I still remember the moment when I first walked down into the Norrington Room of Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford. It would have been the mid 90s, when I was a teenager. The experience brought home to me, more forcefully than any statistic, that I would go to my grave having read only a tiny proportion of the world's books. The Norrington Room was at one time (and it may still be) the largest single room selling books anywhere in the world. It has more than three miles of shelving in an open plan layout that leaves you gasping, overwhelmed by the vast quantity of book spines - each spine representing months or years of labor by someone passionate about their subject.
With so many books filling up not just the Norrington Room but our global shelf-space, and only a limited number of years to do our reading, it seems fair to require every new book to have a solid rationale for its existence. You could call this the Norrington Room Test. So, with that in mind, how would I defend the publication this year of my Bible overview, "The Book of the Covenant," especially given the large number of Bible overviews already available?
Unless I'm mistaken, The Book of the Covenant is the only Bible overview written at a popular level that unfolds the Bible's story covenant by covenant. In the Bible a "covenant" is an agreement that creates a relationship (marriage is one example of a covenant that everyone is familiar with). God makes seven covenants with mankind in the Bible and each one moves salvation history forward in significant ways. So simply by looking at each of those covenants we find ourselves traveling through the Bible's story: from creation to the flood, from the formation of a chosen people to the giving of the law, and so on. This approach avoids the temptation of bringing our own mold to the Bible and forcing its story into that mold, because the covenantal structure is embedded in Scripture itself. There's no more organic way to tell the Bible's story.
A covenantal Bible overview already exists at an academic level. O. Palmer Robertson's much-loved book "The Christ of the Covenants" takes exactly the approach described above, but it was plainly written with seminary students and pastors in mind. When the great Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd Jones was a young man, a friend said of his preaching, "It is wonderful hay but they cannot all reach it" (he was alluding to the racks of hay rigged high up in stables by farmers for their horses). I think it's fair to apply that line to Robertson's book, and so my aim was to "lower the hay" by writing a slightly more accessible Bible overview that took the same covenantal approach. The result is "The Book of the Covenant: the Bible's unfolding story of relationship with God," published by The Good Book Company and available here.
I don't expect my book will ever make it onto the shelves of the Norrington Room in Oxford. But I'd be absolutely thrilled if readers decide that it does pass the Norrington Room Test.
We are currently reading "The Book of the Covenant" as part of a virtual reading group this summer. We encourage you to get your copy, print or ebook, and join us by following and interacting with us on Twitter, Facebook, and the blog. Use this code acctheo to get the print copy at a discounted price!
Norrington Room
