CHAPTER THIRTY
Reading the New Testament as Christian Scripture in the Twenty-First Century

An Altitudinal Review

When you live in a place for a while, it is an enlightening experience to get up in the air and see your world from the window of a plane. Whether the altitude is a few thousand feet in a friend’s single-engine Cessna or many miles above the earth in a jet, the abnormal height allows a perspective that normal driving and walking about cannot offer. Connections between places, relationships of buildings, roads, and neighborhoods to one another, and the overall shape of your city or town are revealed in surprising and thought-provoking ways.

Figure 30.1. Plaque with Christ in majesty [The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917.]

If you’re reading this chapter you’ve probably spent quite a few hours reading about the New Testament (and hopefully reading the New Testament itself!). Now that we have walked around the pages of the New Testament at the ground level, what can we observe by taking a brief, higher-altitude look? Particularly, from the perspective of reading the New Testament as Christian Scripture, what do we see?

An altitudinal view of the New Testament highlights several major highways and how they connect the various features of its topography:

• Jesus the Son, Jesus the Christ
  Undoubtedly, the New Testament’s vision is centered on the belief that God has finally and ultimately revealed himself to the world through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, who is in fact the promised Messiah. As the first verse of the New Testament says, Jesus is the Son of Abraham and the Son of David (Matt. 1:1) who is then revealed also as the Son of God (Matt. 3:17). Whatever else one sees in the New Testament, the person of Jesus is the central feature of the biblical landscape.
• The Good News
  The New Testament is continually proclaiming that the message of Jesus’s coming into the world is good news, a happy announcement, or “gospel.” The gospel is good news because now there is a way to have an honest, trustworthy, accessible, gracious relationship with the one true God, who is the creator of the world and the Father of Jesus. This good news / gospel is that humanity’s sins can be forgiven and our sinfulness can be replaced with a growing righteousness and wholeness. This good news / gospel is that God has begun his return to the earth to restore it and his highest creation, humanity. This forgiven, restored humanity will live together under God’s perfect rule, his kingdom that will cover the earth.
• The Abiding Holy Spirit
  The New Testament is written after Pentecost, after the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit at the inception of the church and the beginning of a new covenant between God and humanity. The New Testament repeatedly emphasizes that now, after Jesus’s physical ascension, God’s presence still exists in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God works in the world and also empowers individual believers in Jesus and the gathered church to witness and to be transformed over time into the image of God himself.
• Hope for the Future
  The New Testament leans heavily forward. That is, the vision of the New Testament includes a backward look at history, but it especially casts our vision forward to the future that God will bring. This future will be a renewed and restored creation under the perfect, just, and peaceful reign of God. This future vision of hope is the basis for the Christian life now amid suffering, pain, and brokenness.
• Faith and Faithfulness
  This overall New Testament vision of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the gospel, and future hope is ultimately focused on the present, in the invitation for the New Testament’s readers to respond in faith and faithfulness. Faith is trust in the truth of what God has revealed through Holy Scripture. Faithfulness is a continual (though imperfect) orientation of one’s life toward following Jesus’s teaching and model. The New Testament sees itself not merely as a historical or theological book, but as a guide for how one should live now as we await the return of Jesus to establish the reign of God fully on the earth.

Figure 30.2. Fresco depicting the descent of the Holy Spirit (ca. 1000) [St. Sophia of Kyiv / Wikimedia Commons]

Holy Scripture’s Role in Forming Wise People

So if it is true that Christianity is a forward-looking faith that requires something of us—faith and faithfulness—what does it mean to read the New Testament as Christian Scripture in the twenty-first century? The short answer is that God has given Holy Scripture (Old Testament and New Testament together) to develop the faith and faithfulness of his people. To read the New Testament as Scripture is to read it as a disciple who is ever growing in the knowledge of God and of oneself. We can summarize all of this with one word: wisdom.

Whether in the twenty-first century BC or the twenty-first century AD (or anywhere in between), humanity needs wisdom. Wisdom is the combination of knowledge, skills, insight, experience, and character that produces in us the highest and most beautiful form of humanity. Wisdom is not an object to be collected; rather, it is practical knowledge in which one can grow over time. Wisdom alone can create and sustain true human flourishing. All other ways of being in the world—materialism, isolation, arrogance, hate, pleasure seeking, power grabbing, and warmongering—may give short-term pleasure and benefit, but ultimately they are self-destructive. Only wisdom brings life.

