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.
I suspect that “fake news” is a piece of trashy political sloganeering that will blow away when the wind next changes direction. But the larger picture is troubling: digital technologies, in different ways, on different levels, are undermining our sense of what is real. Katherine Viner wrote in the Guardian a few months back:
We once talked about fake news; now it is reality itself that feels fake. The majority of global citizens doubt their ability to distinguish truth from fiction online. Who can blame them?
What can we do about that?
The dominant story in the Bible is the one about kingdom. It begins with the calling of a people to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” in the midst of the nations (Exod. 19:6) and ends with the overthrow of pagan Rome and the reign of Christ with the martyrs for a thousand years (Rev. 18:1-20:4).
But there is another story in the Bible, a subplot, about Wisdom, which intersects with the kingdom narrative at a few critical points, not least in the career of Jesus, not least in the crucifixion of Jesus.
Wisdom was in attendance at creation: “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” (Prov. 8:22). There is then an optimistic story told about “her” finding a place to dwell in Israel (Sir. 24:8-12). But in dangerous times, in a time of national crisis, the story is reworked in pessimistic terms:
Wisdom went out to dwell with the children of the people, but she found no dwelling place. (So) Wisdom returned to her place and she settled permanently among the angels. Then Iniquity went out of her rooms, and found whom she did not expect. And she dwelt with them, like rain in a desert, like dew on a thirsty land. (1 En. 42:2-3)
Israel has become, in the eyes of the apocalypticist, a place where iniquity, not wisdom, is to be found.
The prologue to John’s Gospel is, I think, another retelling of this story, with some notable differences. The Word was in the beginning, the Word was “in addition to” God (pros ton theon), the Word was divine, or something along those lines (theos ēn ho logos); everything that came about in the beginning came about through the Word (John 1:1-3).
This creative Word from the presence and person of God became flesh and dwelt among a small number of Jews, who received him and believed in him. The prominence given to the testimony of John the Baptist in this passage suggests to me that the Word became flesh at the moment of Jesus’ baptism, when John understood the significance of the “Son” who would rank before him (1:15, 26-27, 30, 34).
So the Wisdom-Word of God, through which all things were made, becomes flesh in the career of Jesus at a critical moment in the story of God’s people. That brings a new reality into existence.
If we think that the people of God again face an existential crisis, then we should perhaps believe that again the creative, controversial Wisdom-Word of God must find a place to dwell in order to bring about a new trustworthy reality. Then it is up to us to speak that realty into existence.
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