If we come to the New Testament looking for the shape of an ideal society, we shall be disappointed. The New Testament contains many travel guides but few architectural plans. It is, after all, a short document or collection of documents and among the topics it has no place for are the upbringing of children, public health, the arts and animal husbandry.
So if the title deeds of the Christian faith have no contribution to make to these issues, what exactly is the benefit of reading this 2,000 year old collection of texts? The answer of course is the same as the answer to similar questions about the works of Homer or Virgil. Put simply, they are here. And they are still here after two millennia. As with all books old and new we have to ask what they are about. ‘Animal Farm’ for instance is not about animal taxonomy.
In Utopia (Nowhere) Thomas More laid out a tongue-in-cheek account of an ideal community. More had many responsibilities, including the running of a secret police unit. He had to deal with ugly issues in daily life. In Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ Gonzalo a political innocent as he seems, offers his own formula for a well-run island ‘all men idle, all'. Economic inactivity would be the rule. The smart set on the doomed boat would have welcomed this What exactly do we come to the New Testament for then? Consider this. It is about what might have happened had the Creator descended into his creation and become a part of it – as though a playwright had appeared on the stage as an actor in his own play. Correction: this is not what might have happened. It actually did take place. So Christians believe. Jesus was more than an ordinary man. There was an incarnation.
This is so momentous a happening that it obviously deserves its own record. And that record is what we call the New Testament. Whether we accept its message or not, it is a coherent book or collection of different genres to make up a whole that we have to take seriously.
Consequences flow from taking the New Testament seriously. We can’t say that of every book that is a best-seller.
MELKSHAM ALPHA
Charlie Thomson, Rector of three Melksham churches, has a strong ministry team and an Alpha group meeting at the King’s Arms.
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