Relationships are Central in the Gospel Story

Remember the main movements in the story that we have identified:

(1) Harmony

(2) Disruption

(3) Restoration

Each of these major Acts in the Biblical Drama speaks to the four-fold relationships that God designed for humanity

(a) Upward—we are made to walk with and work alongside God;

(b) Outward—we are to do the walking and working hand-in-hand with others, because life is designed to be a community experience;

(c) Downward—we are stewards of the earth upon which we depend for sustenance;

(d) Inward—when we, as puzzle pieces, are properly situated in our intended places, connected with God, others, and the created order, we find that we are settled with ourselves, functioning as we were meant to function, content and satisfied with our identity before God and our role as image-bearing Eikons.

The four-directional harmonious relationships we enjoyed in the Garden were each disrupted by our foolish distrust of God’s wisdom, love, and resourcefulness. The work of God from Genesis 12 onwards has been to restore us to wholeness, in relation to him, to each other, to our world, and to ourselves. This is the Shalom toward which the collective work of Father, Son, Spirit, and church are advancing. To come to Christ is to jump on board this Shalom-building project. To sin is to disrupt these bonds and destroy the life, the peace, the harmony, the wholeness that God is bringing into the world. Therefore…

Sin is Best Understood in Relational Terms

Re-read Scot’s brilliant insights here, pages 48-51 of Embracing Grace. Sin is not just an impersonal infraction of the law, along the lines of a minor traffic violation. It is the damaging of a relationship of trust, which ensues in the breaking of a heart, the violation of a sacred bond. The dominant metaphor God employs to shed light on the damaged connection with his people that sin produces is not that of a CHP officer perfunctorily writing a ticket for someone who just ran a stop-sign. No, he prefers to speak of the destructive effects of sin along the lines of a Father whose adult son cursed him and shamelessly ran off with the family’s inheritance (see Luke 15:11-32). The OT similarly portrays the relationship between God and his people in rich, interpersonal terms. The bond between God and ancient Israel is like that of a husband’s affectionate devotion to his wife. With that analogy in view, willful sin is nothing less than an adulterous affair. The ramifications here are far more serious than a simple traffic ticket.

The story of the rich, young ruler in Mark 10 (vv. 17-22) illustrates the relational nature of obedience to God. The man was overly self-assured that he had done the right stuff, kept all the commandments, and had met his obligations with God. A vital, dynamic, interactive relationship, however, isn’t reducible to a series of check-boxes on a “to do” list. The heart of the commandments is a glad, though costly, giving of ourselves to God in loving loyalty and the willing participation in his generous service to others. (Remember the “Jesus Creed” of Matthew 22:34-40). If this man had a lively relationship with God he would already have sensed the Spirit’s call to share his resources with others, just as Zacchaeus, the wealthy tax-collector, did. After hearing Jesus speak, Zacchaeus welcomed the Lord into his home. Drawn into the story of restoration, Zacchaeus enthusiastically volunteers his generosity: “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” (See the full story in Luke 19:1-10).

Note the contrast here between these two rich men. The rich man of Mark 10 presumes to have been obedient all his life, but fails to grasp that obedience involves a collaborative relationship with Jesus in his work in the world. After his arrogant and self-deceived confession, “All these commandments I have obeyed since I was a boy” (Mark 10:20), the man’s pretence to obedience is exposed as empty when Jesus tests the sincerity of his love for others. It’s as though Jesus is asking, “Oh really? You have a love for others that is the expression of all the commandments? Well, it should be easy then for you to part with your money to help those you claim to love. Show me the genuineness of your obedience. Love your poor neighbor as God has loved you.” Unfortunately, this man failed the test. His alleged obedience was only superficial. He was a “good citizen” but not an embraced embracer. He was like the older brother in the story of the Gracious Father of Luke 15. This man, too, prided himself is his dutiful compliance. “All these years I’ve slaved for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to.” However, when the Father asked him to love his neighbor by embracing his now repentant younger brother, he balked and resisted emulating the Father’s love (vv. 25-32).

These stories demonstrate that obedience grows out of a dynamic, loving relationship with God that actively participates in the way of Jesus, reflecting God’s character and commitments. A wayward lifestyle, disconnected from God, may check the right boxes and pride itself in some measure of obedience, but it lacks the vital engagement with God that empowers us as Eikons to share in his work of bringing Shalom into the world, not least by being generous with our resources, like Zacchaeus. Sin, and obedience, sin’s counterpart, are best understood in relational terms.

To Play our Role in God’s World We Need to Know where the Story is Heading

This is why Scot’s next chapter, chapter 5, brings onto the stage the closing act of the Drama of Restoration. We need to know where the story is directed if we are properly to play out our roles as God’s Eikons. An analogy from British New Testament (NT) scholar Tom Wright is helpful here. Tom uses a different numbering system of acts in the biblical drama than we have used, but the sequence is the same, moving from creation’s harmony, to the disruption wrought by the fall, through the dynamics of restoration including Abraham, Israel, Jesus, Spirit, church, and finally the Consummation, when all will be set right in the new heavens and the new earth. To tie Tom’s analogy closer to Scot’s fifth chapter, think of the world-wide “return” of Jesus (often referred to as the “Second Coming”) as the sixth act. I have added a couple comments in brackets to make this addition more explicit.

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost.  The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.  Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.  Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result.  The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand.  That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.  This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.  It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

This model could and perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities.  Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus.  The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end [perhaps as act 6].  The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act [or the fifth of six acts].  Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.  Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.  Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required.

Excerpted from N. T. Wright, “How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?” Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7–32; italics original.

For more on this, see our "Bible as Story" page.