The story of the martyrdom of James, the brother of Jesus, casts an interesting light on how the early church in Jerusalem understood its future. There are two accounts of his death which are difficult to reconcile, but it is in any case the narrative content that is of concern to us here rather than the historicity of the events described.

Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God is an extraordinary – and I think extraordinarily flawed – attempt to erase Justification Theory from Paul’s theology. It is a mammoth book to read, let alone attempt to review, in toto; and if it is a large enough wood to survey, it is also extremely dense and tangled, so I will content myself with hacking away at the odd tree here and there. Besides, others will do a much better job of assessing and situating the work. Andy Rowell has a helpful collection of links to early reviews and an interview that Michael Bird did with Campbell; but the best online review I have come across is Loren Rosson’s, with whose conclusions, for now at least, I would broadly agree…

My wife and I attended the Liturgy at the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist in the depths of rural Essex yesterday. It was our second visit with our friend Olivera. I would describe it less as a service of worship in the way that most Catholics and Protestants would understand it, more as an intimate drama in the round acted by monks and priests in the midst of the audience. Since most of the Liturgy is in Greek, there is plenty of time for reflection.

In the book shop afterwards I picked up a copy of Encounter, by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. Flicking through, I came across the following paragraph, from an address given at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition and All Saints in 1991. Rather than buy the book, I took a picture of the page…

Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission, by Davina Lopez, is a good example of what has probably been the most significant turn that Pauline studies have taken following the New Perspective. As an overtly gender-critical analysis the book takes a step beyond the empire-critical work of scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Richard Horsley, and Neil Elliott; but it operates, nevertheless, broadly from a theoretical position that has ‘rediscovered the Roman Empire as a world to which Paul responds’ (xii). The New Perspective has properly corrected the Western theological tradition’s preoccupation with the spiritual condition of the individual consciousness and a supposed anti-Jewish bias. But insofar as it still thinks of Paul’s ‘self-presentation and rhetoric as exclusively religious and theological’, it fails to take adequate account of the broader political questions of Jewish existence in an imperial context (122).

Lopez takes as her point of departure two classical images, one literary, the other sculptural. The first is taken from Suetonius’ account of Nero’s mental and political decline: in a dream he is ‘surrounded by the statues of the nations which had been dedicated in Pompey’s theatre and stopped in his tracks’ (Suet. Nero 46.1). The second is a relief sculpture from the imperial cult complex in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, which shows the emperor Claudius subjugating the nation Britannia, depicted as a half-naked woman. Out of these Lopez creates a composite representation of the nations conquered and subsequently effeminized by Roman male power, and then asks what it would mean to examine Paul’s rhetoric in the light of this imagery. Paul’s ‘good news’ to the nations, she suggests, is that ‘they no longer are captive and enslaved to a victorious general or raped and killed by divine emperors, but are (re-)born as  children of Abraham and belong to the God who brought the Israelites (and others) out of Egypt’ (3).

At issue here, in the first place, is the sense that we give to ta ethnē – the ‘Gentiles’ or ‘nations’. Within the purview of contemporary New Testament scholarship the Gentiles are invariably construed non-sociologically and non-politically as peoples who are not adherents of the Jewish cult: ‘Gentiles do not have a real definition or substance of their own, except in relation to Jews and Israel’ (5). Even recent theological perspectives that have affirmed Paul’s essential Jewishness fail to consider the independent historical identity of ‘the nations’: ‘They exist only in an ideal theological other-world, where they are urged to become religious in the right way.

Normally speaking, within the closed symbolic world of the New Testament, images such as the sculptural depiction of Claudius and Britannia are permitted no significant interpretive function; but Lopez asks whether they might ‘tell us something about how to imagine the real world of the Pauline letters’. In opposition to the sort of ‘rational’ biblical scholarship that has generated ‘an ideal theological world, where there is no real context for Paul’s rhetoric besides personal religious piety and struggles over dogmatic correctness’, she describes a non-idealist hermeneutic that attempts to re-imagine Paul’s relationship with the Gentiles ‘through an examination of the ideology of conquest and universal domination in the Roman Empire’ (6). In other words, she wants to consider how Paul would appear to us if we considered ta ethnē in relation not to Jerusalem but to Rome – if we were to suppose that Nero’s nightmares about the insubordinate and obstructive nations were, in fact, of central symbolic relevance to Paul’s mission.

