Redemptive History

What is the Bible?

In theological terms, the Bible is God’s inspired Word, his authoritative revelation of who he is, what he has done, and what he expects from his creatures. Yet, in terms of genre, what is the Bible?

Some speak of Scripture as God’s love letter to humanity; others describe it as God’s instruction manual—Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth (B.I.B.L.E.). I am much more inclined to ground the Bible’s imperatives (read: laws) in the infinitives of what God has done (think: gospel). The Bible is not a human book for struggling humans. More fundamentally it is a book from God, about God, for God’s people to be reconciled to God. To say it differently: It is a word about the Living Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, the one in whom all creation is unified (Eph 1:10).

For this reason, the most appropriate designation for the Bible is that it is an Epic Comedy that effects Salvation and Judgment. Let me explain. Continue reading →

Here is a great quote from Oscar Cullmann that shows the centrality and importance that redemptive history had for Irenaeus and should have for us. He rightly understood that Christian preaching divorced from the fullness of redemptive history, had no vitality. May our preaching be filled with biblical theology and its Christ-centered, gospel witness. Here is the quote found in Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition:

Down to the theologians of the ‘redemptive history’ school in the nineteenth century…there has scarcely been another theologian who had recognized so clearly as did Irenaeus that the Christian proclamation stands or falls with the redemptive history, that this historical work of Jesus Christ as Redeemer forms the mid-point of a line which leads from the Old Testament to the return of Christ (Cullmann, Christ and Time, London 1962, 56-7).

May we exhaust ourselves defending and declaring, exegeting and extolling the glories of Christ unveiled in the history of redemption. The power and the purity of the gospel depends on it.

Sola Deo Gloria, dss