What is the salvation narrative? In a phrase, the salvation narrative is the story of God’s single plan to re-establish his reign through his chosen human agents in the creation; to renew the world and its righteous governance. To borrow N. T. Wright’s language, what we’re talking about is “God’s World Renewal Project”. This is the story of scripture. God’s plan to restore and renew the creation from its condemnation and corruption that came as the result of the disobedience of humanity. This story of God’s mission is what we will regularly refer to as God’s World Renewal Project. It is only when we have this larger framework in mind that the concept of covenant comes clearly into focus.
This concept is absolutely crucial in putting together the big picture. In fact, it is the big picture. Understanding Paul, holiness, whatever it may be, means reading against the backdrop of the salvation narrative. If we discard the salvation narrative, what we end up with is a one-dimensional, out-of-balance theology. We end up, sadly and wrongly, thinking about salvation as being solely about me and Jesus, “Jesus died to forgive my sins so that I can go to heaven,” talk. Again, this statement is true, but incomplete. The gospel, the full gospel, Paul’s and Jesus’ Gospel, is much deeper than this. It has so many more dimensions than this. It is a rich, and complex thing that cannot be flattened out by taking away the long story of God’s enduring and faithful plan to redeem the creation.
The central pivot point in the story is Jesus. It is Jesus’ missional life, death and resurrection that is the culmination and fulfillment of a single, meta-narrative of God’s redemptive mission to the world through Israel and that this single mission to the world through Israel is precisely what shapes Paul’s thought and theology. This is true in much the same way that the Mosaic covenant established at Sinai is a continuation and fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. The New Covenant in Jesus is the fulfillment and continuation of the covenant promises God made with David in 1 Samuel 9. Although, we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. The idea here is that the Bible is a single salvation narrative of God’s World Renewal Project that begins in Genesis and ends in Revelation.
At this point, it is important to clarify what we mean by narrative. Mistakenly, some folks have the idea that narrative and fiction are synonymous. This is not so. The word narrative is by no means intended to imply “fiction”, or that the Bible’s story of redemption is historically unreliable in any way. To the contrary, the thrust of the term narrative is that there is a strong sense of continuity and cohesion between the various parts of the bigger picture that can become fractured when we read sections of scripture in a vacuum (like only reading the New Testament and not the old, or reading the prophets separated from their historical setting that is clearly laid out in the Old Testament historical books (Joshua-Esther). This results in a fractured reading and is bad hermeneutics that results in bad theology.
Paul, on the other hand, was an excellent interpreter of scripture and thereby had excellent theology. Paul, in properly taking into account salvation history, understood the Roman Empire, the Jews, and most importantly Jesus, as characters in an epic drama that began all the way back in Genesis. The story of Jesus, the cross and the resurrection is not a new story. N.T. Wright says this, “The ‘reinterpretation’ or ‘reworking’ in which Paul engaged was seen by him not as a new, quirky or daring thing to do with ancient traditions, but as the true meaning of those ancient traditions, which had wither gone unnoticed or been distorted by more recent readings of Israel’s scriptures and the movements of life and culture in which those readings played a key part” (Wright, 2013, 46).
The story of Jesus and the story of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Israel, David, Nehemiah, Isaiah the prophet, they are all the same story and Paul read it that way. So should we. If we fail to read it this way we will miss the critical dimensions of Paul’s thought into which his doctrine of holiness is a situated. This is all to say that the fundamental historical-theological framework for Paul’s theology (christology, soteriology, eschatology and ecclesiology) is the great narrative of God’s World Redemption Plan. The proposition is that everything that Paul says or thinks regarding salvation, justification, sanctification, glorification is framed by his understanding of the single narrative (N.T. Wright distinguishes between Paul’s worldview and theology. Much of what I am discussing here Wright would chalk up to worldview. This is certainly a helpful distinction, however, for a work of this size there is not room for analysis of Wright’s understanding of worldview and how it shapes theology. Cf. Wright, 2013, 63-67.)
For a number of reasons this concept is far removed from the thought life of the average Christian interpreter of the pauline corpus. Historically, the church has come away with what seems at times a rather obscured interpretation of Paul, or an interpretation of Paul that doesn’t seem “natural” to what Paul may be trying to say. The serious neglect of Romans 9-11 is proof of this. Perhaps this is why we sometimes struggle so much with seemingly countless passages in Paul’s letters. Perhaps we’ve been reading Paul with without the single, epic salvation narrative in mind. Let us consider Paul’s lens (Wright, “worldview”) for looking at the person and Work of Jesus by taking a step back and taking in the landscape of God’s World Renewal Project from Genesis to Revelation.
(This is an excerpt from a working book manuscript, Holiness in Fresh Perspective. All rights reserved.)