What she proposes is a ‘gender-critical re-imagination of Paul as apostle to the defeated nations as part of a non-idealist framework that draws on elements from contemporary empire-critical, postcolonial, feminist, and queer theoretical contributions’ (7). By ‘non-idealist’ she means an approach that obliges historical-criticism to take proper account, first, of the concrete social contexts of biblical texts (‘including political and economic structures, patterns of domination and subordination, and marginalization’) and, secondly, of the ‘wider variety of cultural artifacts’ by which a social context must be described. Moreover – and more urgently – a non-idealist reading is inherently liberationist in that it seeks to detach the Bible from interpretations ‘aligned with privilege, elitism, and imperialism that masquerade as value-neutral’ and which obscure the ‘gospel of the poor’ that is central to both the Old and the New Testaments. The empire-critical component is an extension of the non-idealist grounding of the text. The ‘New Testament is seen as a collection of documents demonstrating negotiation of and resistance to Roman imperial rule’ (9). Postcolonial analyses make a sharper, but for Lopez ambiguous, contribution. There is a repudiation of modern biblical exegesis as being ‘thoroughly implicated in the perpetuation of imperialism and colonialism’. But if the further conclusion is reached that the Bible itself endorses an inherently colonial project to dominate the world, ‘its texts and contradictions are rendered impotent for social transformation from the margins in the present’ (10). Finally, feminist and queer approaches put forward gender and sexuality as ‘useful optics for seeing more adequately the hierarchical relations of power operative in the Roman Empire of Paul’s time’ (15).

In light of these theoretical perspectives, Lopez argues that it is possible to ‘recontextualize, in a non-idealist way, the Gentiles and nations and position them as occupying the same semantic field as the poor and marginalized’. Paul then appears as apostle to the marginalized and the defeated, which connects with the ‘preferential option for the poor and marginalized at the core of the Bible’ (22). Within a Jewish framework the Gentiles are those peoples which are not Israel, and Paul’s mission appears as a struggle to ‘build different relationships’, subsuming both Jews and Gentiles under a common ancestor determined by his ‘trust’ in God. Within the framework of the Roman ‘imaginary’ or ideology, however, the fate of ta ethnē is to be ‘found, conquered, and incorporated into the Roman family through military violence and diplomacy, as well as subsequent enslavement and death’. From this perspective Israel is simply one among the many nations that have been subjugated by Roman military power (110-113). Indeed, Josephus has Agrippa warn the Jews that if they persist in their determination to go to war, the Romans will burn Jerusalem and destroy the nation in order to make of them ‘an example to other nations’ (Jos. War 2.397). In its apocalyptic resistance to empire Israel constitutes an outstanding instance of nationhood defined in relation to Rome. Lopez believes that the Jewish definition, drawn from the Septuagint usage, remains influential for Paul’s mission, but argues that in the process a re-mapping occurs so that in the end the good news that Paul proclaims to the nations may be construed from a quite different perspective: it is that the nations may be liberated from their enslavement to violent, exploitative imperialism through an alliance with liberated Israel on the basis of trust in God and inclusion in the multi-national family of Abraham.

It is an impressive thesis, but is there any evidence that the term is re-mapped in Paul to the extent that he understood himself as apostle to the nations as Rome’s other rather than as Israel’s other? Lopez puts forward two broad arguments. The first amounts to little more than a non-idealist inference: Paul was so exposed to and so fluent in the pervasive visual and literary narratives of Roman hegemony (described in detail in chapters two and three) that he was bound to have somewhat assimilated the reversed perspective on the nations that they entailed. The second argument has a more exegetical character. Lopez suggests that Paul’s conversion consisted of a radical shift of consciousness from violent persecutor to conquered Jew, from dominator to dominated, from ‘impenetrable masculinity to penetrable femininity’, and in that respect mirrored the relationship between Rome and the nations (124-137). ‘What Paul is forced to come to heightened consciousness about is that to the Romans, the nations include the Jews – and they all are persecuted ravaged, and re-created, by a larger force. God reveals to Paul that he has Christ “in him,” that he has the dynamics of defeat by the Romans within him’ (135).

