At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The text in each case is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
A narrative-historical approach brings into view the large-scale, national and civilisational events and processes that frame “theological” reflection. What it comes down to is that we cannot properly understand Jesus without taking into account the foreseen war against Rome, or understand the apostolic mission apart from the horizon of the conversion of the Greek-Roman world.
In the modern Western context, spirituality has largely become a reaction against institutional religion and a quest for personal fulfilment, though it has acquired a new, hard technological edge—I hadn’t heard of Dataism before. Gotta know these things.
But the question I ask here is whether, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, we are witnessing a spirituality in crisis.
In Athens, Paul takes a surprisingly constructive stance with regard to Greek spirituality. He affirms a cultural intuition that what is experienced as “unknown” is the invisible and transcendent God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
The search for God is birthed in the best spirituality of a culture.
But if that intuition is persistently suppressed by an obsession with material objects and spiritual techniques, that civilisation may arrive at a tipping point at which the spirituality or religion may fail catastrophically. In effect, that is what he tells the “men of Athens”:
Being then offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine is like gold or silver or stone, an imprint of the craftsmanship and imagination of a human person. Having then overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he determined a day on which he will judge this civilisation (oukoumenēn) in righteousness, by a man whom he appointed, having provided proof to all, having raised him from the dead. (Acts 17:29-31*)
They are approaching a historical moment when the old spirituality, characterised by idolatry and myth, will be swept away and replaced by the worship of one God and the confession of one Lord.
The church, therefore, is not purveying another spirituality in a consumerist religious marketplace. The church serves the God who acts in history.
That means two things for its life in the Spirit.
It means, first, that the church is a prophetic community that discerns, interprets, and proclaims the action of God in the historical moment, in the present crisis.
Then secondly, the life of the church is renewed by the Spirit through the present crisis—as part of a recurring biblical-historical cycle of creation → failure → judgment → new creation.
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