Book Notice: Richard Bauckham on The Bible in the Contemporary World

Book Notice: Richard Bauckham on The Bible in the Contemporary World May 3, 2016

Richard Bauckham

The Bible in the Contemporary World: Hermeneutical Ventures
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015.
Available on Amazon.com

This is a great collection of essays by Richard Bauckham on matters related to postmodernism, biblical criticism, biblical prophecy, creation, ecology, freedom, and wisdom.

I thought the first chapter of the book on “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story” was a tour de force. Bauckham makes some good points about how reading the Bible as story should not lead to the marginalization of wisdom literature.

What I really enjoyed was his claim that postmodernism (in general) is not equipped to resist the dominating meta-narrative of consumerist individualism which drives predatory capitalist perspectives. He writes how “[Consumerism]  appears liberating in its valorization of consumer lifestyle choices, but is oppressive in the much more realistic sense that affluent postmodern theorists are liable to ignore: it enriches the rich while leaving the poor poor, and it destroys the environment. In this way it continues the kind of oppression that the modern metanarratives of progress have always legitimated. It is hard to acquit much postmodern theory of unintentional or intentional collusion with this metanarrative. Postmodern relativism offers no cogent resistance to this metanarrative which is not threatened by diversity so long as its overarching framework of alleged economic reality goes unchallenged.”

On how the Christian nonmodern metanarrative is threatening to modernism and postmodernism, Bauckham claims: “It makes a thoroughly universal claim, which combines the universality of the one Creator and Lord of all things with the particularity of this God’s identification of himself as the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ. The latter gives it a particularity offense to the modern metanarratives of universal reason and the former a universality even more offensive to postmodern relativism.”

And on the use of the biblical story to forge a Christian empire: “The tragic irony of Christian history is that so often Christian empires have taken over the symbol of the kingdom of God to justify the same kind of rule as those of the empires it was forged to oppose.”

Anyways, a great read!


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