Questioning the New Testament World

By -
Contrary to the title, this post is not about questioning what we know about the world in which the New Testament was written. Rather, it sets to examine the questions that the Christians in the New Testament world asked with regard to their new faith, which eventually led to the writing of the 27 pieces which we now know as the New Testament.

You see, the early Christians faced a lot of issues which we do not necessarily experience in the modern church. The early Christians did not have the Bible such as us, but they inherited the Jewish Scriptures, from which the apostles had referred to in order to make sense of the kerygma and its implications. The Jewish Scriptures provided the first point of reference, together with the oral teachings of Jesus which some were later recorded down in what we later know as the Four Gospels.

Questions which the early Christians would have asked included:
  • Who is this Jesus whose identity is to shape ours? What is his significance and why does he deserve my complete loyalty and obedience?
  • What does it mean to follow Jesus? How should calling him "Lord" affect the way I live, the things I do or don't do, the ambitions I pursue or don't pursue, the way I use things of the world and so forth?
  • How is the scandal of the Messiah's disgraceful execution to be understood and made into something positive, purposeful and beneficial? What does the mystery of this crucified, risen and returning Messiah tell us about our relationship with God and place in this world?
  • How can we be sure that we are indeed the heirs of God's promises and a legitimate phenomenon in the history of God's dealings with humanity?
  • How are we to live together as this new people of God? What codes of conduct and values are to guide our interactions with one another? What qualities should be apparent in and what characteristics banished from this new community? 
  • What should our worship look like? What are the distinctive rituals that set us apart and give us identity? How should they be performed, and what is their significance? How are we to regulate the life of the community?
  • When will our labors have their reward?
  • How are we to keep our hearts focused on God's reward, and not be distracted by the temporal ambitions which marked our pre-Christian lives and still mark the lives of our peers?
  • How can we discern the true prophet or reliable teacher from the deceiver? What are the boundaries of this new faith?
  • What is the role of the Torah? 
  • What is the place of Gentiles in the people of God? Must they become Jews first and enter by means of the signs and statutes of the Mosaic covenant?
  • If Jesus is the Messiah promised to the Jewish people and prophesied in their Scripture, why have they responded so poorly?
  • What is the church's relationship to the Jewish Scriptures and to the promises made to the particular nation Israel? Does the church exhibit continuity or discontinuity with Israel and the revealed plan of God?
  • How do we make sense of the world's hostility toward the work of God, the alleged good news and the people of God?
  • If we are God's children, why do we face shame and marginalisation? How are we to maintain self-respect in the face of dishonor? 
  • How should we relate to non-Christian family members? What effect does our commitment to obey Jesus have on our roles in the household?
  • How should we interpret what we see going on around us every day? 
The key thing is that we often try to read our own meaning into the Scripture, but yet we do not pause to consider why the New Testaments were written? We just need to bear in mind that the early church did not begin with the urge to write Scriptures to defend each and every of Jesus' teachings. But there were questions that arose here and then that required the apostolic leadership of the early church to address these pastoral issues. This means that we ought to consider the original meaning of the text before we claim any application in our own lives. There is a world that the 27 NT books sought to address and I believe we ought to respect that, and not behave in a way whereby some scholars claim - to read our own meaning into the text. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Parable of the 'Good Samaritan'

By -
Once there was this man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among thorns, and the thorns spring up and choked him. And as he went on, he didn’t have money, and he met the Queen of Sheba, and she gave him 1,000 talents of gold and 100 changes of raiment. And he got into a chariot and drove furiously, and when he was driving under a big juniper tree, his hair caught on a limb of that tree, and he hung there many days, and the ravens brought him food to eat and water to drink, and he ate 5,000 loaves of bread and two fishes. One night when he was hanging there asleep, his wife Delilah came along and cut off his hair, and he dropped, and fell on stony ground. But he got up and went on, and it began to rain, and it rained forty days and forty nights, and he hid himself in a cave, and he lived on locust and wild honey. Then he went on ‘til he met a servant who said, “Come, take supper at my house.” And he made an excuse and said, “No, I won’t. I have married a wife, and I c...
Read more

Of Teaching and Learning

By -
Image
Over the past two weeks, I was invited to attend a block class on "Learning to Teach." After two weeks of class, here are some reflections that I have. We thank God Bro Casey is a pretty humane teacher... :P  Firstly, teaching needs to meet the changing challenges of the 21st century. This is especially pertinent with all the advancements in technology as well as the worldview changes with the generation today. There is simply no room for the teacher to remain stagnant and not be able to keep up with times so as to engage their students and to facilitate learning. Applying to theological education and Bible school, we have to consider what kind of ministers we are training for the churches in the 21st century. If we are training ministers who are able to engage today’s generation, then we need to review the current methods of teaching and train ministers to be savvy in social media and technology and be able to make use of them in their ministries. Reflecting back on...
Read more

Of Exegesis, Wedding Preparation and the Whole Lot of Things: Another Reflection

By -
Image
To those who know what happened, the past months since the start of 2016 had been very stressful to me. In the preparation to my impending wedding this coming October, my future father-in-law decided to throw a few spanners into the wedding preparation by declaring that he was not comfortable with me as a life partner to his daughter because I am a full time Christian worker and more importantly because I come from a different family background from her.  The latter means that there are certain practices in my own family which are unthinkable in his worldview on how a family should function. This led to intense tensions between Angelina and myself. To compound the stress, NT Exegesis class was not that easy also and the stress of meeting the deadlines mean that I sometimes did not have the time to reflect deeper into the situations I was facing in my relationship.  However, studying the text of Philemon 15-20 reminded me of the way we should conduct our relationship ...
Read more