Читать книгу The sonship of Christ - Ty Gibson - Страница 8

I’m going to suggest that the reason we struggle to make sense of the Sonship of Christ is due to a selective and narrow reading of Scripture that ignores the overall storyline of the book. Not that anyone intends to read the Bible selectively or with a narrow focus. It’s just that most Christians have been taught to handle Scripture as a doctrinal textbook, with the assumption that it basically operates like an encyclopedia from which to compose a collection of theological propositions. So we don’t really read the Bible, per se, but rather we tend to comb its pages searching for verses, sentences, even partial sentences and isolated words, and we then assemble the disjointed mass of “verses” into topical categories from which we compose “beliefs.”

The Bible writers themselves seem to know nothing of this topical framing of truth. It is apparently foreign to the ancient Hebrew way of processing reality. They, by contrast, see and convey the truth in the form of poetry and song, symbol and story—mostly story, since even the poems, songs, and symbols are enlisted to tell the story.

When the Bible is studied in a prooftext manner that overlooks context, it is possible, of course, to harness its many “verses” to formulate just about any “doctrine” a person is inclined to believe. Bible study, with this approach, is a rather subjective exercise in which I look for “verses” to support a premise that I usually bring to the Bible—and, no surprise, I find the support I’m looking for.

Using the prooftext approach to Scripture, we can easily, and with good intention, take hold of the word “son” as it occurs in reference to Jesus and then proceed to reason, quite apart from the biblical narrative, that He must have emerged from God sometime, long, long ago. The “Son of God” cannot be God in the same eternal sense that the “Father” is, we reason, or else He would not be called “the Son.”

Then, in order to deal with the other “verses” that present Jesus as God, we are obliged to venture into more philosophical, abstract explanations that Scripture itself does not offer. We say things along the line of, “Yes, Jesus always existed in the Father before He was brought forth from the Father, so He wasn’t created by the Father, but rather emerged from the Father.” And we feel like we’ve said something meaningful and deep, although we don’t really have any idea what we’ve said and we know the Bible, of course, says no such thing. But when we use a prooftext method that is not careful to notice context, we have no choice but to fill in the gaps with speculations that are not inherent to the text. In other words, we have to make stuff up.

Of course, we can’t blame people for trying to make sense of difficult language. Operating within the prooftext methodology, focusing on a few trees while failing to see the whole forest, it really is quite challenging to make heads or tails out of “God” being “begotten” as “God’s Son.” So we either downplay or over interpret the verses that don’t fit. Those who take the opposing view generally respond by assembling their own list of verses and offering their own strained interpretations. So we end up stranded on a prooftext impasse, my chosen texts against yours and yours against mine.

But there is a solution, and it is very clearly seen to be the solution once we engage with it and see where it leads:

Read the Bible.

The whole thing.

On its own terms.

When we read the Bible as an unfolding narrative—as the big story it actually is—with key characters played out in an overarching, intentional plot line, the meaning of the Sonship of Christ becomes unmistakably evident. In other

words, if we really want to understand the sense in which Jesus is the Son of God, we need to pan out from our selected verses to take in the grand historical tale the prophets are telling.

When in doubt, pan out.

And when we do that—wow!—a whole new world of biblical understanding opens before us, and there is no need for strained interpretations. We just see it. The story tells us the truth in ways that micromanaging individual verses never can.

So let’s do just that. Let’s read the Bible on its own terms and see where it leads.

This is going to be exciting.