I have two preliminary points to make from a biblical perspective.

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 sought to mitigate the failure of prophecy either by revising prophecy or by revising history, and that cognitive dissonance theory helps us to understand the psychological or sociological processes underlying the accommodation. The thesis gets at the heart of Hartke’s own rejection of Christianity, which he states very well:

I couldn’t help reaching the conclusion that Christianity itself, in all its various iterations, was the product of our widely attested tendency to cling to our deeply held beliefs when they come into conflict with reality, rationalizing away the conflict instead of letting go.

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 Christian spiritual growth or discipleship is to become more Christ-like, to be conformed to his image, to give off the sweet smell of Jesus in the world. But when we look closely at how Paul develops these themes, a rather disconcerting picture emerges.

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 ago on the theme of the Holy Spirit. It looks like a couple more might be needed—on the gifts of the Spirit in the church, perhaps, and the Spirit in Revelation? Anything else?

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 something more palatable to modern sensibilities.” I’m not sure about the “detheologizing” of Jesus. In many ways, that seems to me to be a rather good thing to do.

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 people groups to align themselves with the God of history.

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.