Recent posts

Ten things the church can learn about missions from a narrative-historical perspective
I follow the output of the Gospel Coalition site on the look out for material that I can use to illustrate the differences between, in this case, conservative theological readings of the New Testament and a narrative-historical reading. I do the same, naturally, for liberal-progressive thinkers,… ( | 1 comment)
How to pray the prayer of Jabez
There’s an odd little story about a man called Jabez lodged in the middle of the twenty-three verses that make up the list of the descendants of Judah in 1 Chronicles 4. It was made very famous twenty years ago by Bruce Wilkinson’s best-selling book The Prayer of Jabez, which exposed a… ( | 0 comments)
Falling sideways: why not much changed when Adam and Eve sinned
What happens when Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What are the consequences of their sin? How does it change things? The common assumption is that the “fall” is a catastrophic ontological event that corrupts not only humanity but the whole… ( | 5 comments)
How did Jesus’ disciples imagine that he would “redeem Israel”?
Shortly after the death of Jesus, two from the band of his disciples are met by the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-35). He asks them what they are talking about, and, a little surprised by the ignorance of the fellow, they update him on what has just transpired in Jerusalem. It would… ( | 18 comments)
Why the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost marked an end, not a beginning
One of the reasons why we routinely miss the point of Peter’s explanation of what happened on the day of Pentecost is, I think, that the canonical arrangement of books encourages us to read Acts as the beginning of something new rather than as a direct continuation of what went before. The New… ( | 3 comments)
Jamie Davies on the apocalyptic Paul: from interpretation to theology
Jamie Davies makes J. Louis Martyn the pivot point of his retrospective summary of the history of modern investigations into the thought of the “apocalyptic Paul.” Martyn is the terminus ad quem of the longer history of research going back to Johannes Weiss and the terminus a quo… ( | 2 comments)
Jamie Davies on the apocalyptic Paul: the J. Louis Martyn school
In the second chapter of The Apocalyptic Paul: Retrospect and Prospect, Jamie Davies introduces what is effectively a “school” of modern interpreters who have built on J. Louis Martyn’s account of Paul’s apocalyptic thought: Martinus de Boer, Leander Keck, Alexandra Brown, Beverly Gaventa… ( | 1 comment)
Jamie Davies on the apocalyptic Paul: from Weiss to Martyn
Jamie Davies’ book The Apocalyptic Paul: Retrospect and Prospect comes in two parts: a look back down the long road that has led to attempts to assimilate the “apocalyptic Paul” into systematic theologies, and a look forward to see where that road might take us next. I’m not sure how far I… ( | 0 comments)
The narrative vocabulary of rape in the Old Testament and the counter-example of Amnon and Tamar
I asked in the previous post about blaming Bathsheba, “If it was a rape, why isn’t it presented as a rape?” James McGrath asks to the contrary, if we call Amnon’s assault of Tamar “rape,” why do we not apply the same category to David’s sexual encounter with Bathsheba? “Where in the story is… ( | 3 comments)
No one’s blaming Bathsheba
James McGrath made this comment in response to my treatment of Bathsheba’s bathing in my previous two posts (see the links below): I found myself unable to keep reading after you blamed Bathsheba for washing herself after the end of her menstruation as the Law mandates, in a place that… ( | 3 comments)
Further notes on David and Bathsheba
In response to the last post asking whether David raped Bathsheba a couple of online commentaries defending the rape interpretation were flagged up on Facebook: David’s Rape of Bathsheba and Murder of Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12) by the Theology of Work Project, and Restoring Bathsheba, a sermon by Wil… ( | 3 comments)
Did David rape Bathsheba?
Reading parts of a recent bad-tempered Twitter row about David and Bathsheba, I began to wonder whether Bathsheba is to be regarded in any sense as responsible for the turn of events. I was told that “she was really asking for it” interpretations are wildly inappropriate fantasies and that I should… ( | 17 comments)
The marginalised servant of the Lord: existence, function, and dysfunction
I have two preliminary points to make from a biblical perspective. First, the story of Jesus and the early church as told in the New Testament is not a departure from the story of Israel. On the contrary, we must insist that it is much closer in presuppositions, outlook, and expectations to… ( | 1 comment)
When prophecy mostly didn’t fail
Matthew Hartke posted a couple of pages from Robert Carroll’s book When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament on Twitter last week. It got me fretting. The argument of the book is that there is evidence in the Old Testament of how Israel… ( | 4 comments)
What did it mean to be the “fragrant aroma of Christ”?
What did Christ smell like? Paul says that the apostles—he has in mind at least himself, Timothy, and Titus—are the “fragrant aroma of Christ to God among those being saved and among those perishing” (2 Cor. 2:15). Careless readers of scripture that we are, we happily assume that the goal of… ( | 0 comments)
Oops, mustn’t forget it’s Pentecost Sunday this weekend
With the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in full swing here in the UK, it’s easy to forget that it’s Pentecost Sunday this weekend. To compensate for the oversight and to make sure that the narrative-historical perspective doesn’t get neglected, here is a series of seven posts that I did ten years… ( | 0 comments)
No, not that undomesticated Jesus, the other one
Allan Bevere makes the important point that Jesus was not crucified because he went around telling people to love one another. “It doesn’t take a profound thinker to know that the primary motivation for this dehistorizing and detheologizing of Jesus is to domesticate his life and work into… ( | 9 comments)
What does Luke’s account of Paul’s visit to Athens tell us about how to do “missional church”?
In the six week course I have been doing on “missional church” for King’s School of Theology I have made quite extensive use of the story of Paul’s visit to Athens in Acts 17:16-34 to underline the point that mission in the New Testament is not about the salvation of individuals, it is a call to… ( | 2 comments)
Not sure about the charts: please explain…
I have been having an online conversation with someone who is rather suspicious of the charts I have been using (such as the one below) to map the story of the people of God throughout the ages. One of the problems is that I have not defined the y-axis. My assumption was that the chart rather… ( | 0 comments)
Kingdom of God and missional church: not as difficult to define as you might think
Frankly, it is an absurdity that we still have such a hard time making sense of Jesus’ core proclamation about the kingdom of God. The problem comes up again in another book by Alan Roxburgh on “missional church,” this time co-written with Scott Boren: Introducing the Missional Church: What It… ( | 2 comments)