The Fifth Act

There is a significant change which gives better direction to what I aim to achieve.Previously this blog was called Third Day Dawning indicating the New had commenced through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. While I still hold to that I think the new Heading - Fifth Act - focusses my attention on what I should be engaged in and to what I am committed.
Bishop Tom Wright portrays the Biblical story as a five act drama. CREATION ... FALL .. THE STORY OF ISRAEL ... THE STORY OF JESUS [GOSPEL] ... the FIFTH ACT ... the Church and what it ought to be doing.
The first four acts are there to read, consider ... but what is to follow in this Fifth Act? The following is an explanation. It comes from the website www.ntwrightproject.com more of that a little later.

1. Five-Act Hermeneutic
Wright uses the analogy of a five-act Shakespearean play to explain his biblical hermeneutic. Suppose the fifth act of the play has been lost, while the first four are intact. What could be done if we agreed that the play ought to be staged? We would gather the most trained and experienced Shakespearian actors, immerse them in the first four acts of the play’s script, then once they had become familiar with the language and setting of the play, and most importantly its plot and impetus, and fully imbued with their characters, we would put them on a stage and ask them to carry the story forward by acting out a fifth act for themselves. In "The New Testament and the People of God", Wright explains:
“…part of the initial task of the actors chosen to improvise the new final act will be to immerse themselves with full sympathy in the first four acts, but not so as merely to parrot what has already been said. They cannot go and look up the right answers. Nor can they simply imitate the kinds of things that their particular character did in the early acts. A good fifth act will show a proper final development, not merely a repetition, of what went before” (p. 141).
Wright contends that if the biblical story is a five-act drama, the church finds itself living in the fifth act. The five acts are thus: I-Creation; II-Fall; III-Israel; IV-Jesus. The fifth act is formed by the writing of the New Testament – including the gospels – and “would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of Revelation) of how the play is supposed to end” (NTPG, p. 142). Scripture is authoritative in that God’s people “live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion” (p. 143).
This means the church cannot disregard the first four acts by taking the story wherever it wills and the wind blows, but neither can it simply repeat the four first acts as if the story were frozen in time. The church needs both faithfulness and innovation; both consistency and creativity. The ecclesial identity advanced here is that the church has been given the vocation to be the people of God in the fifth act of creation. What Christ accomplished through the cross and resurrection (“it is finished”), the church is called to implement.

What do we say to the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” when he explains that the Son of God is too reckless a character to have around risking the church’s good work? That the question was asked highlights a most serious problem that has beset the Church during its history.
The "Church" replaces Christ in 'its mission' - therefore it becomes NO mission.