Mature reflections by one of our most eminent scholars on how the Bible speaks to the most pressing social and political issues facing the world today. A crucial responsibility for Christian interpreters of Scripture today, Richard Bauckham insists, is to seek to understand our contemporary context and to explore the Bible’s relevance to it in ways that reflect serious critical engagement with that context. In The Bible in the Contemporary WorldBauckham models how this task can be carried out. Bauckham calls for our reading of Scripture to lead us into increased engagement with the important issues of today’s world, including globalization, environmental degradation, and widespread poverty.

He works to bring biblical texts into relationship with these contemporary realities by means of the Bible’s metanarrative of God and the world, in which God’s purpose takes effect in the salvation and fulfillment of the world as his cherished creation.