Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Luke
Overview
Luke intuitively understands the importance of storytelling as the key to human growth, change, and healing. Speaking to the crisis of faith faced by his church, Luke retells the story of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection as a means of addressing the spiritual struggles that resurface generation after generation. Touching on issues of belonging, authority, tradition, behavior, and hope, Frederick W. Schmidt offers a reading of Luke’s Gospel that speaks to today’s reader.
Top Highlights
“Luke knew this too. He understood the need to recount the past, to put it in order. He knew that this kind of storytelling helped to explain the present. And he knew that if he could do that, he could also describe the future. Addressing the needs of other Christians, he used the stories he had heard told about the ministry of Jesus to help his circle in the ancient church understand where they had been, where they were, and where they were going.” (Page 2)
“Armed with certainty and a commitment to making Scripture speak to the contemporary believer, all they actually accomplish is the naïve, if not cynical credentialing of their own views.” (Page xiv)
“What is interesting about stories of this kind is that they not only help us to recount the past, they help us to imagine a way forward. Until we’ve told our story, we are often at a loss to know how to go on. We live uneasily with the stuck-place we find ourselves in and we can drift through days on end without making any progress. It is only when we wrap a story around what has happened to us that we can tell to others that we can imagine a new chapter that begins with the words, ‘And then …’” (Page 2)
“We hear (and see) little more than what we already know and we interpose our own story on the story Scripture offers to tell. What is lost as a result? The ability to hear something more—a new chapter, a different path, an unexpected ending—and without that, we lose the ability to grow and change.” (Pages 5–6)
“Christianity is an incarnational faith—we believe in a God who takes on human form. We believe in a church led by the Holy Spirit that occupies the historical and physical realm as an embodied expression of God’s will for the world.” (Page xvi)
- Title: Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Luke
- Author: Frederick W. Schmidt
- Series: Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Study Series
- Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
- Print Publication Date: 2009
- Logos Release Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Bible. N.T. Luke › Criticism, interpretation, etc
- ISBNs: 9780819223616, 0819223611
- Resource ID: LLS:CONVSCRLUKE
- Resource Type: text.monograph.bible-study
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T22:58:32Z