The Story We Haven't Heard

By Frank Viola

I have a few vivid memories of my first year in college. One of them reemerged the other day. I was 17 years old.  Part of my daily routine was to frequent a certain study hall in the Argos Center at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Before my academic studies, I would begin with Bible reading. I remember sitting at my desk at the Argos Center one day,  reading Acts and asking myself, "How does this story fit together with the rest of the New Testament? It would be awesome to have a resource that would show me when the Epistles were written during the story in Acts. I could then piece the whole thing together." At the time, I knew of no such resource.  (Thankfully, that is no longer the case.) Back then, I had no idea how vitally important it was to understand how the story in Acts blended together with the Epistles.

Fast forward more than twenty years. 

Last week, I was listening to a minister give a sermon on CD.  At one point in his talk, he contrasted Paul's words in Romans 7, "the things which I don't want to do I do" with his words in Philippians 4, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." 

The minister argued that something happened to Paul between Romans 7 and Philippians 4 that left him a changed man. His answer was that 2 Corinthians 12 ... "the thorn in the flesh" ... is what happened to him. His evidence for this is that 2 Corinthians 12 comes between Romans and Philippians in the New Testament. He stated that Paul's "thorn" was his struggle with habitual sin mentioned in Romans 7.

I can't quite put my finger on the emotion that this sermon elicited. But at least a slice of it was sadness. 

This minister's way of reasoning is not uncommon to that of many modern ministers who preach to God's people on a regular basis. The paradigm used for interpreting Scripture is to cut and paste verses together as they are presently arranged in the New Testament. 

The problem with this is: 

1. The New Testament books are NOT arranged in chronological order in our Bibles. 
2. The New Testament in its present form doesn't put the story of the early church together in a way that fills in all the historical gaps.

This is no slam on the New Testament. It is a criticism on the way we have been conditioned to approach and study it.

In contrast to what this minister was teaching, 2 Corinthians was NOT written after Romans! It was written BEFORE Romans. And we can be fairly sure that Paul's "thorn in the flesh" had nothing to do with a besetting sin of his.  We will continue to grope in the dark concerning what his "thorn" was as long as we are ignorant of the story.

Consider this: A person can memorize the entire New Testament in its present order.  In addition, they can be able to parse Greek.  And still . . . that person can be woefully ignorant of what the New Testament actually says. Why? Because they have no historical context by which to understand it. In other words, they may know chapters and verses and be ignorant of the whole story.  By studying chapters and verses, Christian leaders have routinely created ivory castles and abstract doctrines and theologies that have no grounding in the Biblical narrative. Note the following quotes by scholars:

One can always read some kind of meaning into a verse of Scripture. But those who understand that the books of the New Testament were written to specific people, in specific places, nearly two thousand years ago, know that this is not a good idea. If the New Testament texts were written to make sense to people in the first century, then we must try to put ourselves into their places in order to determine what the writers of the New Testament intended their readers to understand by what they wrote. If we try to make sense of the Bible with no knowledge of the people who wrote it, those who read it and the society in which they lived, we will be inclined to read into the Scriptures our own society’s values and ideas. This would be a major mistake since our culture is very different from that of the ancient Romans. [James Jeffers, The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era: Exploring the Background of Early Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), p. 11.]

The arrangement of the letters of Paul in the New Testament  is in general that of their length. When we rearrange them into their chronological order, fitting them as far as possible into their life-setting within the record of the Acts of the Apostles, they begin to yield up more of their treasure; they become self-explanatory, to a greater extent than when this background is ignored. [G.C.D. Howley in “The Letters of Paul,” New International Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979), p. 1095.]

[When reading the New Testament letters] we are in a position of people listening to one end of a telephone conversation; we have to infer what is being said at the other end in order to reconstruct the situation for ourselves. [F.F. Bruce, Answers to Questions, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972, p. 93.]

When the  New Testament books are arranged chronologically and all the historical gaps are filled in, what emerges is a beautiful and compelling story. That story gives us keen insight into why Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, Romans, and later, Philippians. The story gives us the historical context by which to interpret all the Epistles. It also gives us a fairly clear picture that identifies Paul's "thorn in the flesh" as well as many other difficult Biblical passages.

Systematic theology is not adequate for understanding the message of Scripture. Narrative theology-- a theology that emerges by reflecting on the whole story of Scripture--is not only adequate, but it is necessary for a proper apprehension of the central thought of God.  This is especially true in the era in which we live.

In the era of modernism, systematic theology juiced truth down into a set of propositions and formulas all based upon a disjointed approach to the Bible. This approach to Scripture has convoluted and cluttered the story. 

As the church moves from a modern world into a postmodern world, it is essential that all Christians--especially those who minister--become familiar with the first-century story in its historical context.  In many strands of the Christian family, narrative theology and ecclesiology will soon replace systematic theology and ecclesiology. 

Simply learning the story will spare us from taking Scripture out of context and assigning foreign meanings to it.  It will spare us from systematizing living truth which refuses to be subjugated and restricted by a theological system. Learning the story will revolutionize our understanding of the message of Scripture, including how we practice church and what we choose to emphasize and de-emphasize.

Postmodern people are compelled by the intrigue of story and narrative. And the story of the early church is one of the most compelling stories of all time. This is one of the reasons why I penned The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: An Extraordinary Guide to Understanding the New Testament (Destiny Image).  It is but one stab at furnishing Christians with a new groundwork for a narrative theology and ecclesiology that is built, not upon chapters and verses, but upon the fluid story contained in Scripture. 

I issue a challenge along with an expectation: Take time to discover the story, and you will understand the New Testament in a brand new light.  I close with the words of my friend, Ben Witherington, which echoes the profound importance of the story:

The Story is a tale as large as the universe and yet as small as an individual human being. It is, however, not a Story about everything, not even about all of human history. It is a Story that focuses on God’s relationship to mankind, from the beginning of the human race in Adam to its climax in the eschatological Adam, and beyond. It is a Story about creation and creature and their redemption by, in, and through Jesus Christ. It is a Story about a community of faith created out of the midst of fallen humanity. It involves both tragedy and triumph, both the lost and the saved, both the first and the last. Its focus is repeatedly on Divine and human actions on the stage of human history. It is out of this Story, which Paul sees as involving both history and His story (i.e., Christ’s), that he argues, urges, encourages, debates, promises, and threatens . . . Christ is the central and most crucial character in the human drama, and everything that Paul says about all other aspects of the Story is colored and affected by this conviction . . . In Paul’s view, one is always in danger of saying too little about Jesus Christ, not too much.

Related articles: 
The Bible is Not a Jigsaw Puzzle

Published 2006