The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story.The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story. By Craig G Craig G (born Craig Morgan) is a rapper who hails from the Queensbridge housing project in Queens, New York, USA. Craig is best known as one of the original members of hip hop producer Marley Marl's Cold Chillin' Records group the Juice Crew, which consisted of other hip hop . Bartholomew & Michael W. Goheen. Grand Rapids Grand Rapids, city (1990 pop. 189,126), seat of Kent co., SW central Mich., on the Grand River; inc. 1850. The second largest city in the state, it is a distribution, wholesale, and industrial center for an area that yields fruit, dairy products, farm produce, , MI: Baker Academic, 2004. Pp. 252. Paper $19.99. Bartholomew and Goheen present The Drama of Scripture as an introduction to biblical theology Biblical Theology is a discipline within Christian theology which studies the Bible from the perspective of understanding the progressive history of God revealing God's self to humanity following the Fall and throughout the Old Testament and New Testament. designed for first-year university and college students. Their goals are to help students understand the true nature of Scripture as God's story and from there to develop a "thoroughly biblical worldview world·view n. In both senses also called Weltanschauung. 1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. 2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group. " (p. 11). They work from the assumption that the Bible represents a "unified coherent narrative of God's ongoing work" in the world (p. 12). Consequently "each event, book, character, command, prophecy and poem" in the Bible must be understood in the context of a single story line. For Bartholomew and Goheen, the Bible is essentially a narrative drama about redemption describing how God goes about recovering and restoring God's good creation (p. 198). To N.T. Wright's conception of the Bible as a drama in five acts, Bartholomew and Goheen add a sixth. The opening act of this drama is God's act of creation described in two distinct but related narratives (Genesis 1-2). The point of these creation narratives is not to provide the details of how God made the world, but to help us understand our place in this divinely authored universe. The second act, consisting of the fall into sin as told in Genesis 3, is to be understood as an account of "what really happened" even though it contains details unlike those we normally associate with historical narratives (p. 41). Act 3, the story of Israel, encompasses the entire complex of Old Testament narratives from the Abrahamic covenant through Exodus, the Deuteronomistic history and Chronicles where "it is as though at this point in the story of the Old Testament we have two points of view" (p. 92). The third act culminates in the return from Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem The Temple in Jerusalem or Holy Temple (Hebrew: בית המקדש, transliterated Bet HaMikdash and meaning literally "The Holy House") was located on the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit) in the old city of Jerusalem. . This is followed by brief interlude interlude, development in the late 15th cent. of the English medieval morality play. Played between the acts of a long play, the interlude, treating intellectual rather than moral topics, often contained elements of satire or farce. covering the intertestamental period The Historical Bridge Spanning the Interval of the Old Testament and the New Testament is a figurative way that Protestants refer to the 350 silent years between the Old and New Testaments, which was from 400 B.C. to 5 B.C. . The climax of the biblical drama is the fourth act in which we hear the story of Jesus who announces the coming of God's kingdom, reveals its character through his mighty works, rejects Jewish cultural symbols, gathers a community of sinners and outcasts The Outcasts are a fictional criminal organization from the Digital Anvil/Microsoft game Freelancer. Based on the planet Malta, the Outcasts are the descendants of colonists from the sleeper ship Hispania. , conquers sin through his death on the cross, and by this resurrection inaugurates a new era of salvation. This is followed by act 5, the story of the church whose mission is to take the good news of Jesus to all the world. This is where contemporary readers fit into the biblical drama. The finale will come in act 6 when Jesus returns to heal, redeem and restore all of creation in a renewed world populated pop·u·late tr.v. pop·u·lat·ed, pop·u·lat·ing, pop·u·lates 1. To supply with inhabitants, as by colonization; people. 2. by humans occupying resurrected bodies. There are a number of things that I like about this book. Particularly helpful is the discussion of how we might continue the mission of Jesus in the world today. Here Bartholomew and Goheen make three very important points. (1) Salvation is not an escape or rescue from this world into some sort of heavenly or spiritual existence, but rather a restoration of God's rule over creation. (2) Salvation involves much more than restoring individuals to a personal relationship with God. (3) Our cultural situation is quite different from that of Jesus; hence our mission in the world requires both innovation and consistency. Unfortunately the authors do not provide the necessary tools for discerning those cultural differences, and hence for determining where innovation and consistency might be desirable, necessary, or attainable. There are a number of other problems with the book. The most significant of these is that the whole scheme of the six acts Following the Peterloo massacre of August 16, 1819, the UK government acted to prevent any future disturbances by the introduction of new legislation, the so-called Six Acts which labeled any meeting for radical reform as "an overt act of treasonable conspiracy". is founded on a Christian supersessionist theology that skews just about each and every one of Bartholomew and Goheen's discussions of the Jews and Israel, who in their words failed to fulfill their mission. The Old Testament, in this scheme, becomes an illustration of failure rather than a foundational set of texts for three western monotheistic religious traditions. Hence I would not recommend this work as a textbook for introductory first year courses on biblical theology. Ritva H. Williams Augustana College Augustana College is the name of two colleges in the U.S., and the former name of one in Canada, all founded by Scandinavian immigrants:
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