How well does this work? The singular ethnos denotes a ‘nation’ or ‘people’ – never an individual ‘Gentile’ as such. In the New Testament, however, it does not always work in English to translate the plural ethnē as ‘nations’. For example, Luke writes that following the preaching of Paul and Barnabas in the synagogue at Iconium ‘a great number of Jews and Greeks believed’, but then ‘unbelieving Jews stirred up and poisoned the souls of tōn ethnōn against the brothers’ (my translation). Later an attempt is made by both tōn ethnōn and the Jews, along with their rulers, to insult them and stone them (Acts 14:1-5). In this context ta ethnē clearly refers not to the nations at a distance but to numbers of individuals who are not Jews; the term is virtually synonymous with ‘Greeks’. Presumably when Paul tells the pagan citizens of Lystra that in previous generations God ‘allowed panta ta ethnē to walk in their own ways’, he is thinking of the nations as peoples who have not known the one true God, who had revealed himself explicitly to the Jews (Acts 14:16). The ‘Gentiles’ are people or peoples, whether conceived abstractly or encountered concretely, who derive their identity from their non-Israelite nationality. It is easy enough to demonstrate that Paul’s usage does not break out of this pattern, even if it may be entirely appropriate in many instances to translate ta ethnē as ‘the nations’, with full awareness of the political resonances generated within the Greek-Roman oikoumenē.

The frequent use of the term in the New Testament, however, also presupposes two closely linked story-lines, both rooted in the Jewish scriptures, which are really determinative for meaning. The first views the nations as aggressive powers that oppose Israel, both religiously and politically; they are likely at some point to destroy Jerusalem and defile its sanctuary as a manifestation of God’s anger against his people; but there is always the prospect of an eventual victory over the nations and the establishment of the Jews as a preeminent people. At this point the second story-line is engaged: when YHWH intervenes decisively to judge and restore his people, messengers are sent to proclaim news of the event to the nations, which may lead to the participation of the nations in the worship of Israel’s God, potentially in fulfilment of the promise to Abraham that he would be the father of, and a blessing to, many nations.

The first of these stories provides a framework for understanding Jesus’ suffering: his crucifixion by an imperial power anticipates the mass crucifixion of Jews by Rome during the course of the war and becomes, therefore, symbolic of Israel’s punishment. Paul certainly identifies with this suffering, and he urges the communities to which he writes to participate in the same narrative of death and vindication. At this point, it seems to me, Lopez’s empire-critical argument – and to a lesser extent the gender-critical spin that she puts on it – offers credible and intriguing insight into the political-religious character of Paul’s very deliberate association with a crucified messiah.

However, Paul then assimilates the suffering into the second narrative, which is explanatory of his own calling: he is the messenger to the nations who is subjected to physical abuse by both Jews and non-Jews – indeed, it is precisely this persecution that validates his apostleship. He suffers not on behalf of the nations brutalized by Rome but on behalf of Christ implicated in Israel’s punishment. In this narrative the fact of oppression as a general political evil is not negated, but it is subordinated to the overriding issue of Israel’s salvation – that is, a salvation concretely and politically, and therefore not merely religiously and theologically, conceived as a matter of the ongoing integrity and survival of the community.

There is no moment in Paul’s narratively constructed self-understanding, therefore, that permits or requires the sort of re-mapping of the ‘nations’ that Lopez is arguing for. The distinction that she makes between a rhetoric of personal piety and a rhetoric of anti-imperial struggle is too simplistic. We may well think that Paul is fully aware of the theo-political implications of his gospel and the concrete, non-idealist existence of the communities that he addresses; but this does not necessarily mean that he understood himself as apostle to the nations subjugated by Rome rather to the nations that ‘worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator’ (Rom. 1:25) or that raged and conspired against YHWH and his anointed king (Ps. 2:1-3). The end point for Paul, as is clear not least from his Letter to the Romans, is deliverance not from Rome but from the wrath of God. What follows that story, however, is another matter.

