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Richard Bauckham is one of the most consistently interesting, perceptive and accessible New Testament scholars writing today, with a string of highly– and rightly–lauded publications behind him. This volume collects 14 essays (actually one is a sermon) most of which have been published before (although readers are unlikely to have read any but a tiny number). They encompass the wide Bauckham’s wide interests – he has written previously not only detailed exegeses of New Testament texts but also on freedom, politics, and gender issues – and they coalesce, as the title suggests, around the light that a careful reading of scripture can shed upon contemporary problems. They represent, in the author’s words, “a coherent and consistent … approach to the Bible and to the contemporary world that I have developed over a long period.” (ix)
This is perhaps half true for, while being consistent the volume doesn’t quite cohere as much as Bauckham would wish. The book’s themes are big ones – postmodernity and metanarratives, freedom and individualism, consumerism, globalisation, the environment. Clutching tightly to the Bible when walking into such knotted and complex territory is fraught with dangers, into which many Christians gracelessly fall. “The Bible says…” are three of the most dangerous words on earth with which to start a political, economic, social, or even environmental sentence.
Bauckham, not surprisingly, does not fall into any of these pits. When he thinks about the environment he engages with Genesis 1–3, Romans 8, and 1 Corinthians 13 not only with sophistication but with care and humility. When he writes about globalisation, in the most substantial essay in the collection, he engages with Babel, Nebuchadnezzar, Ezekiel, and Revelation in a way that opens up, rather than shuts down, approaches. There is nothing to fault his approach, still less scholarship.
The problem is that the volume does end up feeling a bit disparate. This is partly because the contributions vary in length (from six to 25 pages) and in focus (for all that postmodernity, individualism and globalisation are related, they remain distinct and different issues). But it is also because the volume remains stubbornly no more than the sum of its parts, offering no vantage or framework from which the reader may grasp the big picture of what Bauckham is doing.
This criticism is, I acknowledge, slightly unfair. Bauckham explicitly rejects the idea that the volume pretends “to some kind of balanced and comprehensive overview” (xii) and so to critique it for not offering one is unwarranted. The (ironic) problem is that its final subject matter – identifying “the points at which the trends of our time clash with the direction of God’s purpose for the good of his creation, as the Bible delineates it” – invites a holistic analysis that the reader never quite gets.
No matter: Bauckham writes well and I would recommend this book to anyone unfamiliar with his work without hesitation. Let it be, however, a gateway drug to his other, Class A publications.
The Bible in the Contemporary World: Exploring Texts and Contexts. Then and Now by Richard Bauckham is published by SPCK.
This review was originally published in Theology , Vol. 119(5), September 2016.
