I had a conversation last week with an old friend, Scott Lencke, about what I have been calling a “narrative-historical” approach to the reading of the Bible and of the New Testament in particular. Scott has made it available on his new podcast, or you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
He says that the approach will be a “great challenge to our typical evangelical approach, but one I think is worth chewing over in order to better read the Bible.” Agreed, but it may be less of a challenge here in the UK than in other parts of the English-speaking evangelical world.
I spent the day yesterday at a gathering of church leaders, mostly from an old charismatic network, listening to Rikk Watts hammering home the message that the Bible is Jewish story and history, not theology, its “truth” is contingent and contextual, not abstract and universal—and that this way of thinking has real missional and apologetic power.
I wasn’t myself persuaded by his contention that the Synoptic writers implicitly identify Jesus with YHWH—it seems to me that what is going on is delegation, not identification. But no one seemed to dispute the hermeneutical premise of his argument. Rikk and I co-teach a module on Jesus and the Gospels for King’s School of Theology, so we can’t be too far apart.
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