Anglicans have a love-hate relationship with the Bible. Some bits we love—Psalm 23 (the Lord is my shepherd), 1 Corinthians 13 (love is patient, love is kind), the parable of the lost sheep and the kind shepherd; and so on.
But a lot of it we could do without—the embarrassing bits about six-day creation and Adam and Eve, the battles and the genocides, the endless genealogies, and the picture of a mean and judgmental God. We might feel like following the example of American President Thomas Jefferson, who carefully cut out from the New Testament the parts he liked and stuck them together to make his own personal New Testament.
But there is a reason the Bible is as it is, and there is a reason that our weekly readings include bits from all over the Bible. Here’s the reason: all human beings need a story to live by, to help them make sense of their world and their lives, and the Bible is the Christian story.
A six-act play
What does that mean? Tom Wright is an Anglican Bishop and a world-renowned New Testament scholar, and he has a great analogy for this, which I’m going to adapt slightly. He says, suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s was discovered tomorrow, but there is one act, Act 5, missing—let’s say it was eaten by mice.
What could you do? He says the most daring solution would be to get together the world’s most experienced Shakespearean actors, get them to memorize Acts 1 through 4, and I’m going to add in an Act Six (even though Shakespeare wrote no six-act plays!), and then set those actors loose to act out the play, following Shakespeare’s script.
Which is okay until they come to the missing Act 5, of course. So, what are they going to do then? Well, says Tom Wright, they would improvise, they would make it up. Of course, the trick is, if they are going to do that well, they would have to be true to Acts 1 through 4, the characters and the plot would have to be credible, and their improvisation would have to connect with the start of Act 6. So, on the one hand, they can’t simply quote lines at random from earlier acts, as though nothing has changed, but on the other hand, they can’t simply ignore the play as Shakespeare wrote it, and say that’s out of date. Tom Wright says what they are called to is not just improvisation but faithful improvisation.
Now, says Wright, that is how the Christian story of the Bible works. There are six acts: Act 1 is creation. The story begins with a good God making a good world. For the Christian, the world is not random and it’s not meaningless. It is made by a Creator, with beauty and purpose. That’s where our story begins.
In Act 2, things go wrong. We decide we can manage the world without the Creator’s help, and the results are all around us. G.K. Chesterton says, “sin… is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved— [it is] a fact as practical as potatoes.”
Then Act 3: this begins in Genesis 12, when God calls Abraham to be the father of a nation that will bring blessing and renewal to the whole world. God begins his world restoration project and recruits human beings to work with him. The Old Testament is the story of God shaping one nation to demonstrate to the world what it means to live as God’s people in God’s world in God’s way.
Then in Act 4, something different and wonderful happens: the writer of the story enters the story—as if Shakespeare should see a rehearsal of Hamlet, and steps onto the stage saying, “Here, let me show you how it’s done.” The coming of Jesus is the author of the story, entering into that story. Jesus trains his twelve apprentices in the ways of God’s new world, he dies for our sins and is raised to new life, then sends out his followers to start new communities of apprentices.
Let’s skip Act 5 for a moment and go on to Act 6. This is the end of the story—indeed, the end of the world. This is the ultimate happy ending: God will intervene once again to put everything to right and usher in a new creation where “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”
Faithful improvisation
So where does that leave us? We are in Act 5. We are called to faithfully improvise our role in God’s story of the world—on the one hand, improvising, since we can’t simply quote earlier parts of the play; but on the other hand, faithful to the story: this is not a story we make up out of thin air: we’re living in a Godshaped, God-initiated story.
I have an atheist friend in his 80s who told me he wakes up every morning and thinks, “What’s it all about?” He has no story like this to live by, no reason for hope. I said, I hope humbly, “I wake up every morning and read the Bible and pray—and it reminds me what I believe it’s all about.” We are living in a story, and it is a good story—indeed, the Bible calls it Good News, Gospel.
This article is based on a sermon preached at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, in October 2024, to mark the 50th anniversary of the church’s Bible study group.
Why Read the Bible?
Anglicans have a love-hate relationship with the Bible. Some bits we love—Psalm 23 (the Lord is my shepherd), 1 Corinthians 13 (love is patient, love is kind), the parable of the lost sheep and the kind shepherd; and so on.
