The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture
A couple of days ago I was waiting to pick up my son Daniel at a rehearsal, and so I went into the local Episcopal Book Store near his high school on Stone Way. It's been one of my favorite bookstores for years. It was in this bookstore that I first met Frederick Beuchner, Esther de Waal, Barbara Brown Taylor, and other writers who I hadn't stumbled across in my browsing in what were for me more typical Christian Book stores. There are books on Lenten practice and Lectio Devina and edgy theologies. Icons of various sizes line the walls, and there are even singing bowls...glorious things I'd never heard of until about six months ago.
As I was parking the car, I prayed a little prayer that God would bring me a book, help me find something that would really be helpful in these days of more depression than I've seen in a long time. So I finally made it in the shop, looped around the sections on prayer and Benedictine Spirituality, sauntered past the icons and the crosses and the wall hangings, and landed in a back corner with great, thick books on theology.
And the name N.T. Wright jumped out at me.
N.T. Wright is an Anglican Bishop in Durham, England, and I've been hearing his name for the past several years. I'd never read anything of his, but just this past week, when I was in Abilene to teach my class, I'd asked my teaching partner, Dr. Ken Cukrowski, a New Testament Scholar, to talk to be about the notion of inspiration as it related to scripture. When I began to ask myself questions last year about whether or not Paul was being self-referential in referring to "scripture," it occurred to me that I probably needed some help thinking through the various issues of scriptural inspiration, which is a subject stratospherically (is that a word) over my head. But still...
So the title of this little book on the shelf (in between all the bigger tomes) caught my eye: The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture. That is exactly what I was needing...a new understanding of the authority of scripture.
Well, as I usually do, I sat down and blew through the book in about 5 hours. I do this when the book captures me and won't let me go. I won't capsulize here, but trust me, here is a very smart man. What I love about what Wright does in this work is that he captures so many of the nuances of the current situation as it relates to "evangelicals" and "liberals", "right" and "left", and as he sets the parameters for what he sees as a real path through the challenges of both modernist and postmodernist criticism, he calmly and assuredly reveals the shortcomings of most sides of the arguments. He traces the history of the notion of "authority" as it relates to scripture from the Ancient Hebrews to the latest postmodern challenges, and then lays out a clear proposal to re-establish the role of an authoritative scripture in the lives of Christians. It is balanced, thoughtful, scholarly, and in the end, pretty practical. The only real downside to his plan is that it requires work, certainly more work than I've been doing biblically.
But it made me want to get to it...
2:40:54 PM
