible is God’s invitational narrative to participate in life in the Kingdom. We completely miss this when we limit the Bible to “the free ticket to heaven”. Even further, we lose our motivation to read, study, meditate, discuss and apply it. This is astonishing when considering that so many evangelicals take pride in belonging to a “Bible-believing church”.

There are many other reasons why we as evangelicals are struggling to give the Scriptures their importance. From a lack of personal/communal discipline to our collective entitlement that runs against the type of sacrifice described in the Scriptures to a terrible underestimation of what is at risk when we the Scriptures do not play the role that God has intended for us.

We as evangelical believers cannot make the other extreme mistake by treating the Bible as its own divine person (like a 4th person of the Trinity) but rather regard it as a God’s sacred revelation that offers His redemption all people. Again, I want to encourage you on reading The Last Word. I found it to be the place to start for evangelicals reading NT Wright.