Mike Morrell prompted me initially to respond to Kevin Beck’s This Book Will Change Your World, and has now posted some thought-provoking comments. Since they mainly have to do with the thesis of Re: Mission, a new post seems in order. His basic argument, if I have understood him correctly, is that while there is something appealing to the postmodern about the emphasis on the narrative particularity of biblical truth, there is still something that “points to a certain cosmic or larger scope of inclusion of all humanity in the blessings of God, not just a subset called ‘the people of God’ ”.
His first basic point has to do with Jack Miles’ reading of Luke 4:16-19 in Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God:
…Miles, narrating the story of Jesus reading Isaiah’s scroll in the temple in Luke 4, notes how Jesus stops reading mid-sentence! Jesus reads “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” but he excludes “the day of vengeance of our God” on Israel’s enemies.
Yes, Jesus stops reading Isaiah before the line about vengeance; but I do not argue that Jesus anywhere proclaims judgment on the enemies of Israel. In my view he does not look beyond the first eschatological horizon of judgment on Israel, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. I don’t think he goes on to envisage the overthrow of pagan imperialism as the arch enemy of YHWH and his people. It is the judgment and salvation of Israel that preoccupied him – he is barely interested in the inclusion of Gentiles in this salvation, let alone judgment on Rome. This is something that emerges at a later stage, as the church struggles to maintain its identity in the pagan world.
In fact, Jesus goes a step further, and tells them about the prophets’ rejection and God’s favorable visitation on the widow at Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, which Miles reads as God’s calling a truce on the particularity-of-Israel/holy war mentality and an opening of God’s blessings indiscriminately on everyone. At which point, of course, the particularists in the synagogue drove Jesus out.
I’m not so sure that the reference to Elijah and Elisha can be read so easily as signifying the opening of God’s blessings indiscriminately to everyone. He mentions these stories to explain his saying that ‘no prophet is acceptable in his own country’: Elijah was sent to a widow in Zarephath, Elisha to Naaman the Syrian, despite the fact that there were plenty of widows and lepers in Israel. It seems too much to read into this argument ‘God’s calling a truce on the particularity-of-Israel/holy war mentality’ or ‘a certain cosmic or larger scope of inclusion of all humanity in the blessings of God’. They are stories that make sense on the presumption of Israel’s sense of vocation in the world; they are used to establish an internal critique of it; but I’m not sure that they constitute an abandonment of that mentality.
That does not mean that I think Jesus supports the maintenance of Israel’s particularity by violent means; but he says little that encourages us to think that he was working to remove (rather than transform) Israel’s sense of particularity in the midst of the nations.
What changes everything, of course, is that when the Gentiles are told about what God has done for Israel (this is the character of Paul’s apostolic mission as he explains it in Romans), many of them believe and receive the same eschatological Spirit. But Paul goes to great lengths to argue that this is entirely consistent with the story of the people of God descended from Abraham. The make-up of the people of God undergoes a radical change but this is as much to make Israel jealous as anything else in Paul’s view, and it does not appear to abrogate the connection with the promise to Abraham.
Or to approach from a different angle, the New Testament repeatedly interprets Jesus’ exaltation in light of Psalm 2, which is a story about how God delivers Israel’s king when he is defied by his enemies. I don’t really see how we can read these texts without being reminded of a story of the historical existence of a particular people – over which Christ has been made Lord and King.
The New Covenant, then, seems to be (at least potentially) the universalizing of the Hebrew God’s blessing and relationship toward the human family as a whole - humans made in the Imago Dei.
The language and symbolism of the New Testament seems to me intended to preserve the unique identity of the church in its narrative continuity with Israel – or better, with the vocation originating in the Abraham stories to be a new creation people. I do not think that we are still stuck in Israel, so to speak. My argument in Re: Mission is that Paul saw the possibility that Israel might repent following the destruction of Jerusalem, which would have made a big difference to the ongoing existence of the people. That didn’t happen, and in practice the Jewish root of the tree withered away, smothered by the inrushing Gentiles. So the church becomes universal in the sense that it is a multiracial people, but the missional pattern remains the same: the descendants of Abraham are blessed so that they may be a blessing to others. This seems to me to rely precisely on the effective existence of a particular chosen people, with a particular narrative memory, who embody in themselves the original creation blessing.
If we take the incarnation seriously, at least, then Jesus’ baptism of repentance (changing courses) in the Jordan at the beginning of his public vocation is telling).
I would interpret Jesus’ ‘baptism of repentance’ differently. The issue there seems to me to be his identification with a retold exodus narrative: he is obedient Israel passing through the waters and entering the wilderness for 40 days, where he gets right the choices that Israel got wrong.
I’ll even grant you that this ‘something’ cosmic might not have been the main focus of the New Testament writers - perhaps it was least present in Jesus himself. But perhaps next-generation interpreters like Origen and, later, Gregory of Nyssa, were being faithful interpreters of the Gospel in their time, taking what was in the first use meant for the lost sheep of Israel and applying its language for the hungry unwashed masses.
This is a very interesting perspective – I think it helps to differentiate between the contingent outlook of the New Testament writers and subsequent theological reflection on the texts from a very different historical and cultural position. But I would argue that what is emerging in this post-New Testament era is a Christendom theology, profoundly influenced by Greek thought, increasingly disconnected from its narrative origins, that eventually comes to see Christianity as a universal, privileged culture. My argument would be that with the effective collapse of Christendom our best hope is to recover the historical particularity of the texts, not in order to recreate the first century church, but to gain a fresh sense of their narrative trajectory.
On the other hand - and I say this respectfully - the idea that there’s an eternally-existing subset of ‘the people of God’ bearing weak-force witness to a limited redemption enacted by a Hebrew tribal deity that will one day save them and put their world to rights is kind’ve bleak and not terribly compelling.
Respectfully, Mike, I don’t think this is what I’m saying – though I like the way you put it! The core biblical narrative, as I see it, has to do with the troubled, difficult historical existence of a people called to exist in the world as ‘new creation’ – called by God to embody collectively, as a sign to a world that has adopted a quite different agenda, the full justice, integrity, beauty and God-centredness of created life, to experience through that the original blessing of creation, and to mediate that blessing to the world. Redemption is part of that story – in fact, there are several moments when the God of this people must act to deliver his people from their enemies, from the consequences of their own stubborness and stupidity, and so on. The redemption that is in Christ is of a peculiar nature: it grounds the people in grace rather than Law. But it is still primarily a narrative moment in the story of a people. I’m not sure what you mean by the statement about a ‘tribal deity that will one day save them and put their world to rights’. I see in the New Testament the hope of a final renewal of creation – partly as an inference from the resurrection, partly as a statement about the ultimate sovereignty of the creator. But salvation is not the primary issue: it is rather that seminal vocation to be an alternative world, a creational microcosm, for the sake of God and for the sake of others.
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