Q. One of the most helpful points you make in the discussion of Gal. 5 is that some conservative readings of the Bible (and its covenants as well) are frankly too flat, by which I mean they could not imagine a stage by stage plan of God to save humankind and all creation. They can’t imagine either that some things in the Mosaic Law, as Jesus says, were given due to the hardness of heart, but once the new covenant written on the heart comes, new occasions teach new duties, and for that matter new and more demanding commandments as well. I have run across this problem again and again in reading Biblical theologies, while trying to write one that does justice to the narrative thought world of the OT and NT. I imagine you’ve run into this same problem again and again. So how do we get conservative Christians beyond the history of ideas approach to analyzing the Bible even including Paul?
A. That – to repeat – is what I was trying to do in Scripture and the Authority of God – stripping the notion of ‘biblical authority’ back to its basic components and then reassembling it from the ground up. Of course, even those who try to treat the Bible ‘in the flat’ do not do so in fact – they too operate a heavily selective text-pool…
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