An article by Lucy Broadbent in today’s Times Magazine describes the current Hell House phenomenon and its impact on teenagers. Churches such as Trinity Church in Dallas present shocking tableaux of classroom massacres, date rape, abortions (with real theatrical blood and pieces of real meat), suicide, child molestation, and drink-driving accidents. The kids arrive expecting a jolly evening of Halloween-style entertainment, I suppose; and they leave traumatized – strangers cling to each other in tears, one girl passes out, another sobs convulsively on the grass.

I wouldn’t want to judge it from a distance. Hell Houses are certainly controversial and have attracted a lot of criticism, but I rather like the idea of reviving the tradition of morality plays as a teaching medium, and the shock and gore at least make a change from the usual banality and sentimentality that passes for drama in churches.

The objection voiced by a specialist in developmental psychology at the University of Colorado – that it is bad thing for people to internalize fear of hell and the prospect of being tortured for eternity – seems to me to miss the point. The main objective behind these modern morality plays appears be to frighten children with visions not of hell but of what might go wrong on earth. Mothers take their daughters along because they want them to know what abortion and rape are like.

I also wonder about comments made by the head of theology at the Evangelical Alliance in the UK, Justin Thacker, who was interviewed for the piece. He doesn’t like the idea of Hell Houses being imported into Britain. It’s not the way he would promote Christianity: ‘They deliberately try to use fear to promote Christianity, but that is not the kind of Christianity I know and love – and I don’t think that is what Jesus’s message was. I don’t believe you can scare people into having an authentic relationship with God.’

The trouble is that Jesus had some pretty severe things to say: anyone who says ‘fool!’ will be liable to the gehenna of fire; it is better that you lose one of the limbs than that your whole body be thrown into gehenna; the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down; the sons of the kingdom will be thrown in the outer darkness; it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town; I have not come to bring peace but a sword; this evil generation will suffer the madness of war (my understanding of the parable of the seven spirits); the angels will throw the wicked into the furnace of fire; the king will send his troops to destroy those who do not come to the feast and will burn their city; those who do not see Jesus in the suffering disciples will be sent away to be punished – just briefly to list the most obvious statements from Matthew’s Gospel.

Arguably, Jesus is doing something very similar to the Hell Houses. He graphically portrays the suffering that will come upon his people because of their sin, their rebellion against God, unless they mend their ways. His ‘hell’ is not some lurid post-mortem torture chamber; it is the ghastly, bloody reality of war. The Jews can stay on that broad path leading to destruction, or they can take a narrow path leading to life. There may be some serious ethical and psychological issues raised by the Hell Houses, but I’m a little surprised that the head of theology at the Evangelical Alliance would be so quick to sanitize a Jesus who in his own way was not averse to using shock and gore tactics in order to keep people on the straight and narrow.

My argument in both The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission is that New Testament eschatology – that is, the interest that the New Testament has in critical future events – can for the most part be mapped against a historical narrative that interprets, first, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70 and, secondly, the eventual defeat of Greek-Roman paganism as critical events through which both YHWH and the early suffering church are justified and vindicated. This two-part vindication constitutes, in effect, the parousia event, when the church that has remained faithful to Christ under intense pressure, both from apostate Judaism and from paganism, will be rewarded – raised, exalted with Christ to reign with him throughout the coming ages.

A passage in the Sibylline Oracles appears at least to parallel if not corroborate this reading. An insertion by a Christian redactor (dated by Charlesworth between AD 70 and AD 150) describes how the Jews will ‘reap the bad harvest’ when they launch a haughty and reckless rebellion against Rome. As a consequence the temple of Solomon will be destroyed, and the ‘Hebrews will be driven from their land; wandering, being slaughtered, they will mix much darnel in their wheat’. This will be the wrath of God – punishment for an evil deed (Sib. Or. 1.387-400; cf. 1.362).

The Jewish text then describes a tenth and last generation of men, when God will ‘break the glory of idols and shake the people of seven-hilled Rome’ and ‘impose famines and pestilence and thunderbolts on men who adjudicate without justice’. But God will save ‘pious men’, and there will be ‘deep peace and understanding’ (2.15-31).

