The Origin of the Bible - Flipbook - Page 21
THE BIBLE
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might be translated into them in written form. And this is but a
minor sample of the civilizing mission of the Bible in the world.
This civilizing mission is the direct effect of the central mes
sage of the Bible. It may be thought surprising that one should
speak of a central message in a collection of writings that reflects
the history of civilization in the Near East over several millennia.
But a central message there is, and it is the recognition of this
that has led to the common treatment of the Bible as a book, and
not simply a collection of books—just as the Greek plural biblia
(books) became the Latin singular biblia (the book).
The Bible’s central message is the story of salvation, and
throughout both Testaments three strands in this unfolding
story can be distinguished: the bringer of salvation, the way of
salvation, and the heirs of salvation. This could be reworded in
terms of the covenant idea by saying that the central message of
the Bible is God’s covenant with men, and that the strands are
the mediator of the covenant, the basis of the covenant, and the
covenant people. God himself is the Savior of his people; it is
he who confirms his covenant mercy with them. The bringer of
salvation, the mediator of the covenant, is Jesus Christ, the Son
of God. The way of salvation, the basis of the covenant, is God’s
grace, calling forth from his people a response of faith and obedience. The heirs of salvation, the covenant people, are the Israel of
God, the church of God.
The continuity of the covenant people from the Old Testa
ment to the New Testament is obscured for the reader of the common English Bible because “church” is an exclusively New
Testament word, and one naturally thinks of it as something that
began in the New Testament period. But the reader of the Greek
Bible was confronted by no new word when he found ekklesia in
the New Testament; he had already met it in the Septuagint as
one of the words used to denote Israel as the “assembly” of the
Lord’s people. To be sure, it has a new and fuller meaning in the