God’s EPIC Adventure
ISBN 0979907608
412 Pages

Foreword by Leonard Sweet …[This] book is an invitation to the party of your life.

Afterword by Brian McLaren …a solid and inspiring presentation of the Biblical storyline.

Book Summary

You sit down to read the text of Scripture. When you look at it on the page, it looks like some kind of a strange technical manual with all those large and small numbers that break up the text. Because Scripture is presented this way, readers have learned to read and memorize those small fragments and that has led to fragmented lives amongst the flock of the followers of Jesus. We have become versified mutts, suffering from what Dr. Winn Griffin calls versitis. What is the antidote to this serious, potentially deadly problem? Learning to Read and Live in God’s Story.

God’s EPIC Adventure provides the reader with a basic background of how we find ourselves in our present position of reading Scripture in such a fragmentized way. In God’s EPIC Adventure, Dr. Griffin uses Bishop Tom Wright’s five-act-play model as a way of presenting Scripture as a full-length Story in order to assist the reader in a better reading experience of Scripture’s text. Thinking and reading Scripture as Story can result in a follower of Jesus learning the art of living in the Story that Scripture presents, rather than applying fragmented parts of it and becoming a theological quilt. Dr. Griffin presents the gluing themes of Covenant in the Old Testament and Kingdom of God in the New Testament as two ways of saying the same thing, namely that God has invaded this present evil age with his rule.

In the Prologue, he helps the reader discover how we ended up in this theological fix of reading Scripture in such a fragmented way. Then, he presents the Story in a chronological storyline from Genesis to Revelation. In the last section of this book, he presents a way of thinking about how we as actors in God’s Story can use our imagination and improvise our part in God’s EPIC Adventure. Dr. Griffin keys God’s EPIC Adventure to the New Bible Dictionary and The Books of The Bible so that the reader can get more information about the text and can read the text without all the human additives that have been placed in the text that hinder its reading. Readers will find ways to use this book that they have never thought of before!

God’s EPIC Adventure
ISBN: 0979907608
412 Pages
$29.99
Discount Price $26.99
Presently US SHIPPING ONLY

Winn Griffin is President of Seeing the Bible Live Ministries, Woodinville, WA. He received a B.A., a M.A., a D.Min., and a second D.Min. from George Fox University. The first three degrees are in Biblical Studies, the latter one is in Leadership in the Emerging Culture. He teaches at Bakke Graduate University, Seattle, WA, and is Academic Dean of Missio Dei Learning Community, Monroe, WA. He and his wife, Donna Faith, live in Woodinville, WA, and have two adult children, Jason and Jeramie Joy. They participate with Vineyard Community Church, Shoreline, WA.

In light of the early Israelites being an oral community, picture the following example in contrast to the story we told earlier about a local Bible Study.

The sun was setting and leaving an array of colors in the western sky. A cool breeze was beginning to take over from the heat of the sun. Jedaiah was stoking the fire to keep it alive for the gathering outside the tent of his father Shimri. Jedaiah was seventeen years old, a sturdy lad with deep brown eyes.

All day Jedaiah daydreamed about what story Moses might share with his family during the cool of the evening. Would it be the story of Abraham and his journey to Egypt? Maybe it would be about Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt. Egypt had been a hard life for him and his family. The events over the last few months that had brought them to the foot of Sinai had been breathtaking.

Later after the evening meal, Moses arrived with two of his children. He greeted all who were gathered around the fire and found a comfortable place to sit and enjoy its warmth. The evenings in the desert could get a little chilly. Moses shared a couple of events from his busy day. One was particularly interesting to Jedaiah. Moses spoke of an interaction with a family who had a young son, Boaz, who was awestruck with the daughter of the family just two tents away from his family’s tent. Mariah was “drop dead gorgeous,” a dazzlingly beautiful magnificent woman of eighteen years. As Moses relayed the story Jedaiah fixed his eyes on Hannah with a wry grin on his face. More on Israel: An Oral Community

Foundationalism, as we will see below, has a penchant for minutia which seems to assist readers of Scripture to read it fissiparously. Foundationalism has produced for us the plague of versitis, topicalitis, and systematitis.

