Elliot has raised some pertinent questions about the continuing relevance of some basic Christian beliefs, given a narrative-historical understanding of the New Testament. They deserve a more substantial answer than I can provide right now, but here’s an outline of how I think we may manage the tension between continuity and change. A recent post on “A revised missional theology” covers some of the ground. You could also have a look at this three part series, though it may be a bit dated now: “The narrative-historical reading of the New Testament: what’s in it for me?”
In the six week course I have been doing on “missional church” for King’s School of Theology I have made quite extensive use of the story of Paul’s visit to Athens in Acts 17:16-34 to underline the point that mission in the New Testament is not about the salvation of individuals, it is a call to… ( | 2 comments)
I have been having an online conversation with someone who is rather suspicious of the charts I have been using (such as the one below) to map the story of the people of God throughout the ages. One of the problems is that I have not defined the y-axis. ()
Frankly, it is an absurdity that we still have such a hard time making sense of Jesus’ core proclamation about the kingdom of God. The problem comes up again in another book by Alan Roxburgh on “missional church,” this time co-written with Scott Boren: Introducing the Missional Church: What It… ( | 2 comments)
In their book Practices for the Refounding of God’s People: The Missional Challenge of the West (2018), Alan Roxburgh and Martin Robinson first offer a rather pessimistic analysis of the consequences of modernity’s “wager” (the metaphor is Adam Seligman’s) in letting go of its Christian… ( | 14 comments)
Edwin has an interesting question about the link between Jesus’ furious condemnation of the Jerusalem hierarchy and his subsequent vindication:
I have been trying to get to the point where I have my aha moment in this reframing of the biblical story and what it would mean for Jesus’s message of… ( | 2 comments)
In my previous post I had meant only to address certain questions about Jesus’ view of the “end” but thought it might be more illuminating to set Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching in Mark 13 in the context of the events of the last week in Jerusalem. There is only one story here, after all—not multiple… ( | 3 comments)
I started out meaning to reply to a few questions sent to me about Mark 13: Isn’t it the case that Mark places the “final apocalypse” immediately after the destruction of the temple? Doesn’t this point to a failure of prophecy? Didn’t Jesus say that he would return within a generation? I thought it… ( | 6 comments)
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