The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping. The Bible tells us who we are, where we are, and where we are going. In fact, its identity-shaping, Spirit-mentored direction propels its readers into a missional life. Eugene Peterson warns of the danger of making the Bible after our own Trinitarian image: my Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings. Instead, if we read the Bible aright, we are remade--since the Bible as been sent as a word from God to us--into God's image, the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ...
...This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to work its story into persons of God so that they may become doers of the good. Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons who are in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. Scripture, I somethings have to tell myself, is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretative traditions and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings or in monographs and academic journals (very few care to read). Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as amissional text that shapes them so that they can live in the story that the church tells in Scripture.
Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 146-147.
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