I pointed out yesterday that there is no reason to read “he shall rule over you” in Genesis 3:16 as the corruption of an original good andrarchy. In response to this Nigel Dutson asked about the interpretation of Genesis 2:18, where God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” He says: “No mention of domineering control to be sure but certainly the idea that woman was created with man’s interest in mind and not vice versa.”

Prompted by reading the chapter in Daniel Kirk’s Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? on the place of women in the story of God, I recently set out my view i) that andrarchy (in this context, mandated rule by the man) is a consequence of the fall; ii) that it is therefore an aspect of the fallenness of humanity, of our bondage to sin; and iii) that a “new creation” people should not perpetuate this state of affairs unless there is very good reason for doing so—particularly in view of the fact that western culture has mostly thrown off this unjust arrangement over the last hundred years.

A key text for Tom Wright’s “gospel christology” is the account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1-9; Mk. 11:1-10; Lk. 19:28-40). In Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters, which is excellent in many ways, this story is the climax towards which his chapter on the “hurricane” of divine kingship is directed. The argument goes something like this. The theme of the return of YHWH to Zion is widely evidenced in the major Old Testament prophets but is also found in Zechariah and Malachi, even though these texts belong to the post-exilic period. It appears, therefore, that at least some Jews at this late stage were of the view that, despite the ending of the exile and the rebuilding of the temple, YHWH himself had not yet returned to fill his house with his glory. So the return from exile had not really happened—and had still not really happened by the time we get to Jesus’ day.

Kevin DeYoung asks, “Who are the 144,000 in Revelation?” Are they a remnant of ethnic Jews who are left behind after the rapture, who will evangelize the Gentiles, as presumably dispensationalists would argue? Or does this symbolic number stand for the “entire community of the redeemed”?

DeYoung favors the latter interpretation, which is the mainstream Christian interpretation, for a number of reasons: i) in Revelation 13 Satan seals his followers, so you would expect God to “seal all of his people, not just the Jewish ones”; ii) in Ezekiel 9:4 the mark on the forehead differentiates between idolaters and non-idolaters, so the sealing of the 144,000 should make a “similar distinction based on who worships God”; iii) the 144,000 are called “servants of God” (Rev. 7:3), we are all servants of God, therefore we are all part of the 144,000; iv) the 144,000 in Revelation 14:1-5 are spoken of in “generic everybody kind of language”, as a group drawn from all peoples, not just from the Jews; and v) the list of the 12 tribes is “highly stylized”, so that 12 x 12 x 1000 means the completion of God’s people multiplied by the apostles multiplied by a “great multitude”.

What impressed me most in Daniel Kirk’s discussion of the place of women in the story of God was his argument that the church is called actively and concretely to realize in the present a future new creation in which it will be unnecessary for the man to rule over the woman.

There are two main parts to the argument, and it is interesting that they more or less side-step Paul’s teaching on the matter. Whatever pragmatic reasons there may have been for restricting the activity of women or requiring them to be submissive towards their husbands, they do not invalidate the ultimate and overruling hope, which is that in the new creation the curse of patriarchy will no longer be operative. If that is the case, then the church is under some eschatological pressure to make that a visible reality in the here and now.

Today the Blog Tour for Daniel Kirk’s new book Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? pulls in at Chapter Six: “Women in the Story of God”. In addition to my contribution here, there will be a piece by Julie Clawson, which I am willing to bet will be nothing like as overwrought and self-serving as what follows here.

I want to start by getting my main problem with Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? out of the way. The book argues—rightly, in my view—for narrative continuity between Jesus and Paul, and in this regard it runs much in the same vein as Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel, though it is Tom Wright and Richard Hays who mostly provide the scholarly backup. Kirk then addresses a standard set of contentious ethical issues—gender equality, social justice, sexuality and homosexuality—asking whether the same continuity can be discerned at this level. His overall argument is that Paul does not represent in any way a significant departure from or distortion of the original vision and practice of Jesus.

Everyone by now must have noticed that there is a large and unsightly crack running down the middle of that highly vocal and energetic sector of Western Christianity that thinks of itself in the broadest sense as “evangelical”. It is not the only fault line—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Pentecostalism and what I suppose we must still call “liberal” Christianity (it seems a waste of a good word) are similarly divided from one another and from evangelicalism. But this is the one that I live closest to—actually, very close to at the moment; and I have a hard time explaining it.

On one side of the fault line is a fairly coherent grouping of Reformed churches and theologies, recently reinvigorated. On the other side… well, things are not quite so clear.

A new book by Daniel Kirk has been released with great fanfare and a star-studded blog tour, to which I will make a contribution next week. The book is called Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? and is basically an attempt to show that Jesus and Paul are on the same page—or at least on different pages in the same story. Here is the product description from Amazon:

Readers of the Bible are often drawn to Jesus’s message and ministry, but they are not as positively inclined toward Paul. What should people who love Jesus do with Paul? Here Pauline scholar J. R. Daniel Kirk offers a fresh and timely engagement of the debated relationship between Paul’s writings and the portrait of Jesus contained in the Gospels. He integrates the messages of Jesus and Paul both with one another and with the Old Testament, demonstrating the continuity that exists between these two foundational figures. After laying out the narrative contours of the Christian life, Kirk provides fresh perspective on challenging issues facing today’s world, from environmental concerns to social justice to homosexuality.