A Whole New World

The best kind of discovery is the kind that opens up a whole new world to you. A bit like Christopher Columbus arriving on the shores of America, I feel like I've just set foot on totally new terrain. Not that they are uncharted territories, unknown to man but only that they are completely new to me.

I'm the kind of guy who loves stumbling on a new road or a new township. I'd sneak some detour drive to secretly explore roads when no one's around, just to know how things connect. I spend disproportionate amounts of time studying maps and staring at Google Earth images. I have an irrepressible need to know where the road leads and what's around the corner. My approach to life seems to be one big exploration.

Hence the thrill at discovering Biblical Theology and Salvation History (or Heilsgeschichte). Biblical Theology seeks to address the theology/thinking of individual authors, books, and periods of the Bible within the context of their time in history; and build a theology of what the WHOLE Bible says by piecing together the individual perspectives. Salvation History on the other hand describes a cohesive story line of the whole Bible, discerns its direction and breaks them down into its natural stages or periods. In that way these stages can be compared and used to elaborate the story line in its own framework.

Both give me new paradigms to approach the Bible. Rather than a mere collection of 66 books, lumped together according to genre and period, I begin to see that they form a progressive story line with a definite beginning and end. There is a cohesive direction to the whole volume (of volumes). There is an introductory crisis, an anticipated resolution, and countless cycles of tension and relief, approaching or retreating from the problem that demands an answer from the very beginning. And all throughout, the solution unfolds itself, anticipating, hinting, clarifying, setting the stage, to a real climactic end.

Both give me frameworks to think about any given topic. Instead of lifting statements from all over the place to construct an argument based on proof-texts, I have a means of delineating how an element unfolds throughout the Bible. With BT I can discern what various authors thought in various periods/situations in history and correlate them to build a whole. With SH I can trace the evolution of an idea progressively unpacking through the story line and its major stops along the path.

My initial foray into BT and SH have resulted in two pieces - one on Guidance, and another on Worship.

BT and SH promises to revolutionise the way I think about the Bible, myself, and the world. You could say my worldview is being redefined. And the best part of all is that I've only just set foot on the new world. I am on a threshold of many years of discovery. And nothing is more thrilling than the combination of having a road to travel on but not knowing what lies ahead. Ahhh.. the joy of discovery and the discovery that leads to endless discoveries!