A crown from heaven in the form of a bright star will be revealed, to be won in a contest, at which point we revert to the Christian redaction. People from all nations will strive to win the prize of immortality. Christ will give an ‘immortal treasure’ to the martyrs who ‘pursue the contest even to death’, and an ‘imperishable prize’ to ‘virgins who run well and to all men who perform justice and to diverse nations who live piously and acknowledge one God’ (2.39-52; cf. 2.149-153).

In this hybrid Jewish-Christian story God will punish Israel, but the time will come when he will also put an end to the system of idolatry that inspired Rome’s antagonism, and an age of peace for the people of God will be inaugurated, when the faithful chosen Hebrews will rule over ‘exceedingly mighty men, having subjected them as of old, since power will never fail’ (2.174-176). At this climactic eschatological moment those who have pursued the prize of immortality, at their forefront the martyrs, will be rewarded by Christ.

What this shows is how a very early Jewish-Christian vision naturally focused on the overthrow of Rome and the victory over paganism as the terminus of an eschatological narrative. What ensues in Sibylline Oracles 2 is a resurrection of all the dead, who are summoned to the tribunal for judgment. The unrighteous are punished; the righteous are carried by angels ‘through the blazing river’ to a new earth and to ‘life without care’ (2.315-316). I would suggest that John inserts the period of a thousand years between judgment on Rome and the final judgment of all the dead because he understands that the eschatological victory is not an end in itself – it is for the sake of the continuing existence of the church in the world and for the sake of the world. But otherwise, it seems to me, there is a remarkable congruency between the narrative in Sibylline Oracles and the outlook of the New Testament.

The war in America between Emergents and Reformed is a depressing business. A recent piece by Greg Gilbert on the 9Marks blog (Not Just Important, Not Even Just VERY Important. “Of FIRST Importance.”) expresses satisfaction that defensive measures taken against the insurgents have ‘effectively cut the legs out from under “emergent” theology, considered as a system’. But the basis for this confidence seems rather flimsy. Carson’s Becoming Conversant, which I have read, and DeYoung and Kluck’s Why We’re Not Emergent, which I have read about, might knock down a straw man and frighten a number of people back into the arms of a modern orthodoxy, but I doubt that they will prove to be the ‘one-two knock-out punches’ that bring conclusive victory to the traditionalists. The effect is entrenchment, not resolution or even constructive dialogue.

Gilbert expresses concern that an emergent understanding of the gospel that ‘makes its center something other than the substitutionary, wrath-enduring death of Jesus in the place of sinners for their sin’ has embedded itself in evangelicalism, like a piece of shrapnel. This happens when the cross is sidelined in favour of ‘Jesus’ lordship, or God’s kingdom, or God’s purpose to remake the heavens and earth, or His call for us to join him in his work of cultural transformation’. It also happens when a ‘substitutionary, wrath-bearing’ understanding of the cross is rejected in favour of a Christus Victor soteriology, according to which Jesus’ death is ‘the result of human evil or greed or power-lust or culture-making or any number of other things coming to their lowest, worst, most concentrated point and killing Jesus, who then conquers that worst-of-all-evils through his resurrection’. Taking his cue from Don Carson, Gilbert argues that this understanding of the cross, which no doubt appeals strongly to those of an emergent disposition, has been purged of all sense of sin as an offence that merits punishment. He concludes:

In other words, such a presentation of the gospel essentially leaves out of the meaning of the cross exactly what the Bible makes central to it: A) that Jesus was dying in the place of his people, and B) that on the cross he endured punishment for their sin (not just the results of it—the punishment for it), meted out by God the Father in his righteous wrath.

Two things strike me about this argument. The first is that it can hardly be said that in the debate over the meaning of core Christian terminology (‘gospel’, ‘salvation’, ‘justification’) the mainstream evangelical-Reformed view has successfully fought off contenders and reclaimed the theological high-ground. The book-level conversation between Piper and Wright (see, for example, John Piper and the imputation of a real moral righteousness), whatever one’s views on the matter, at least demonstrates that there are substantial points of disagreement and no prospect of easy resolution. I accept that the sort of ‘emergent’ theology that Gilbert has in mind overlaps only to a limited extent with Wright’s programme, and may well be flawed in other respects; but my point is that there is an increasingly robust alternative to the Reformed paradigm that cannot be dismissed by pelting Brian McLaren with copies of Becoming Conversant.

