Ed Stetzer points us to his latest article for Outreach Magazine entitled “Learning from Each Other.” In his article, Stetzer articulates the well-known dichotomy we’ve set up between the “theologically preoccupied” and the “evangelistically fixated” (his terms, naming groups who do one to the exclusion of the other). I’m about to ruin the ending for you, but go check it out for the rest as well:

“It is unfortunately easy to see that some of us are better at knowing doctrine than sowing doctrine. Let me be blunt, amassing a knowledge of God and shelving it instead of sharing it is sin. We are made to distributors of his glory.

On the other side, the same passage of scripture challenges the evangelistically fixated. Eagerness to tell others about God is undermined if our theology is weak. Let me say it this way, you cannot proclaim God’s excellencies if you do not know what they are.

I have been saying it for years, and I don’t mind saying it again; we need to be both biblically faithful in doctrine and practice, and missiologically sound in our approach to people and cultures.
-Ed Stetzer”

The following quote from the publisher’s note to the readers in the NLT Study Bible, and I think it hits the nail right on the head:

“The goal of any Bible translation is to convey the meaning and content of the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts as accurately as possible to contemporary readers. The challenge for our translators was to create a text that would communicate as clearly and powerfully to today’s readers as the original texts did to readers and listeners in the ancient Biblical world.”

I wanted to share another great quote from Wright’s “Surprised by Hope,” this time on the apparent differences between the Gospels. Do these differences show an inconsistency or do they actually point to the authenticity of the Gospels? Before I get to the quote, I want to remind everyone that N.T. Wright will be on The Colbert Report tonight. Should be interesting!

“… I conclude this first section of the chapter eith a proposal that it is far, far easier to eblieve that the [Gospel] stories are esentially very early, pre-Pauline, and have not been substantially altered except for light personal polishing, in subsequent transmission or editing. Yes, they show signs of the theological interests of the different evangelists: Matthew’s story of the resurrection emphasizes typically Matthean themes, and so on. But this is like what you get when different artists paint portraits of the same person. This painting is certainly a Rembrand; that is indubitably a Holbein. The touch of the individual artist is unmistakable. And yet the sitter is fully recognizedable. The artists have not changed the color of her hair, the shape of his nose, the particular half smile. And when we ask why such stories, so different in many ways and yet so interestingly consistent in these and other features, could have come into existence so early, all the early Christians give the obvious answer: something like this is what happened, even though it was hard to describe at the time and remains mind-boggling thereafter. The stories, though lightly edited and written down later, are basically very, very early. They are not, as has so often been suggested, legends written up much later to give a pseudohistorical basis for what essentially was a private, interior experience.” (pg. 57)

The following is an extended quote from N.T. Wright’s new book, “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church”. In this quote, Wright establishes the two main questions that the book seeks to answer.

“This book addresses two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separately but that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christ hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth,” and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together.” (pg. 5).

When Wright says that the two questions (What is our hope? How can it effect the present?) should be joined together, I believe he is in good company, namely, the New Testament authors. When I took New Testament II, my professor gave us a challenge to find any passage that teaches on the “end times” that did not have an explicit or implicit application for the present time. I have yet to find any.
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