Confessing Evangelical

The problem with reading the Bible as an individual is that that may well be what you end up doing: reading the Bible as an individual, rather than as a member of the Church, to whom the Bible is addressed.

As the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, puts it in his book The Revelation of God (p.223, emphasis added):

Since the advent of printing and literacy it has become common for the Bible to be read by individuals. This obscures the corporate significance of Scripture as the instrument by which Christ rules his church. The narrative element of Scripture, indeed, the narrative line, is of fundamental significance in revealing not merely the person of God, but the identity and nature of the church.

A little later (p.226) Jensen provides further confirmation of the point made in my previous post:

At the very centre of the Bible's authority and unity is Jesus Christ ... the fact that "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" (1 Tim 1:15) is the central message of the Christian Bible, and the interpretative key for the whole. The entire context enables us to comprehend the meaning of Jesus Christ's entry into the world; Jesus Christ's great work provides our access to understanding the Scriptures. Indeed, when we fail to realize the centrality of Christ in his work of saving sinners, the Bible becomes a mysterious and fissiparous book. The importance that the study of hermeneutics has assumed in modern Scripture debate partly results from an unwillingness to recognize the gospel-centredness of Scripture. Other messages must then be found to explain the importance of the Bible for the church.

As I hope those quotes demonstrate, Jensen's book is well worth reading. In tackling the theme of revelation, rather than following the "traditional" approach of starting with general considerations of what revelation is, the different types of revelation (general vs special etc), he chooses instead to start with the gospel. The gospel, Jensen argues, is not only the most important revelation of all, but provides the model for how God reveals Himself. To deny that God reveals Himself "propositionally" is to deny that He reveals Himself by way of promises, which in turn is to deny the validity of the gospel, which is entirely dependent on promises stated in verbal, propositional terms. Stimulating stuff.