- Human and Divine Literature
“God works with his human partners in and through the Spirit, not to override or diminish human agency but to empower his people to become vehicles of God’s heavenly life here on Earth”
The Bible is neither a collection of golden tablets dropped from heaven, nor the work of human writers simply trying their best. It is a divinely inspired library of Spirit-filled, but human-written, texts.
The Spirit empowers human authors to write…
- Unified Literature
“The Bible has many authors, literary styles, and themes, but it tells one story about God’s rescue of humanity to be his partners in ruling the world”
The Hebrew Bible is compiled – its texts weaved together – as a unified story anticipating an anointed royal priestly prophet who arrives and brings redemption in the New Testament.
In other words, the Bible is…
- Messianic Literature
“The story of the Bible and all of its main themes come to their fulfillment in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection”
In the Hebrew Bible, characters like Adam, Abraham, Moses, & David foreshadow a Messiah, but fall short. The full collection is desperate for the New Testament’s Spirit-filled Messiah to redeem humanity from sin and death.
The Old and New Testament are meant to be read as…
- Communal Literature
“We truly need a community of learning, for both understanding and self-critique, in our journey of understanding the Scriptures”
The Bible is primarily written in community, and it’s meant to be read in community. This is the pattern found in Scripture itself, and helps us to overcome our blind spots.
As modern people, we need help understanding the Bible as…
- Ancient Literature
“Reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience and requires patience, humility, effort, and love.
There are huge differences between the cultural assumption of the biblical authors and that of modern readers”
Because the Bible is not just divine, but also human, it reflects the history, culture, and language of ancient people. Part of reading it correctly is learning to read it through ancient eyes.
This takes a lifetime of reading the Bible as…
- Meditation Literature
Scripture “is intentionally dense… It is designed to not be fully understood on the first reading, or even the 50th reading. Rather, it requires years of consistent rereading, so that the meaning of each part only makes sense in light of the whole”
The Bible is an artistic masterpiece calling for a lifetime of meditation. Its wisdom and truth are open secrets, hidden in poetic and literary devices that come alive the more they are engaged.
When read this way, it is…
- Wisdom Literature
“All of the diverse literary styles in the Bible reveal God’s wisdom and invite us into a journey of character transformation … shaping a new kind of human”
As we meditate in community on the unified story of the Bible and the pieces that make it up, it is able to make us wise and transform us into the image of the Messiah from glory to glory.