But a lot of it we could do without—the embarrassing bits about six-day creation and Adam and Eve, the battles and the genocides, the endless genealogies, and the picture of a mean and judgmental God. We might feel like following the example of American President Thomas Jefferson, who carefully cut out from the New Testament the parts he liked and stuck them together to make his own personal New Testament.
But there is a reason the Bible is as it is, and there is a reason that our weekly readings include bits from all over the Bible. Here’s the reason: all human beings need a story to live by, to help them make sense of their world and their lives, and the Bible is the Christian story.
A six-act play
What does that mean? Tom Wright is an Anglican Bishop and a world-renowned New Testament scholar, and he has a great analogy for this, which I’m going to adapt slightly. He says, suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s was discovered tomorrow, but there is one act, Act 5, missing—let’s say it was eaten by mice.
What could you do? He says the most daring solution would be to get together the world’s most experienced Shakespearean actors, get them to memorize Acts 1 through 4, and I’m going to add in an Act Six (even though Shakespeare wrote no six-act plays!), and then set those actors loose to act out the play, following Shakespeare’s script.
Which is okay until they come to the missing Act 5, of course. So, what are they going to do then? Well, says Tom Wright, they would improvise, they would make it up. Of course, the trick is, if they are going to do that well, they would have to be true to Acts 1 through 4, the characters and the plot would have to be credible, and their improvisation would have to connect with the start of Act 6. So, on the one hand, they can’t simply quote lines at random from earlier acts, as though nothing has changed, but on the other hand, they can’t simply ignore the play as Shakespeare wrote it, and say that’s out of date. Tom Wright says what they are called to is not just improvisation but faithful improvisation.
Now, says Wright, that is how the Christian story of the Bible works. There are six acts: Act 1 is creation. The story begins with a good God making a good world. For the Christian, the world is not random and it’s not meaningless. It is made by a Creator, with beauty and purpose. That’s where our story begins.
In Act 2, things go wrong. We decide we can manage the world without the Creator’s help, and the results are all around us. G.K. Chesterton says, “sin… is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved— [it is] a fact as practical as potatoes.”
Then Act 3: this begins in Genesis 12, when God calls Abraham to be the father of a nation that will bring blessing and renewal to the whole world. God begins his world restoration project and recruits human beings to work with him. The Old Testament is the story of God shaping one nation to demonstrate to the world what it means to live as God’s people in God’s world in God’s way.
Then in Act 4, something different and wonderful happens: the writer of the story enters the story—as if Shakespeare should see a rehearsal of Hamlet, and steps onto the stage saying, “Here, let me show you how it’s done.” The coming of Jesus is the author of the story, entering into that story. Jesus trains his twelve apprentices in the ways of God’s new world, he dies for our sins and is raised to new life, then sends out his followers to start new communities of apprentices.
Let’s skip Act 5 for a moment and go on to Act 6. This is the end of the story—indeed, the end of the world. This is the ultimate happy ending: God will intervene once again to put everything to right and usher in a new creation where “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”
Faithful improvisation
So where does that leave us? We are in Act 5. We are called to faithfully improvise our role in God’s story of the world—on the one hand, improvising, since we can’t simply quote earlier parts of the play; but on the other hand, faithful to the story: this is not a story we make up out of thin air: we’re living in a Godshaped, God-initiated story.
I have an atheist friend in his 80s who told me he wakes up every morning and thinks, “What’s it all about?” He has no story like this to live by, no reason for hope. I said, I hope humbly, “I wake up every morning and read the Bible and pray—and it reminds me what I believe it’s all about.” We are living in a story, and it is a good story—indeed, the Bible calls it Good News, Gospel.
This article is based on a sermon preached at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, in October 2024, to mark the 50th anniversary of the church’s Bible study group.
John Bowen is Professor Emeritus of Evangelism at Wycliffe College in Toronto, where he was also the Director of the Institute of Evangelism. Before that, he worked a campus evangelist for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. For over thirty years, John has been a popular speaker, teacher, and preacher, on university campuses, in churches and in classrooms, and at conferences, across Canada and the USA. His most recent book is The Unfolding Gospel: How the Good News Makes Sense of Discipleship, Church, Mission, and Everything Else (Fortress 2021).
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