The Five Movements of the

Word of God

Autumn 2017 Ecclesiology Exam Union Seminary, Wenzhou, China

After several weeks of theological discussions on the nature of the church (working with a seminary in the ‘Far East’), the Students were required to select ten of over fifteen essay questions. For those who follow my teaching mission, not only when and where but what, I share the first question in my final exam. Please take note of ” The Fifth Movement.”

Q #1. The Word of God has 5 distinct movements in reaching its final destination. Please name these expanding on the last movement for its significance in understanding the nature of the church.

A #1. From the times of Antiquity, through The Prophets, God spoke both words to his people in the form of prohibitions and promises. These promises were primarily about a blessing God would send to them and through them to all peoples ( Genesis 12:1-3 & Hebrews 1:1-3). This blessedness, both spiritual and material, was declared to make its advent into history through a promised messiah. This is the first movement.

The second movement occurred when the Prophetic “Word became flesh” (John 1:1-3&14) in Jesus of Nazareth. Much to the confusion of many, including even the prophet John the Baptist, Jesus’ messiah-ship, when it arrived on the scene, instead of bringing gloom and doom – the vengeance of God on the ungodly and deliverance to the Jewish people of God from their enemies, took an enigmatic form. The messiah made no powerful entry rather he showed up as a sage, a storyteller, as a teacher who opened up the truth of the way of the Kingdom of God to the common people’s minds and often applied this truth with withering prophetic power to those in power exposing their hypocrisy. The mystery of this messiah’s way was complete when whilst mixing and ministering to the lowly people with great compassion, healing and forgiving their sins, he finally allowed himself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter and weathered the gloom and doom, the judgment of God against sinful humanity (“my God, my God why hast thou forsaken me” Matthew 27:45-50).  This was the second movement of the word of God which the Apostle John attested to in the opening of his Gospel, explicitly stating that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh ( John 1:1-14)

Fifty days after Passover- Easter, the third movement of the word of God commenced its career empowered and clarified by the resurrection.  After Easter, the Apostles boldly declared the crucified Jesus of Nazareth to be the promised messiah and living Lord through whom the sins of Jew and Gentile had been judged and forgiven, and fellowship with God restored. God’s kingdom had come near to all humanity, crossing over the boundary of the Prophet’s predictions of a new future into the present poised to make its full and final revelation. This was a bold intruding word of grace and Life requiring faith and repentance. This Apostolic repacking of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as Gospel is the third movement of the word of God.

In due time, after the passing of the Apostles, the Church collected the letters and Gospels of the Apostles and canonized them as the New Testament. Herein the Apostolic witness was formalized and became the bequest of the church anchoring it once and for all times to the Apostolic witness. Henceforth the church was not free to become what it, or the world around it, willed it to become but was destined to return time and again to this singular witness, to stand and re stand on its Apostolic shoulders alone, so as to reform itself and realign itself in accord with this witnesses’ charter. In this way, alone, the church was predestined to sort through the complexity of the present and find its way into the future that God was and is continually calling it to witness to. This is the fourth movement of the Word of God.

The fifth Movement of the Word of God: Through the Church (i.e., where two or three are gathered in my name) under the initiative and power of the Spirit, the canonized formalized Apostolic Word time and again becomes freed up from its lettered fixity to speak God’s grace and life in time and place with effective power. When this occurs, souls hear and believe it and henceforth belong to the coming kingdom of God. Only through the power of the Spirit does this word come alive again, become, as the writer of Hebrews states, ” sharper than a two-edged sword piercing bone and marrow.” When this occurs, the word brings to bear light that exposes prevailing forms of idolatry in any given time and place. Moved by the truth carried by the word and the power of the Spirit, women, and men are spiritually set free and henceforth live by grace and gratitude, repenting of their sins. The Spirit, reinvigorating the Apostolic Gospel of Christ through its creation and instrument the church, performs this liberating miracle over and over again. Believers witnessing, preaching, teaching, mediating the Apostolic word of life in whatever way they can communicate the word of God one to another. It was Martin Luther who grasped this distinction between the word in Scripture and the reincarnation of this word in preaching in time and place.  This fifth movement of the word of God is the timely reinvigoration and often creative interpretation and application of the good canonized Apostolic Word of God performed by believers under the guidance of the Spirit so as to enable this canonized truth in the text to speak directly to a particular people or person caught within a particular set of conditions (else all that one would need to do is read aloud passages of Scripture and take one’s seat silently or simply gathers one’s satchel and goes home). Through the preaching- witnessing of the believing community, the laos – the people the formalized evangelical word in the text, so that comes alive and intersects the bondage and lies embedded in a given world, in a given time and place. When this occurs, the word ‘heats up’ and becomes like burning coal from heaven. Or as Paul to Timothy writes, “the word of God is not bound” via the Spirit, in and through the human agent, it is freed from its formal status quietly embedded in the text so as to come alive again where it can and does speak life and hope to souls for the first time, and time and time again. Repeatedly we read in the book of Revelation about the “sword of his mouth.” 

