N.T. Wright and the Importance of the Narrative of Scripture
I had to produce a children's Bible two or three years ago [...] and I realized that, looking back at the children's Bibles that I had known as a child and I had known when my own children were young, they were basically [as if] the Old Testament was like a Christian version of Aesop's fables: one odd story after another of strange people wearing strange clothes, doing odd things with a little moral at the end; no sense of the larger Biblical narrative.
[...]
[T]he overarching narrative that so many people grow up with in our world is basically a de-resonated narrative, it's as you [Bishop Barron] say, the Epicurean narrative, that there's no meaning, we're just random atoms bouncing off one another. And actually if you discover even the beginnings of the Biblical story, of a good creation, of the Creator God not abandoning creation when it goes horribly wrong, but then having these themes of praise and kingship, and then the whole thing converging on Jesus — that's a great story. And I'm frustrated sometimes with my own grandchildren, because they know The Lord of the Rings better than they know the Bible, and they actually know Harry Potter in some ways better than they know the Bible. But... fine, okay, but there is this great story [...] Hence the question of evangelism, which is partly what this conference, I think, is about: that the evangelistic message is, "Let's tell the story," and they say to people, "You can be part of this story; in fact, you are already part of this story, because the God who made the world loves you, and God is putting the world right and wants you to be part of that project." And instead of saying, "You're going to hell; now here's the system where, if you check this box, you'll go to heaven instead," — no, that's not how the Bible itself puts it at all, really; the Bible itself says, "Here is the Creator God who is, through Jesus in the Spirit, remaking the world. He wants you to be part of that process, to be remade yourself and to be part of His remaking project for creation." That's a wonderful, powerful emphasis, and I think people intuit different bits of it, as you say, and our task is then to clarify that, to articulate that, and to live it out in our churches; because if you're not interested in justice and beauty, then who's going to pay any attention to you when you talk about new creation? An so to do that, the message of the Bible comes alive and makes sense.
- N.T. Wright, An Anglican-Catholic Dialogue on Scripture