Every society, religion, and philosophy offers some form of wisdom that promises human flourishing. Christianity claims that the Holy Scriptures have the most comprehensive and trustworthy wisdom because the words come from the Creator God himself and most fully reveal who he is. It is no accident that the ultimate revelation of God both in Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures is described with the weighty term “the Word.” The two-Testament canon provides the world with the Word that promises wisdom, consummately pointing to Jesus as the Word incarnate.

Thus, Christians see Holy Scripture as playing a unique role in shaping the thinking, sensibilities, desires, loves, habits, and behaviors of God’s people. God’s words, when believed and acted on, reshape us into wiser people. There are other aspects of creation and human knowledge that can help people live and die well. But Holy Scripture is central to this activity, and the New Testament in particular gives a framework to rightly perceive the world’s history and nature.

As a result, the ethical or moral thread of the New Testament is more than one aspect of the New Testament’s teaching; it is the woven structure of the whole. We may say that Scripture is engaged in a project of resocialization, of re-formation of humanity, with Jesus as the model and the Holy Spirit as the enabling power. Thus, to read the New Testament well is to read it as guiding the continual reshaping of our lives.

Two important ideas must be woven into this vision. First, this reshaping is not only about the individual, nor does it end only with the individual’s character development and happiness. God’s restorative work is also about the individual as a member of the being-restored creation, for life together in the kingdom of God. Second, this group of transformed people lives and is being reshaped during an overlap of two ages: between the inauguration of the new age through Jesus and his church (now) and the consummation of this work, when God fully brings his reign from heaven to earth (the future). This means that inevitably there will be conflict. The existing world, living in a broken relationship with its Creator, is like a tectonic plate that is now being pushed up against a new landmass that is forming, the church. The result is that both parts feel the pressure, pinch, and pull of the other. Sometimes this is calm, sometimes there are subterranean rumblings, and sometimes there are earthquakes and volcanoes. The New Testament teaches that Christians should not be surprised when the tension between the world and Christian believers erupts in conflict. Because the central nature of God is love and therefore the ultimate vision for humanity is love, this means that when the tectonic plates collide, Christians must be willing to be wronged, to suffer, to be misunderstood and maligned, to be humble peacemakers.

In sum, to read the New Testament today is to read it to be transformed into a new way of being in the world, relating to others as people of love and life, inviting others to come and see, to taste the Lord’s goodness, even if this means rejection, suffering, and persecution.

An Ending and a Beginning

Most books aren’t still widely read two thousand years after their composition, and there is no book being read as broadly or deeply or in as many languages as the New Testament. Because the New Testament is God’s canonical revelation and the faithful witness to the Son Jesus, who is himself the exact representation of God himself (Heb. 1:3), this is good.

What if you are not sure? What if all your questions have not been answered? What if you still have doubts about the truthfulness and value of Christianity? Come and see. When Nathanael heard about Jesus but wasn’t sure, his friend Philip responded simply, “Come and see” (John 1:46). Read. Ponder. Pray. Ask for wisdom. This is wisdom.

The end of this introduction to the New Testament is at hand, but it can and should be only a beginning of a life of reading the New Testament as Scripture. It is all too easy for readers of a textbook like this to spend more time reading about the New Testament than actually reading it. But this introduction—as helpful as we hope it is—is not Holy Scripture; this book is not God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), or a lamp for our feet (Ps. 119:105), or pure spiritual milk (1 Pet. 2:2), or alive and active, dividing soul and spirit (Heb. 4:12); unlike Scripture, this book will fade and pass away (Isa. 40:8; Matt. 24:35). The implication is clear: prayerfully studying and obeying Holy Scripture is the ultimate sense of what it means to read the New Testament as Christian Scripture.

Christian Reading Questions

1. How would you explain “the gospel” in three sentences?
2. Has your view of Jesus changed or been affected at all as you have learned more about the New Testament? How so?
3. In what ways has learning how to read the Bible as Christian Scripture brought more wisdom into your life?
4. How do you plan to continue prayerfully studying and obeying Holy Scripture throughout your life?