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 Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One (2009).

In their book Practices for the Refounding of God’s People: The Missional Challenge of the West (2018), Alan Roxburgh and Martin Robinson first offer a rather pessimistic analysis of the consequences of modernity’s “wager” (the metaphor is Adam Seligman’s) in letting go of its Christian past, and then propose a model for re-establishing a viable Christian presence in “liminal spaces.”

Edwin has an interesting question about the link between Jesus’ furious condemnation of the Jerusalem hierarchy and his subsequent vindication:

I have been trying to get to the point where I have my aha moment in this reframing of the biblical story and what it would mean for Jesus’s message of judgement to be vindicated in his resurrection. Does it mean all his denunciations were backed by God and his moral teachings for following God rightly, without corruption, would now be authoritative, thus silencing the debates between the competing Jewish traditions?

So are the vindication and enthronement of Jesus an overruling of the “competing Jewish traditions” and a validation of his particular vision for Israel?

In my previous post I had meant only to address certain questions about Jesus’ view of the “end” but thought it might be more illuminating to set Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching in Mark 13 in the context of the events of the last week in Jerusalem. There is only one story here, after all—not multiple disconnected stories about the temple, the atonement, the resurrection, and the second coming. So how does it all hang together?

I started out meaning to reply to a few questions sent to me about Mark 13: Isn’t it the case that Mark places the “final apocalypse” immediately after the destruction of the temple? Doesn’t this point to a failure of prophecy? Didn’t Jesus say that he would return within a generation? I thought it might be helpful to address these “apocalyptic” questions in the setting of the narrative in Mark beginning with the entry into Jerusalem. Just reading difficult texts in context can solve a lot of problems.

Here we go again.

In a response to my recent piece on James Tabor’s “failed failed apocalypse of the New Testament” argument, Edward Babinski, one of a number of vociferous ex-fundamentalist critics of conservative orthodoxies, has outlined an obscure but interesting argument regarding Jesus’ belief in an imminent cosmic judgment, based on the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch (1 En. 1-36). I offered a brief response, but on further reflection, I think that any analogy between the Book of the Watchers and the apocalyptic outlook of the New Testament points in quite a different direction. I will suggest that Jesus actually comes off the better for it.

My recently developed narrative missiological model has three main parts to it. During periods of stasis the people of God is 1) new creation and 2) royal priesthood. During periods of crisis those functions tend to be reduced, and 3) a prophetic identity comes to the fore.