It is a commonplace of Reformed and evangelical theology that the kingdom of God is ‘now and not yet’. In one sense it has already arrived; in another sense it hasn’t. According to Wikipedia the argument goes back to the Princeton Calvinist theologian Gerhardus Vos. Some sort of ‘now and not yet’ dynamic in Christian theology seems inevitable if we believe in a final transformation or renewal of all things rather than merely an indefinite continuation of present conditions. The question I have has to do with the ‘kingdom of God’ part of the formula. What I suggest is that it would have made sense in the restricted historical perspective of the early believers, but that for the post-eschatological church it needs to be translated into creational terms. This may seem merely a matter of semantics, but I think that the widespread and undiscriminating use of the formula (indeed, our kingdom of God language in general) obfuscates rather than clarifies the biblical narrative.

What is it about theology – or perhaps, what is it about human intellectual activity generally – that makes it so hard for us to listen to each other well, read carefully what others have written, and restate each other’s views accurately? And then, what is it that makes us so cross, defensive, dismissive, when we find ourselves misunderstood or misrepresented or miscriticized?

It has a lot to do, no doubt, with the fact that so much of our dialogue and debate is done impersonally: we react not to people whom we know and love but to books or to blog posts or to bloodless online personalities or to remote overrated celebrities. I had lunch this week with a couple of pastors from a church that feels rather alien to – even hostile towards – my own theological and spiritual sensitivities. Indeed, I pointed out to them that I have written books that fundamentally disagree with their positions on women in leadership, prosperity theology, and the imminent return of Jesus. It could have been an awkward lunch, but they were very gracious men – and just establishing that much of a personal relationship was enough to suppress the urge to pick a fight. Instead, I left thinking that we should not tolerate or reinforce the gulf between, in this case, (charismatic) neo-Reformed and ‘emerging’ or ‘new perspective’ theologies – and that we should certainly not take so much satisfaction from the adversarial character of the debate. If we invested as much time in building relationships as in building up our polemical stockpiles, we might find a way beyond the impasse.

Having said that – OK, call me a hypocrite – what got me started on this tack was a couple of critical remarks that I came across while scouring the web in search of something to get wound up about.

I have been engaged in a very constructive conversation with Derek Flood about ‘Penal substitution and the OT narrative of judgment’. My argument has been roughly that in order to understand who Jesus was, what his intentions were, and in this particular case how his suffering might be understood in terms of both punishment and substitution, we need a much stronger sense of the historical narrative in which he is embedded – and we need to resist the bad and lazy habit of reading our highly processed theological conclusions into the text. In response Derek has raised an extremely pertinent question about (I guess) the devotional or pastoral or theological or catechetical ‘value’ of consigning Jesus to the past, as it would seem:

As you say, your “main concern is to relocate Jesus, with exegetical and historical integrity, within the biblically interpreted narrative of Israel.” My question is: why would that be valuable? Or more specifically, to what end?

Following my post on the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God it was (indirectly) suggested to me that Jesus may have communicated his sense of divine identity through his actions rather than through his words. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Jesus’ miracles in themselves cannot be counted as evidence that he was God; nor can his resurrection. Off the top of my head, I can think of no more than two or three incidents that might qualify (I am open to considering other suggestions), and in these cases it still seems more likely that they reveal a person who believes he is acting on behalf of God rather than a person who thinks that he is acting as God.

In his little book Is God a Delusion? Nicky Gumble (‘the pioneer of the Alpha course’) addresses Richard Dawkins’ claim that ‘There’s no good, historical evidence that Jesus ever thought he was divine’ (79-80, 127-131). It’s an old debate, of course, and neither Dawkins nor Gumble contributes anything very new to it; but I suspect that Dawkins may have the better of this particular argument, and not merely for historical reasons. I draw attention to it partly because I have covert sympathies with Dawkins anyway and feel a little embarrassed by the way he has been so rudely duffed up by evangelicals, but mainly because it highlights again (see also Putting the theological cart before the biblical horse) the worrying structural discrepancy between theology (in this instance, admittedly, a rather elementary apologetic defence of a mainstream belief) and the interpretation of Scripture.

I have, for some time, had a bee in my bonnet about the penal substitutionary atonement debate. There are those, on the one hand, who think it sits right at the indigestible core of a sound understanding of the atoning significance of Jesus’ death; and there are those, on the other, who think it sucks. To my mind there is a solid alternative that emerges when we put on our dogmatic-noise-cancelling ear-phones and sit and read the Scriptures as historical narrative, which in the broadest and simplest sense is what they are.

I came across a discussion on Derek Flood’s Rebel God blog, which got the bee buzzing furiously again. In his post Derek is primarily concerned to refute a penal substitutionary reading of Isaiah 53. I think he is quite right to say that ‘this is not a picture of the satisfaction of the demands of justice’, but I’m not sure that this makes the word ‘penal’ redundant. There is at least a difference to note between God directly punishing Jesus in order to satisfy the demands of justice and Jesus being implicated in the direct punishment of Israel (in order to satisfy the demands of the Law). It seems to me that the best argument for a narratively limited and historically informed (that is a crucial qualification) doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement is the fact that Jesus died on a Roman cross in anticipation of the punishment of Israel by the instrumentality of the besieging Roman armies, who crucified Jews willy nilly.

Following some discussion on James McGrath’s blog about the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man, Antonio Jerez has promised to shoot the book full of holes some time in the not too distant future. To facilitate this act of wanton destruction I have copied below an initial criticism made by Antonio and the response I gave on McGrath’s blog.

Stephen Fowl has written a very enjoyable, lively, lucid, little book about hermeneutics called Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2009). But I’m having a hard time accepting some of the implications of his central argument, which is that priority should be given to theology (specifically the premise of the self-revelation of the triune God) over historical-criticism in the interpretation of scripture.

Fowl maintains that although biblical scholarship for the most part should be understood as an attempt to ‘display the communicative intentions of biblical writers’, this should not be the primary consideration for theological interpretation of scripture. The significance of this prioritization is brought out in what strikes me as a particularly troublesome paragraph (49).