Following my “Stories about Jesus: how they fit together, and what he means for us today” post a couple of months back, a missionary friend got in touch wondering what this all meant for the “job of the missionary” in the secular Western context. My typical way of answering this sort of question is to spend so long reviewing the biblical narrative that there is little space left at the end to consider the practical implications—I’m not much of a missiologist. This post will be no different, but in my defence I will argue—as a non-missiologist—that telling the story of the creator God as a matter of history is, in fact, the primary task of the missionary in the secular Western context.

I’m afraid I missed it, but yesterday was Ascension Day. Dang. Ian Paul, however, reposted a good piece making the important point that whereas John’s Gospel makes the crucifixion the climax of Jesus’ ministry, the New Testament as a whole pursues the narrative through the resurrection to the ascension and exaltation of Jesus. We often miss this emphasis because our tradition downplays it and because we don’t read carefully. Quite!

In a recent article on the Christianity Today site Fred Sanders argues that “We Actually Don’t Need a Trinitarian Revival”. He has heard widespread rumours of the death of Trinitarianism and he thinks that they are “grossly exaggerated”. Where the “everything-you-know-is-wrong diagnosis” fails is in not recognising a basic distinction between primary and secondary forms of Trinitarianism—a distinction which Sanders attributes to Robert Jenson.

Primary Trinitarianism is “the underlying reality of the presence and work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the life of the church”. It is grounded biblically in the idea that the person who is “born of the Spirit… testifies that the Father so loved the world he gave his only-begotten Son”. That person, therefore, is “giving an account of the triune structure of salvation history itself in the Bible’s own language”.

Last night I went to hear Steve Walton’s inaugural professorial lecture at St Mary’s University. The lecture was entitled “Doing Theology Lukewise: Luke as theologian and storyteller”. It was a straightforward demonstration of the theological depth of Luke’s narrative art. It was lucid, engaging, and I enjoyed it immensely.

One of the main points that Steve wanted to make was that, contrary to popular opinion, Luke has an atonement theology—it’s just that he constructs it narratively rather than as a matter of explicit theological assertion.

Stefan Paas is Bavinck Professor of Church Planting and Church Renewal at the Free University Amsterdam, which is where I started work on my PhD back in the 90s.

In an excellent article in Mission Studies called “Mission from Anywhere to Europe: Americans, Africans, and Australians Coming to Amsterdam” (2015) he examines three phases of foreign mission to Europe over recent decades: by American evangelical Protestants, by West African Neo-Pentecostals, and more recently by Australian neo-Pentecostals, which basically means Hillsong. In each case he looks at their perceptions of Europe, their message and method, the responses from Europeans, and the results.

Matthew Bates’ book Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King is just one straw in a strong wind blowing out of biblical studies, driving us away from theological towards narrative constructions of Christian identity and purpose.

In my view, this is an exhilarating and necessary development, but Matthew’s book, for all its merits, has highlighted a fundamental shortcoming. Because evangelicals naturally want to retain the direct practical application of the “gospel”, evangelical narrative theologies exhibit a consistent tendency to leapfrog history. I would put Greg Beale’s A New Testament Biblical Theology and J. Richard Middleton’s A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology in the same category.

In chapter four of his book Salvation By Allegiance Alone Matthew Bates sets out to defend his core thesis that the pistis (“faith”) with which we respond to the gospel is better understood in terms of concrete allegiance than as mere mental assent.

He argues that the gospel consists in an eight-part narrative that “climaxes with the enthronement of Jesus as the cosmic king, the Lord of heaven and earth, even though all too often this portion of the gospel is entirely omitted when it is proclaimed today”. If that’s the case, “faith in Jesus is best described as allegiance to him as king” (77).