In a Midrash story, Moses addresses the people of Israel at Sinai; he then turns and addresses a school of rabbinical students living many centuries later. What does this story imply?

Moses is contemporary to both the people at Sinai and the rabbinical students. As Moses addresses one group, he turns to address another; time is compressed to an immediate succession of events, even though they are centuries apart. This is an image of vocative address and hearing today.

According to Scripture, when we hear, it is always today, however many centuries have elapsed. When we hear, Who then was a neighbour? … Go and do likewise, it is as if Jesus turned from the lawyer who questioned him and speaks directly to us. What are the historical implications of this? Surely such compression of time destroys any comprehension of a text entirely from its original context?—a procedure known as historicism.

To assume we can know everything about a text’s context and participants as transparently accessible is to negate its capacity to address us anew. A text merely becomes an artefact for endorsing presumed information or hypotheses about the past. Yet within Scripture’s pervasive impetus as a living word, its central protagonists continually turn to us and address us in our time.

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Moses or Jesus addressing different generations over centuries of time is contingent on one crucial factor—the word of God; that God speaks today. Yet, as talking animals are to fables, speaking gods or angel voices are to myths in the minds of many.

In gospel testimony, God speaks and a reality otherwise than our own is disclosed. This seems alien to our time in which no voice is heard but our own, even if this is cast in a selection of “diverse voices.” The reiterated gospel affirmation by a voice from God—this is my beloved Son. Listen to him—is assumed to be mythical as representing cleverly invented but obsolete stories.

Images of Scripture that speak of God’s possibilities surpassing natural possibilities are designated as myth in a classic modern signature for a thinly disguised dismissal of anything that does not fit specified categories of reality. Yet apocalypse or revelation is characteristic of biblical testimony to God who speaks as people hear otherwise than an echo of their own voices ricocheting around within a closed reality.

While some people claim to be myth detectives, they do not recognise their immersion in modern myths such as value-neutral knowledge, inevitable improvement of human nature, every human problem has a political panacea or a technical solution; they do not recognise their enthrallment with postmodern myths such as any perspective has veracity, relativism is the basis for global harmony or everything is seamlessly and spiritually one as vaguely divine.

Benign or violent, contemporary myths are not generally recognized, for such myths reflect an assumed reality. How then can people claim to identify presumed biblical myths and above all, a “myth” that in grace, God speaks to people today?

Some images of biblical apocalypse are surreal. This is because the reality to which all apocalypse points is always pending. Paradoxically, this reality has already begun even as it is also yet to occur. We cannot integrate the future into our lives; it arrives too often as surprise. This is a perennial human lament. Yet much more so, the future of God arrives in excess of our expectations, even as a promised future. Everything in biblical testimony, from the glory of God to the salvation of humans, is like this. Without such excess possibilities, there would be no Christian faith in testimony to God’s self-disclosure in veracity and extravagant grace.

Myths are timeless images of the way things have always been or the way things should be but cannot be. Even if a myth is cast as a rational ideal that yearns for what could be without the frustrating contingencies of time and human freedom, it is already exhausted as a vision that is extricated from the difficult realities of life. A myth can be aligned with any aspect of our experience as a form of explanation; it can also be dismissed as an unnecessary façade on observable recurrences of life. Like a dream that evaporates, the reiterated but dreamy mourning, warnings and yearnings of myth hold no new potential, unlike relationships with their tangible future, which can be surprising and creative in their freedom.

Biblical apocalypse is a reality-check on being human, while offering unexpected possibilities for life in grace. Our awareness of human fragility is intensified, even as our possibilities are disclosed. If images are cast of a pending future reality of God, there is no way of calculating their impossibility, for this future is always surprising as creative. Apocalypse of the intimate and future reality of God for humanity is offered as a gift in excess because biblical testimony is about God and the extraordinary not the ordinary.

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The modern propensity to reduce an entity to its smallest components so as to analyze and comprehend the parts of a larger whole might be appropriate for machines, perhaps for understanding aspects of organic life or organizations but seldom for relationships and even less so, for hearing God speak today. Postmodern elevation of diverse voices without distinction conveys the presumed equality and freedom of relativity. This may stimulate infotainment contests in asserting social truth by popular applause; it also reflects pervasive social ennui without durable relationships, with cynicism concerning any sovereign word that could speak with veracity and intimacy today. Interpreters of Scripture who are aligned with either propensity are deceiving themselves and others.

Christian identity and purpose are not nurtured by reticence because either we have not been inducted into the right methods for adjudicating the meaning of biblical writings, which is a modern propensity, or everyone’s viewpoint is assumedly equal as relative, which is a postmodern propensity. Imperatives to Christian testimony surpass by terminating, potentially endless talk about interpretation. Christian Scripture is only engaged as the word of God is heard in testimony to the gospel by which, Jesus turns from a Samaritan woman to address people in Africa, Indonesia or Australia today in grace and truth as risen Lord of life.

If Christian eschatology is anticipation of the future reality of God even now becoming present in Christ, then the testimony of Scripture surpasses any category or method that locks its writings into past but perpetually contested contexts. As seamlessly one with the prophetic recognition that God writes on the heart and the Spirit leads into all truth, Christian Scripture exhibits the expectant and joyous intimacy of a Pentecost community participating in the future reality of God as a gift now disclosed and experienced. The Spirit’s voice in testimony to Christ leaps centuries of time as we are addressed by God, specifically and personally in any today.

In biblical testimony, the word of God is conveyed dynamically through story, parable, testimonial, epistle, song, imperative and prayer. Worship, proclamation, reflection, discipleship and responsibility are everywhere occasions in which the word of God is heard. This testimony is evangelical as good news—a message to be relayed by messengers (angelois) and therefore angelic.

In order to hear, we must inhabit the “strange” reality to which Scripture gives its testimony for ears to hear the timbre of God’s word. Triune disclosure is vocative—we are addressed as called; our response is solicited and decisive within life. The call of God and our response in faith to specific imperatives and responsibilities are defined by the gospel of Jesus Christ, representing the integral Christian context for hearing God speak today. And today is that time alone in which we can hear God speaking.