The second observation is that Gilbert appears to have put forward here – wittingly or otherwise, and if wittingly, he is to be commended – a remarkably New Perspective account of the significance of Jesus’ death. Jesus died for the sin, not of the whole world, but of his people – he died (as Gilbert says) ‘in the place of his people’. And because that people was subject to a covenant that threatened punishment for persistent disobedience, it becomes quite proper to say that he suffered the punishment of Israel for the sake of a remnant that would survive the wrath of God – though it’s a much less prominent theme biblically than the Reformed folk think. Jesus suffered on a Roman cross because of the wrath of God against Israel, in anticipation of the judgment of the war against Rome.

We then need to ask, however, what the consequences were of that death-because-of-Israel’s-sin? What was the historical outcome of the fact that the descendants of Abraham were snatched from the jaws of destruction to participate in a resurrection to the life of God’s new creation?

In the first place, since Jesus’ death for Israel was a demonstration of the righteousness of God ‘apart from the Law’ (Rom. 3:21-26), it was found that there was no longer any impediment to the inclusion of Gentiles in the family of Abraham. Jews and Gentiles were reconciled to God and to one another ‘in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility’ (Eph. 2:16).

Secondly, the fact that Jesus’ death could be interpreted as a victory over the lethal opposition both of the leadership in Jerusalem and of Rome – and indeed of whatever dark powers may have been imagined to lurk behind those political structures – was critical for the hope and survival of the early church. It was central to Paul’s understanding of the resurrection that it foreshadowed the eventual judgment of the Greek-Roman oikoumenē (cf. Acts 17:31), the whole system of pagan belief that for so long had suppressed knowledge of the creator and oppressed, sometimes violently, the people who worshipped him. This was the inevitable outworking of the fact that Jesus had been appointed ‘son of God in power’, given the name which is above every name – not least above the name of Caesar.

But the realization dawned, thirdly, that this resurrection stood for more than the eventual victory of the people of God over the monstrous beast of pagan imperialism. It was a work of new creation; it anticipated a final transformation of the heavens and the earth, a new ontology. The one who was firstborn from the dead, the first of those who would be raised as part of the victory over oppression (cf. Rom. 8:29; Rev. 20:4), was also the ‘firstborn of all creation’ (Col. 1:15-20). And inasmuch as the community of Jesus’ followers participated in this life, it also became a sign of new creation – a counter-sign to the bondage of the cosmos to wickedness, suffering, decay and death. And there is much to be said from a missional perspective about that.

What we have, then, it seems to me, is a rough but coherent narrative that connects the various elements that have been thought to belong to an explanation of Jesus’ death. Gilbert is anxious to stress that a doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement is not simply ‘one more image of the cross among many’; it is ‘the underlying reality upon which all the other images depend and are built’. And in a sense he’s right. But this foundationalist approach is still a very poor representation of the dynamic that inheres in the narrative shape of biblical thought. Biblical theology should not be reduced to a set of tokens that can be selected and shuffled around according to taste, in the way that we might rearrange the pictures that we hang on the walls of our house. But any attempt to impose systematic structures – by making the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement foundational, for example – is bound to distort things. It misrepresents the nature of our relationship to the events; it obscures the extent to which theology is the self-understanding of a community as it makes sense of its historical condition; it unnecessarily downgrades the other parts of the story; and in the present instance it perpetuates the extremely damaging notion that theology is a mode of internecine conflict.

The narrative makes no sense without the episode of Jesus’ death interpreted as a death for the sins of his people, in the place of his people, as an implication of the wrath of God. Gilbert is right there, and his formulation perhaps more subtle and bolder than he realizes. But that death was also for the sake of the future of the people, worked out under the real conditions of history. It is this narrative dynamic that needs to be safeguarded: it sets the trajectory for the missional existence of the people of God.

I think that this will be very difficult to do within the systematizing Reformed or modern evangelical paradigm. I’m not sure that ‘emergent theology’, which is largely a North American phenomenon, has as yet come up with a viable alternative. But there is a much broader emerging conversation taking place, of which the New Perspective is only one element, that I believe in the long run will generate a way of thinking that will do a much better job of re-integrating and reinvigorating the poor dismembered body of biblical theology.