Christians are people of the book. We are a people of the corporate book called the Bible. The Bible was composed by Spirit-led men in all they wrote (II Pet. 1:20-21). But when we read the Bible, we tend to make it an encyclopedia of our favorite life verses. “You like your verses, but I have mine,” we say as if we were playing poker. You can have your own favorite theology, but that’s because you are overlooking my favorite texts. It is easier to function this way than to search for patterns and types and covenantal structures.
This is one of the greatest tragedies of our day. We have created a cut/paste hermeneutic. We have seen the Scriptures as a collection or an appendix of isolated texts. We have accepted the plague of individualism under the guise of special hallmark cards. As a result, we forget that when we read in John 3:16 that God so loved the world, that statement is only an inspired reality in the context of John’s judgment-filled theology of Jesus’ coming. God loves the world, but he does this by condemning and judging people to eternal destruction. In our day, we have decided that if John 3:16 is good enough for Tim Tebow, it’s good enough for me. We can preserve it in its own separate corpus to be pulled out for any ordinary evangelistic enterprise. The result is a Bible that is chopped, red-lettered, and mutilated by our preferences.
But the Bible is a corporate and contextual text. It is vastly different than the individualized approach many take to it. My own assertion is that the individualization of the Bible—the read-one-verse-a-day Bible programs– has created a culture that views the corporate gathering as secondary in importance. Therefore, to quote James B. Jordan, “individualism means that the Bible history is reduced to moralistic stories.” But Samson, Jacob, and Ruth only make sense in union with the rest of the Bible.
When we gather for the Lord’s Day worship, we are worshiping with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven and all the Christians on earth; true enough. But when we worship, we also worship in the context of the entire biblical story. We are participants in the corporate nature of the text. We are people of the book and, therefore, oppose the plague of individualism.
We come to worship not as atomized creatures but as restored humanity put together in a corporate body of worshipers. When we worship, we join the story of the Scriptures in all its fulness and unity.
