A Grand Epic?

So Sunday night I preached the first in a series titled Passion - this week, it was a Passion for Truth and I was exploring the scriptures as a source of truth. I was heavily influenced in my approach to John 1 by NT Wright's view of the Bible as a story which gains its authority from the power of the whole story of Creation and Redemption as an extension of God's own authority. I hope I haven't done an injustice to his thoughts in paraphrasing it like that!

Meantime I came across this article by Scot McKnight - he has a blog which I read a lot (check out the side bar). Scot McKnight is professor of religious studies at North Park University in Chicago and the author of the upcoming book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. The article has now been followed up with an online version of a quiz which allows you to test how you actually approach the reading of the scriptures.

Take the test! I tested as a low-end progressive with a score of 70 (its starts at 66). According to the test, the Progressive:

"...tends to see the Bible as historically shaped and culturally conditioned, and yet most still consider it the Word of God for today. Following a progressive hermeneutic, for the Word to speak in our day, one must interpret what the Bible said in its day and discern its pattern for revelation in order to apply it to our world. The strength, as with the moderate but even more so, is the challenge to examine what the Bible said in its day, and this means the progressives tend to be historians. But the problems for the progressives are predictable: Will the Bible's so-called "plain meaning" be given its due and authoritative force to challenge our world? Or will the Bible be swallowed by a quest to find modern analogies that sometimes minimize what the text clearly says?"

Love to know where you come out...bound to be some heretics out there!