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.

For Peterson, “story is an act of verbal hospitality.” He insists, “We live in a world improvised of story.” Words provide a form of currency used to provide information. To be schooled is primarily to accumulate information. (Eugene H. Peterson, Stories of Jesus (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1999), 7-8). Motivational speech runs a close second to the accumulation of information. While both are important, they are impersonal. In them there is no discovery, no relationship, and no personal attentiveness. For it to be personal we need story and storytellers.

SoulTsunami

He believes that story came to be a negative word in the modern world. To be a “storyteller” was one of the worst things you could call a person, but in the postmodern world storytellers hold the future in their hands, especially those who use all the “basic media forms: print, software, audio, and video” (Sweet, SoulTsunami. 424). He suggests that the life of Jesus was neither essay, doctrine, nor sermon, but was “a story.” (Sweet, SoulTsunami. 425). For Sweet the “Christian message is not a timeless set of moral principles or a code of metaphysics. The Christian message is a story… (Sweet, SoulTsunami. 425). His favorite definition for preachers is “story doctors” where he says:

People come to worship with problem stories, with painful stories, with jostling narratives and “narrative dysfunctions,” a condition and process “by which we lose track of the story ourselves, the story that tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act.” Preachers help heal people’s narrative dysfunction and help them live out of new, whole stories. Bad stories hurt and impair; good stories heal and help.

In AQUAchurch he speaks about two kinds of stories: “rut stories” and “river stories.” A “rut story” limits us and locks us in place by keeping us stuck in “old tracks and trajectories.” On the other hand, a “river story” moves us forward. These stories “add life-giving software (accumulated memories and learning) to the brain’s hardware (billions of neurons). He believes that the greatest “river story” is the story of Jesus. (Leonard I. Sweet, AQUAchurch (Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 1999), 57). These images come from Donna Markova’s No Enemies Within (Emeryville, CA: Publisher Groups West, 1994) as quoted in Robert Hargrove, Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration (New York: BusinessWeek Books, 1998), 65).

He further suggests that we do not discover “the Way, the Truth and the Life by memorizing verses and mastering facts.” (Sweet. AQUAchurch. 59).

In Summoned to Lead, Sweet says, “Telling stories” used to be a euphemism for lying. No more. Story is crucial in communication. He quotes John Raymond as distinguishing between “tradition-stories, map-stories, and vision-stories.” (Leonard I. Sweet, Summoned to Lead (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 133).

Sweet suggests that we need all of these kinds of stories (Sweet, Summoned to Lead, 134) to and I would suggest that all these kinds of stories may define the overarching Story of Scripture.

Finally, in Out of the Question…Into the Mystery, another book read by the LEC2 cohort, Sweet suggests (as we have suggested above) that we should:

1. Memorize and live out its stories.
2. Fall in love with a new passage every day.
3. Take it to bed with you.
4. Talk to it and hear it talk to you as you wrestle with the text.
5. Become a fifth gospel, a third testament. (Sweet, Out of the Question…Into the Mystery: Getting Lost in the GodLife Relationship, 77).

He suggests that the Story of God is not yet finished that God has framed, “but that we are invited to have a hand in coloring.” (Sweet, Out of the Question, 78).

We have not thought of Paul as a storyteller, for the Jesus stories of the Gospels are absent from his letters. Yet his use of narrative is very important…, because Paul’s central concern was to use the narrative to form a moral community…. Paul’s most profound bequest to subsequent Christian discourse was his transformation of the reported crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ into a multipurpose metaphor with vast generative and transformative power…. In that gospel story Paul sees revolutionary import for the relationships of power that control human transactions…. Thus Paul’s use of the metaphor of the cross resists its translation into simple slogans. Instead he introduces into the moral language of the new movement a way of seeking after resonance in the basic story for all kinds of relationships of disciples with the world and with one another, so that the event-become-metaphor could become the generative center of almost endless new narratives, yet remain a check and control over those narratives.” (a quote from W.A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Mortality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 196-197. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, xxviii.

Hays, who was educated at Yale in the ‘70s, was influenced by Hans Frei who contended in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics that biblical criticism had gone astray by failing to grasp the narrative sense of Scripture. This prepared the way for Hay’s dissertation and then book entitled The Faith of Jesus Christ, which is a discussion of the phrase “faith of Jesus Christ” as being a subjective or an objective genitive in the original Greek language, but argues that this is set within a narrative framework. It would be fair to say that Hays believes that there is a “story-shaped” character to Paul’s writings. (Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, xxiv-xxv).

While history and theology work at their stormy relationship, there is always a danger, particularly in postmodernism, that literary study will get on by itself, without impinging on, or being affected by either of the others [history or theology]. The more we move toward a climate in which ‘my reading of the text’ is what matters, the less pressure there will be to anchor the text in its own historical context or to integrate a wider ‘message’ of the text with other messages, producing an overall theological statement or synthesis. (Bracketed material by present writer.) (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 13).

We are, in fact, drawn irresistibly into the world of a story—and a story, moreover, which, like the modern ‘short story,’ invites us to share its world as much by what it does not say as by what it does. The questions posed are: How open is the story to new ways of being read? Or, what would count as a correct reading, and how important is it to try to achieve a correct reading? One might be left with the reality that there should be a distinction between things that can and must be right and things that must be left open to conversation. (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 83)

Wright suggests, “What we need, then, is a theory of reading which, at the reader/text stage, will do justice both to the fact that the reader is a particular human being and to the fact that the text is an entity on its own, not a plastic substance to be moulded to the reader’s whim.” (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 62) To Wright’s last statement I would whole-heartedly agree.

