Why Troas?

Reason for the name:

The place of vision for evangelism (the man of Macedonia, Acts 16:9)

It is the place where Paul talked on a Sunday all day and through the night, so much so that Eutychus fell asleep and died (Acts 20:7–12). So it is also a risky place to meet.

What’s the aim of the Troas Fellowship?

Get beyond a surface understanding of the Scriptures.

The problem I have in church is that the sermons that I’ve heard over many years tend to be strong on application for one’s life and character but usually at the expense of being weak on biblical understanding. There is a familiar narrative of Jesus being our personal saviour, who would have died for us even if we were the only person on the planet, and who has paid the price so that we don’t have to. He took the punishment for sin from his heavenly father that we deserved ever since Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. Our task is to share this good news of forgiveness with the world until he comes again to take us to our heavenly glory. Other biblical passages are read through that narrative lens and used as exemplars for having faith in God even when it is tough, or for showing loving kindness to our neighbour even what that’s costly. The appropriate response is gratitude for Jesus’ costly death on the cross, faith that we don’t need to do anything to earn it, and encouragement to tell others that they too can find this same forgiveness.

Going to focus on biblical theology

Some sermons focus on what the church believes its doctrines to be. Perhaps we have looked at the Apostles’ Creed, or gone through a systematic theology textbook. We look at the attributes of God, the person and work of Jesus, the nature of the church, the end times, and so on. And in each of these topics we’ll draw upon many Bible verses to support our views. However, the Bible was not primarily written to answer these kinds of questions. It is a good thing to do, but it is not what the authors had in mind when they were writing Scripture. Doctrine packages our beliefs into an orderly account by extracting theology from various books of the Bible: a verse here, a passage there. Many preachers find the actual content and structure of the Bible a problem to be overcome.

But what if we were to ask what the Bible is concerned about? The creeds came out of disputes over heresies that the early church had to deal with, and so the focus for doctrine has been to decide what is orthodox and what is heresy. Fine. But what if we were to hear the Bible on its own terms to hear what it is concerned with. That’s the approach known as biblical theology, and when we listen to the Bible in this way we discover that it is very interested in Israel, in Jerusalem, in victory and in vindication for the oppressed. It anticipates God acting in history for his people, and to restore the world as it should be. And it is especially interested to learn who is to be Israel’s king and lord.

New ways of reading old texts

One of the surprising things we learn about the Bible is that the New Testament has ways of reading the Old Testament that surprise us, perhaps even alarm us. There has been a long running debate about whether we, as Christians, should emulate the way the New Testament writers use the Old Testament, or whether we should just accept that they were inspired, we’re not, so they can get away with doing what they do, but we can’t. Biblical theology believes that not only should we accept what the NT writers say, but also learn from them how they read the OT. We need to learn to read the OT like they do, which is rather different to the way that the church has tended to read the OT. The main ways of reading the OT are:

• a storyline leading up to Jesus,
• typology illustrating the resurrection, and
• prophecy that is fulfilled in Jesus.

It should come as no surprise that the different ways of reading the Bible are disputed, which is why Jesus ended up disagreeing with the Pharisees and Sadducees over their reading of the text. Paul also disagreed with other Jewish Christians such as the men from James over their reading of the Old Testament. It shouldn’t surprise us if we find it hard working out how to read the Bible if so many others have found it difficult too. What is important is to be willing to follow the clues that we find in the Bible itself. The Troas Fellowship is dedicated to hearing the Bible’s own voice and reading it on its own terms.