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?

Where Are We Going!

Over the next few posts we are going to cover three areas:

1. The Western world’s penchant for minutia and the breaking of the Story into fragments.
2. How Story is an antidote for this fragmentation.
3. The concept of the Kingdom of God as a prism through which we can understand the Story of God.

Houston, “We Have a Problem…”
One of America’s finest hours in space flight came when an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13. The quote “Houston, We have a problem,” is actually a misquote. The actual quote is “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” This was a major problem for those on board the Odyssey. The crew in space and the crew in Houston had to put their minds together to solve this problem and bring the three astronauts back to earth safely.

It is natural when a problem occurs to find a solution. However, sometimes a bigger problem occurs: we don’t know we have a problem. This is the situation with millions of readers of Scripture. We have a problem when we read Scripture and we may not even know it.

A Little Known Problem
The little known problem in Scripture reading is the fragmentized way in which we have come to read it. A little snippet here and a little snippet there, a Bible bit here and a Bible bit there. So if it is a problem, what do we do about it?

We will continue this thought in the next post!

It has become fashionable in the West to wear sun shades to protect the eyes. They come in all shapes and sizes and all kinds of colors. It just so happens that we all wear some color of shades in our glasses when we read Scripture, which is our presuppositions that we bring to the text we are reading. We all have them. Once in a discussion with my father-in-law about Scripture, he announced that he did not have any presuppositions when he read the Gospels. My reply, “your presupposition is that you don’t have any presuppositions.”

We all start somewhere. The starting point will determine the ending point. As an example, on the West Coast there is a main Interstate highway with the number 5 (I-5 for short). It runs from Blaine, WA in the North to the Mexican border below Chula Vista, CA in the South. Let’s say you were in Portland, OR and you wanted to go to San Francisco, CA. You can’t get there on I-5 South. You can go part way, but I-5 doesn’t go to San Francisco. Driving South on I-5 from Portland predetermines where you are going. You can’t get anywhere else except where I-5 delivers you.

The same is true with our presuppositions. They predetermine before we start where we will end. Assume that you believe that Jesus More on Presuppositions: Those Shades Are Cool!