Gordon Fee says that if one reads the stories of Scripture from “in front” of them taking no care of what lies “behind them,” then they will read the stories from “over” the text having control of what the text says to them. If, however, one reads the stories of Scripture from “in front” of the text while giving due attention to what lies “behind” the text, then one will learn to live “under” what the text says. (Gordon D. Fee, Tyndale Lecture Series (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Tyndale University College & Seminary), Tape 1: “The Reader As Interpreter”).

Wright argues in Scripture and the Authority of God “neither for a variety of modernism, nor for a return to pre-modernism, nor yet for a capitulation to postmodernism,” but for what he hopes is “a way through this entire mess and muddle and forward into a way of living in and for God’s world…, (Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God 6.) which sees story as the vehicle. (Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, xiii.) Wright goes on to argue for a “totally contextual” reading of the Story and a fully “incarnational” reading of the Story. (Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, 6). By “totally contextually” Wright says that “each word must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its own chapter, each chapter within its own book, and each book within its own historical, cultural and indeed canonical setting.” By “incarnational” he says that one should pay “attention to the full humanity both of the text and of its readers.”

Wright works out his theology within the framework of critical realism. (N. T. Wright, , Jesus and the Victory of God, 35.) In footnote 12 on page 35 Wright makes the following suggestion for clarity: “We should perhaps note that the adjective ‘critical’ in the phrase ‘critical realism’ has a different function to the same adjective in the phrase ‘critical reason’. In the latter (as e.g. in Kant) it is active: ‘reason that provides a critique’. In the former it is passive: ‘realism subject to critique.’ Critical realism “is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other that the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’).”

In the first of his proposed six-volume project on the subject “Christian Origins and the Question of God,” which is The New Testament and the People of God, Wright sees Story as an important ingredient in understanding the larger Story presented in the New Testament. He says:

The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate context, within an acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the Story which it tells, can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’—whichever group that might be—already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests. (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 6).

Texts of Scripture do not have a single meaning limited to the intent of the original author. In accord with Jewish and Christian traditions, we affirm that Scripture has multiple complex senses given by God, the author of the whole drama.

While the authors do not reject historical investigation of biblical texts, they suggest that it should be used in “stimulating the church to undertake new imaginative readings of the texts. (Art of Reading Scripture, 3) This is a move away from authorial intent and debatable. Fee and Stuart hold that, “a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers.” (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 74). If words had an “original intent” (How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Third Edition, 76). then how do the meanings of those words change their meanings to a different audience? Would not that cause God to be saying one thing at one time and possibly something completely different at another time? If one loses the sense of the author’s intent, then it seems that a text can mean, and usually does, anything the reader wishes to say it means.

It is my opinion that there is an interaction between the Old Testament and its ancientness, the New Testament and its first centuriness, and the church and me in all its twenty-first centuriness, when I hear its stories. How do I understand the story? By using all the tools of historical exegesis to enable me to hear the words of the Old and New Testaments’ writers and writings as their first readers and hearers might have read and heard them, catching the full meaning intended by the writers, but always with an ear open for the unexpected word of God through the writers of the Old and New Testaments, challenging my own twenty-first centuriness and all its presuppositions and perceptions. William Lane captures this idea well in the introduction to his commentary on Mark. , xii).

“Only gradually did I come to understand that my primary task as a commentator was to listen to the text, and to the discussion it has prompted over the course of the centuries, as a child who needed to be made wise. The responsibility to discern truth from error has been onerous at times. When a critical or theological decision has been demanded by the text before I was prepared to commit myself, I have adopted the practice of the Puritan commentators in laying the material before the Lord and asking for his guidance. This had made the preparation of the commentary a spiritual as well as an intellectual pilgrimage through the text of the Gospel. In learning to be sensitive to all that the evangelist was pleased to share with me, I have been immeasurably enriched by the disciple of responsible listening.”

Here stories were posited “to build a counter community, one that was counter to the oppression of Egypt, counter to the seduction of Canaan, counter to every cultural alternative and ever-imperial pretense.” Brueggemann asks: “Can we risk these stories?” His answer: “The answer is known only when we decide if we want to subvert the imperial consciousness and offer a genuine alternative to the dominant forms of power, value, and knowledge.” (The Creative Word, 26-27).

It is difficult to get a handle on Brueggemann’s belief about the historical background from the above references about story. However, in a more recent book, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, written with three others, the quartet is frank about their belief about a historical backdrop in reading the text, in their case, the Old Testament. They state:

There is increasing recognition that interpretation now takes place in a postmodern context, one in which the previously settled assumptions of the modern world have become unsettled and must, therefore, be reassessed. One of those assumptions, closely allied with the claims of historical criticism, was that history was the primary category for assessing the truth claims of the biblical text and the reality assumed to “stand behind” the text. In our view the search for a historical reality behind the text sometimes did violence to the imaginative and rhetorical integrity of the text itself. (Bruce C. Birch, et. al, A Theological Introduction To The Old Testament, 21-22.)

Brueggemann points out in his book, The Bible Makes Sense (vii-viii), that the historical emphasis has waned.