The Bible was designed by God to be heard and read. In the “Welcome” section to the Contemporary English Version mission is described as being a translation that can be read, heard, and listened to with enjoyment. The Promise Bible God’s Words in Your Words. We must remember that the Bible was first meant to be heard The Five Books of Moses as its stories were told and read later after they were written down. Of course, we in the Western world have a difficult time wrapping our minds around the idea of an oral Bible. We think that literacy comes from being able to read written works, so if one only had an oral work the person presenting and the people listening would thereby be illiterate. Susan Niditch argues the opposite point of view in her book, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature

One of the primary reasons for not knowing the overarching Story of Scripture is the way readers have come to use Scripture. Individuals and the church have developed the malignant disease of versitis (Is My Bible the Inspired Word of God, 86-88) (proof texting), which has grown to epidemic proportions. Readers take small fragments (verses) and quote them ad nauseam and usually out of context. Scripture is rarely read as a whole complete Story from beginning to end.

Most, if not all, of our reading of Scripture only reinforces a belief that the Bible is just a collection of little nuggets that one can choose from when a small portion is thought to be helpful. It’s like using the Bible as an encyclopedia of God’s knowledge. When you have a problem just look up a reference and quote away. Readers of Scripture need to stop memorizing verses of Scripture and then quoting them as proof texts, brutally tearing them from their God-given context and ordering them in a human fashion, as if a reader could do a better job than the Spirit in putting the text together. If followers of Jesus are going to memorize, then they need to memorize the overarching Story and the myriad of stories therein, according to Len Sweet, a current postmodern author (Out of the Question…Into the Mystery: Getting Lost in the GodLife Relationship, 77 ). The church and individual readers need to recover the whole Story of Scripture. It is my argument, therefore, that we will never reside in the biblical narrative and make it our way of life if we keep pulling single verses from their context and use them as proof texts to argue our own theological agenda.

In addition to versitis readers have also developed topicalitis (a contagious and deadly Bible teaching disorder), and systematitis (the art of propositional gathering). Topicalitis is best seen in the form of topical preaching and teaching while systematitis is extended topicalitis in the form of Systematic Theologies. Westerners have developed a penchant for minutia. Is it possible that fragmented teaching produces a fragmented believer who is anemic, listless, and weak with no sense of vocation as a follower and experiencer of God?

These three epidemics are caused by foundationalism, which among Evangelicals has caused too “low” a view of Scripture (N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?,” Vox Evangelica, no. 21 (1991): 7-32). Why? Evangelicals have come to believe in the authority of the book that we have made Scripture to be. Evangelicals believe that God somehow has given us the wrong sort of book and it is our job to turn it into the right sort of book by engaging in the fissiparous (tending to break up into parts or break away from a main body) use of Scripture. How did this happen? To provide a beginning answer we will look at several authors and their discussion about the rise of foundationalism.

One might think of the Bible as a book that demonstrates how God has acted in relationship with his people. According to Dr. George Ladd, the late Professor of Theology at Fuller Seminary, Scripture is the word of God written in the words of men (George E. Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism, 1966), 12). For him acts and words are an inseparable unity. (Ladd, Criticism, 27). God has delivered these acts and words in a variety of literary forms, among them narrative. According to Fee and Stuart, narrative or story comprises about forty percent of the Old Testament. (How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth, 89) Narrative is the primary genre of the Gospels, (Fee and Stuart, How to Read, 127) and an underlying substructure of the writings of Paul according to Richard Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul , xxiv-xxv).

My argument is that the church’s understanding of the Story of God in Scripture is, for the most part, seriously fragmented. Understanding the whole Story is not a concept that is celebrated in the church at the beginning of the twenty-first-century.

I have deep concerns for the church moving across a cultural divide, that members on each side of the divide (Modern and Postmodern) have ample opportunity to have a holistic look at the overarching Story of God as it is presented in Scripture. These blogs are intended to be a challenge to the church to understand what her story is and how to become the people of God living as his recreated humanity, as a light to this present evil age. Knowing the story will help in answering the question: How are the people of God to advance the gospel as they improvise the Story of God for the sake of the world?