the church geek

Jan’s post this morning stirred up some things I’ve been thinking about for a while now…

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on the Emergent Church and have also been delving into N.T. Wright’s work on the scriptures. As a result, I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is really something to the power of seeing the bible as narrative; as seeing it articulating the story of God’s work in the world and empowering the church in its calling within that story.

For the Easter season I’ve been studying and preaching on the texts in First Peter. Within that letter, Peter helps the gentile converts see how they’ve been enfolded into God’s story. How through the new birth of Israel the doors have been opened for them to enter into the fold of God’s chosen people.

It’s a brilliant move that gives ‘those people who were not a people’ an identity. It also helps them frame their struggles and persecutions within the larger story of God’s work; encompassing their present in what has happened in the past and the hope of what God will do in the future.

All of this has helped me begin to make a little more sense of those passages (especially in Matthew) that point to the ‘prediction’ of events in the Old Testament prophets that have been ‘fulfilled’ in Jesus Christ. In some sense, the early Christians took the themes of the prophets and framed the Jesus movement within the context of God’s work in history.

They enfolded their own story within the context of the much larger story of God’s work in Israel and in history. When it comes to Christians today, I think this has much to say to us. It helps us find our own identity in that much greater story. That is powerful stuff.

But here’s my struggle: Before I began engaging in the emergent church and exploring the scripture as narrative, I read Amy Jill-Levine’s book The Misunderstood Jew. I came away both impressed and convicted by the way the church can mis-read some of the New Testament texts and how they have often been mis-interpreted in ways that have done violence to the Jewish community of faith.

But, at the same time, I can’t see the Bible as telling an over-arching narrative without seeing that story as a comprehensive one detailing God’s continuous work encompassed in both the Old and the New Testament; seeing it as a somewhat seamless story, from the call of Abraham, to the rise of the church, to my own life today.

Maybe I don’t go so far - as Matthew seemed to have no problem with doing - as to use the word fulfillment, but I still in the end lean toward seeing it as a somewhat seamless story. At the very least, the New Testament gives voice to what happened in Jesus Christ by picking up and giving new life to all the shattered hopes and dreams of the people of Israel following their return from exile.

So does the way I see that over-arching story necessarily imply that I am doing violence to the Jewish faith? Is there someway to tell that story that still honors the Jewish faith, that doesn’t say the Jewish faith has been replaced? I don’t know. I’m still working on that, and I don’t have an answer. But at the very least Levine’s book reminds me to be much more careful about the ways I choose to tell that story.

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