The career of the Holy Spirit acting in this way for this end commenced on the day of Pentecost. Acts 2 states that when the Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, it was like a mighty rushing wind, and it “sat upon” the Apostles like “cloven tongues of fire,” and they spoke the Gospel. Note the text states that not simply tongues sat upon them (i.e., the formal Apostolic witness, their verbal testimony that Jesus was and is the Christ-messiah). Nor does it simply state that fire sat upon them (i.e., divine power, remarkable spiritual charisma, the ability to command miracles from heaven) but “tongues of fire or fiery tongues sat upon them” (i.e., the Spirit acting according to its own purpose, timing and design caused the word of God -Apostolic witness of the Gospel of Christ, to come alive and burn with such brilliance that all lies that had been perpetrated against the identity of Jesus, mudding, distorting and darkening his true person and station, lies maliciously deployed to force his crucifixion, lingering like a dark public shadow over him after Passover weekend, all these through the power of Holy Spirit, who is described in John’s Gospel as the Spirit of Truth, were exposed naked to Satan and Jesus’ true identity was revealed as “Lord and Christ ( Acts 2:36). In this way, repentance and faith were made possible, even necessary! This is the fifth and final movement of the word of God that commenced at Pentecost (* Note –the mudding and darkening of Jesus’ true identity is the precise framework of the first sermon of Pentecost by Peter and subsequent sermons ‘remembered’ in the early chapters of Acts)

 “The Word of God is not bound” (2 Timothy 2:9 ASV), bound to the text as lettered form and Apostolic tradition, bound by worldly political, tribal, and national powers, bound by ecclesial powers who subsume it and fix it in rituals and neat doctrinal formulations. By the power of the Spirit, the Word breaks forth again and again, and when and where this occurs,  it comes alive. When this occurs, all lies enshrined and happily celebrated as truth and freedom cease to be safe. All who celebrate their moral and or social wholeness like the Pharisee who went into the temple to thank God that “he was not like other men” are in danger of being publicly exposed as spiritually diseased. But all who are wounded and broken by this world, captive to its pseudo powers, are called to Life, hope and freedom. The Apostolic Word, through the breath of the Spirit, comes, both with healing in his wings, harmless a dove, and as dangerous as a raging fire. When the Word is unbound, no one inside or outside the church is safe. All must hasten by faith and repentance for refuge in the beneficent sanctuary of the merciful Lordship of Christ. The church must attend to this Word, which has come down to us through the Apostles in the form of Gospel- good news. This word, in this Gospel (Euangelion) form, is the church’s meeting point with the Spirit and the secret of its power. In the following, I have composed a few questions and reflections that inevitably surface when the word of God is viewed through the lens of these five movements.

The Word of God, when viewed through the lens of these five movements, raises several discussion points worthy of reflection.

(1)  The Word of God viewed in light of these five movements of the word of God forces a rethink about to role doctrinal orthodoxy plays and does not play in the church.

(2) Identifying the Word of God with chapter and verse proof-texting is also called into criticism by the five-movement thesis present above.

(3) Doing the work to reconstructing the contextual meaning and the meanings tied to ancient culture and customs does not guarantee the text will come to life and speak to a contemporary situation.  

(4) If Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh, and the Gospel of Christ is the Apostolic Word of God proclaiming the saving meaning of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection to you and me in history, is the whole Bible equally the Word of God? Or is the Bible like Luther taught? “The Scriptures,” he asserted, “are like the swaddling cloths that wrapped the baby Jesus. The cloths were so tattered and human the baby they wrap so divine and precious. ” 

(5) Did the Word of God, once it achieved a standard canonized textual form, “the Bible”, and was printed and given to the people as such, render God’s Word simply available to human reach and understanding?  In other words, is the Bible in the hands of the people the living and abiding word of God? Or do we need to mind the gap recognizing that God’s word is always past and present and as present ultimately remains “God’s Word” until God speaks it to our hearts via the Holy Spirit? In this vein of thought does not the Word of God, the communication of God’s word, make itself known by way of a simple inquiry into the historical traditional word given in the text and a spiritual prayerful contemplative inquiry into its meaning then and now”? Is this word of God not only read but ‘heard’ via God speaking to us.   “Today if you hear his voice harden not your heart”. As such is not hearing the Word of God both gift and task, or a task bordered on each side by grace/gift?