welcome to the story.

From the discussion boards at Emergent Village: sspeters: My question is this: Newbigin says that the biblical story is unique and attempts to identify how the telling of that story can challenge the reigning worldview ("plausibility structures" he likes to call them). How does it accomplish this? " through the witness of a community which, in unbroken continuity with the biblical actors and witnesses indwells the story the Bible tells." He further clarifies this concept of indwelling the text by noting that " the important thing in the use of the Bible is not to understand the text but to understand the world through the text." I am intersted in your collective insight on this issue as it relates to the topic of this thread. How does one "live in the text and from that position tr(y) to figure out what's happening in the world now?" Me: I believe that by living in the text and allowing that to read itself outwardly into the world now, we connect with the heart of the passage. When we begin to realize that the text is more than detached, propositional, simplistic truth, and begin to move towards realizing that the text is organic in substance, in that it lives and breathes along with us, then I think we begin to connect with why we have the Bible in the first place. By understanding that we are in a narrative that does not just involve my individualistic context, but involves people from all different contexts in the past, present, and future, we begin to get around the idea that we are but a small piece of the puzzle. The first chapter of John is always used to quote how the word (textual word) has existed from the beginning of time. A proper understanding of this passage is that the Word (the preincarnate and incarnational Christ) became flesh among us. Christ left his place where in a sense he was "detached" and he fleshed out Truth into our lives. When we begin to indwell Christ (the Word) this way, then the Bible doesn't become so much a text for study, but wisdom for living. And if its not primarily a text for studying the precise meaning and intent of the author (which it very much is, just not primarily), then it can instead be an organic, fleshed out encounter with our world as we indwell the Word and he in turn indwells us.