1. It liturgizes
2. It starts a theology
3. It models testimony and counter-testimony
4. It tends toward justice
5. Recapitulates Israel in Christ
6. It starts at the beginning and ends at the end
7. It surprises, contains universes, is meaning-generative
8. Offers chiasm
after chiasm
9. Offers a center outside the text in the gospel of Jesus
10. Initiates faith, liberates, renews, sanctifies,
enlightens
It doesn't:
1. Stand alone and aloof from history and other literature
2. Claim to be directly handed on by God (except when it
does)
3. Preach prosperity
4. Completely cohere
5. Serve as a handbook for life (except when it does)
6. Rhyme
7. Reveal God any more than it wants to
8. Offer a complete systematic or dogmatic theology
9. Dumb things down
10. Offer life without challenge and convicting
The Bible contains the Spirit of God which conveys the Word of God to our time and place and circumstances. Some things never change and the truth of God's love and redemption are some of them. We hear aspects of that truth differently as times change and generations pass away.
ReplyDeleteThe Bible is not God and we do not worship the words of the Bible (which would be especially silly given that the Bible was written in ancient versions of the Hebrew and Greek languages.
Here's the audio from the presentation on these: http://www.spreaker.com/user/schnekloth/what-the-bible-does
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