Hello!
This is my response to BI201
This course was very good! I can see why it is a part of so many different certificates, since it lays an important foundation to understand the whole Bible. Goheen is very good in showing how the Bible really is one unified story. He shows how the biblical story is really about the Kingdom of God, with Jesus Christ being
the very culmination. Since this course was so wide in its scope, I want to focus in the introduction.
If we were to ask Christians two questions: 1. What is the meaning of life? 2. And what is the overarching theme of the Bible?, I think we often might end-up with two different answers. What Goheen so brilliantly shows is that these two questions really have the same answer. The meaning of life and the main theme of the Bible is the coming of God’s kingdom to earth, fulfilled and realized in Jesus
Christ. We can of course unpack this summary and expand it, but as I see it this short answer really summarize the very center of it all. Or in Chris Wright’s words: the Bible is understood with a messianic and a missional key. The Bible is one unfolding story of restoration culminating in Jesus and making Jesus known.
By talking about “worldview story”, I think Goheen challenges us in how to approach Bible study and Bible reading. We interpret the Bible differently, depending on our worldview. We have to know the context first, not only the context of a certain passage or book, but the context of the whole Bible. This I believe is too often lacking among Christians. We know what Jesus means to us, i.e., his place in our story, but we don’t really know our place in his story.
In order to get an overview of the Bible and to see the whole context, I find Goheen’s 6 acts helpful. If you can summarize it, you can also expand it. And by placing the Kingdom of God as the metanarrative of the Bible, Goheen also helps us understand different parts of the Bible since every part of the Bible relate to the Kingdom of God in some sense. For instance, Genesis 1 is really hard to place in the biblical story if the meaning of life is salvation from our sins and to live in heaven when we die. Sin is not introduced in the biblical story until Genesis 3, and if the removal of sins and going to heaven when we die is the very metanarrative of the Bible, then Genesis 1-2 becomes unnecessary or simply unimportant for the biblical story. However, when the Kingdom of God is made the meaning of life, then Genesis 1 has huge importance, as Goheen shows in unit 2. (I’m not saying that salvation from our sins is unimportant, I’m saying that it is not the very metanarrative of the Bible. Instead, I believe it is intimately interwoven with the Kingdom of God but not “introduced” as a theme until Genesis 3, whereas the Kingdom of God emerges as a theme already in Genesis 1.)
To me it was an eye-opener to learn that everyone lives within a narrative, a story,
that is part of one’s worldview. All different worldviews that emerge are completely incompatible with each other. A worldview claims to make sense of the whole reality, and the Bible claims to be the truth of universal history and the meaning of human life. Ultimately the Christian worldview cannot co-exist with other worldviews. This is also something I believe Christians should be aware of. Jesus Christ wants to be the center of everything. The Kingdom of God is meant to grow until it includes everything. Though we always should be wise and loving, we should also always keep this in mind in our interaction with society and culture. If we truly start to live as if our story is the only true story, then I think we would see something beautiful happen. After all, Jesus offers us the only story that is not oppressive but liberating.
If we were to live fully convinced that the worldview that Jesus and the Bible offers is the best and only true worldview, I think we would see more of what Goheen
calls “spontaneous expansion of the church”. As a community we would start to live an attractive life to non-Christians and spontaneous evangelism would not be
shameful for common members of the church. If we are convinced that the life Jesus offers is the best life, then it would be all natural to simply share that with other people. And I think we will get there if we afresh could see Jesus as the very culmination of both the Bible and history.
Bless