A crucial responsibility for Christian interpreters of Scripture today, Richard Bauckham insists, is to seek to understand our contemporary context and to explore the Bibles relevance to it in ways that reflect serious critical engagement with that context. In <i>The Bible in the Contemporary World</i> Bauckham models how this task can be carried out.<br><br>Bauckham calls for our reading of Scripture to lead us into increased engagement with the important issues of todays world, including globalization, environmental degradation, and widespread poverty. He works to bring biblical texts into relationship with these contemporary realities by means of the Bibles metanarrative of God and the world, in which Gods purpose takes effect in the salvation and fulfillment of the world as his cherished creation.