Christians are people of the book; we are a people of the corporate book called the Bible. The Bible was composed by men who were Spirit-led in all they wrote (II Peter 1:21). 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 making observations about our poker hand.
This is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of our day. We have come to see the Scriptures as a collection 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 John 3:16 it is true that God so loved the world, but it is only true in the context of John’s judgment-filled theology of Jesus’ coming. God loves the world, but he does this also 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.
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 practically minimizes the corporate gathering and treats the unified vision of the Scriptures 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 and read in union with the hermeneutic of all Scriptures.
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, opposed to the plague of individualism. We come to worship not as atomized creatures, but restored humanity put together in a corporate body of worshipers reading the Scriptures in all its fullness.
