Simon Chan on the Narrative of Scripture

Fascinating words from Simon Chan on the basic narrative found in Scripture…

“A better way to conceptualize the Bible’s narrative coherence is to see creation as forming the backdrop for God’s elective grace and covenant relationship rather than vice versa. God created the world in order that he might enter into a covenant relationship with humankind. And he accomplishes this with the call of Abraham and culminates his elective purpose in Jesus Christ and the church. This covenantal relationship always involves the election of a people from among humankind. The purpose is not to consign the rest to reprobation (as taught in scholastic Calvinism) but that through the elect the rest of humankind might be blessed (Gen.12:3). Creation, then, does not express God’s highest intention for the world but should be seen as the means by which God’s grace of election could be realized. God has always intended his relationship with the world to be a graced relationship, not just a “natural” relationship. Human creatures are meant to be more than creatures: they are to be God’s people, living in full knowledge of and relationship with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Sin, however, disrupted this relationship and must be overcome. The revelation of God in Christ addresses this problem. But Christ’s coming is not primarily focused on the sin problem. Even if humans had not sinned, Jesus Christ would still have needed to come in the fullness of time, because only through that revelation is covenantal relationship realized in the fullest measure—as communion with the triune God. This newer “storyline” has found support in what is called nonsupersessionism, which sees the church of the New Testament as standing in continuity with Israel as the one people of God rather than displacing Israel.
Implied in this newer canonical narrative is another way of looking at the relationship between the church broadly conceived and creation, and that is to see it not as another entity within the larger creation but as prior to creation. The church precedes creation in that it is what God has in view from all eternity and creation is the means by which God fulfills his eternal purpose in time. The church does not exist in order to fix a broken creation; rather, creation exists to realize the church. To be sure, the church’s coming into being does require the overcoming of sin, but that is quite different from saying that the problem of sin is the reason for the church’s being. God made the world in order to make the church, not vice versa. Scripture itself testifies to the logical priority of the church over creation by referring to the church as chosen in Christ before the creation of the world (Eph.1:14), or to Christ who was slain before the foundation of the world (Rev.13:8). The world, as Robert Jensen puts it, is the “raw material” from which God will bring the church to perfection in Christ. The church is not an entity within the larger culture but is a culture” (Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology [Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2006], 22-23.)

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