Tom Wright on Evangeliclas and Scripture
A friend recommended that I read Tom Wright's Oxford University Sermon entitled the Harvest and the Kingdom (available as a word document).
Having just read it, I can see why he recommended it. It fits in well with the discussion we'd been having about the way in which evangelicals seem to preach more on the epistles than on St Paul. This began with my comment about said friend's father (an evangelical Anglican priest) being a better preacher on the epistles than the gospels. And I commented that I had been known to refer to evangelicals as epistolarians for this reason.
This bit stood out to me as being very important:
This is all the more ironic because, the evangelical has usually insisted on the authority of scripture, but has allowed that to shrink to mean ‘the authority of the bits of Paul which give me my scheme of how to get saved’, with the rest of scripture, including the gospels, as a rag-bag of useful material to pad it all out.
To be fair, he also tells liberals off for being to keen to ignore St Paul and says:
Exactly the same is true, in reverse, about a supposedly gospels-based kingdom-theology which is actually nothing more than social work with a pious face.
Having just read it, I can see why he recommended it. It fits in well with the discussion we'd been having about the way in which evangelicals seem to preach more on the epistles than on St Paul. This began with my comment about said friend's father (an evangelical Anglican priest) being a better preacher on the epistles than the gospels. And I commented that I had been known to refer to evangelicals as epistolarians for this reason.
This bit stood out to me as being very important:
This is all the more ironic because, the evangelical has usually insisted on the authority of scripture, but has allowed that to shrink to mean ‘the authority of the bits of Paul which give me my scheme of how to get saved’, with the rest of scripture, including the gospels, as a rag-bag of useful material to pad it all out.
To be fair, he also tells liberals off for being to keen to ignore St Paul and says:
Exactly the same is true, in reverse, about a supposedly gospels-based kingdom-theology which is actually nothing more than social work with a pious face.