Tuesday Tome - The Authority of Scripture

Last week, I recommended N. T. Wright's book, The Authority of Scripture, as a good follow-up to my current teaching series at Valley. I read through the book again this week and plan to share a couple quotations in next Sunday's sermon.

What follows is a passage from chapter 8 – "How to Get Back on Track" – in which Wright talks about how important it is that church leaders grapple with scripture in order to be able to "engage with the huge issues that confront us as a society and as individuals."

...If we are to be true, at the deepest level, to what scriptural authority really means, we must understand it like this: God is at work, through scripture (in other words, through the Spirit who is at work as people read, study, teach, and preach scripture) to energize, enable, and direct the outgoing mission of the church, genuinely anticipating thereby the time when all things will be made new in Christ. At the same time, God is at work by the same means to order the life of the church, and of individual Christians, to model and embody his project of new creation in their unity and holiness. To be a leader in the church is, almost by definition, to be one through whose work this mission comes about, enabled and directed by this scripture-based energy; and one through whom, again with scriptural energy to the fore, that unity and holiness is generated and sustained. (p.138)